The Kidwelly rioters of 1757 were fortunate to escape the harsh penalties of the Bloody Code.
The Bloody Code 1688-1830: A Catalogue of Punishments under the Laws of Britain
The attached late eighteenth-century Gloucester Journal report of the convictions and sentencing offers a stark illustration of the severity of Britain’s criminal justice system, commonly known as the Bloody Code. The range of punishments recorded—extending from public humiliation to execution—reveals a legal system designed not only to punish offenders but to deter crime through fear, spectacle, and lasting shame.
Most striking is the frequent use of the death penalty. In this single report, eight individuals were sentenced to death for crimes that included highway robbery, the theft of horses and mares, forgery, and even relatively minor property offences such as stealing money valued at forty-nine shillings or a hat and wig. Such cases demonstrate that capital punishment was not reserved for acts of violence but was routinely imposed for crimes against property. This emphasis reflects the priorities of the ruling classes at a time of economic change and social anxiety, when the protection of property was considered essential to public order.
Transportation formed another major pillar of punishment. Two offenders were sentenced to transportation for fourteen years, while a further forty were sent away for seven years, most likely to penal colonies such as Australia. This penalty served multiple purposes: it removed criminals from British society, eased overcrowding in prisons, and supplied labour to the expanding empire. The varying lengths of transportation suggest an attempt to grade punishment according to the seriousness of the offence or the offender’s previous conduct.
Alongside these severe sentences were a number of corporal and shaming punishments. One offender was whipped, a painful public penalty intended to disgrace as much as to injure. Another was pilloried and imprisoned, exposed to the insults and violence of the crowd while serving as a public warning of the consequences of crime. Five offenders were subjected to branding, a punishment particularly feared among the lower orders.
Among the several punishments mentioned which were inflicted upon offenders under the laws in force at this time in history, none is more remarkable, nor more dreaded, than that of branding, which hath long been practised as both a mark of justice and a lasting token of infamy. This punishment is executed by burning a letter into the flesh of the criminal, commonly upon the thumb or hand, the character so impressed declaring the nature of the crime. Thus, those convicted of theft, or who have once escaped the gallows by benefit of clergy, are marked with a T; felons with an F; those found guilty of murder but spared by a verdict of manslaughter receive an M; and vagrants are often stamped with a V. Military deserters, in later years, have likewise been branded with a D, or sometimes the letters BC, signifying Bad Character.
The branding iron, heated until red, is applied without delay in open court or before the people, causing great pain and leaving a scar which no time can wholly efface. By this means the offender is not only punished in body but condemned to lifelong shame, carrying a visible record of his transgression wherever he goes. The practice was originally intended to prevent repeated abuse of the benefit of clergy, a privilege by which literate offenders could once escape the sentence of death. By marking the thumb, the law ensured that such mercy could not be claimed twice.
In many cases, particularly where offences concerned property rather than blood, branding was granted as an act of lenity, substituted for execution. The records of the Old Bailey contain many such instances, where the mark of fire replaced the fatal tree at Tyburn. Yet even this so-called mercy imposed a permanent social punishment, denying the offender anonymity and honest employment.
Taken together, these sentences reveal a hierarchical system of punishment, ranging from humiliation and bodily pain to exile and death. Justice under the Bloody Code relied heavily on deterrence and public example, imposing harsh penalties even for non-violent crimes. By the late eighteenth century, however, such severity was increasingly questioned. Branding was used less frequently, and growing criticism of the Bloody Code would, in the early nineteenth century, lead to legal reform, the curtailment of capital punishment, and the eventual abolition of branding in 1829.
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Article/image created by Garry Smith/Alfiepics)
The Glouster Journal is a pictorial representation of the newspaper article.