The Hanging Tree

Abstract
It may help to explain some of this book’s peculiarities if I say at once that it grew out of a chance discovery. One day I was working in the Public Record Office on something quite different when tedium and a passing curiosity moved me to order from the Home Office catalogues a volume of judges’ reports, then unknown to me. I chose the year 1829 at random. The volume fell open at a thick dossier of petitions and papers which I was soon reading with the avidity of one who knew that he really ought to be reading something much less interesting. It was about a rape case set in the iron-making village of Coalbrookdale in Shropshire. A poor man called John Noden had for several years been courting a young woman, Elizabeth Cureton. One June evening he knocked at her cottage window after her parents had gone to bed. She let him in, and soon the couple were having sex on the parlour floor. A few days later she claimed that he had raped her. She prosecuted him at the Shrewsbury assizes, and he was tried, convicted, and sentenced to hang. The papers I read were about the Coalbrookdale community’s efforts to persuade the judge, the home secretary, and George IV to give Noden a royal pardon.

This publication has 0 references indexed in Scilit: