Edward Ravenscroft's The Anatomist and the "Tyburn Riots Against the Surgeons"

In "The Tyburn Riots Against the Surgeons" (1975) Peter Linebaugh used as one of his core documentary sources the surviving archives of the Worshipful Company of Barber-Surgeons of London, a precursor to the Royal College of Surgeons. The Company's audit books contain evidence of the extra payments to the Beadle and Porter of the Company in relation to disputes at the Tyburn gallows as crowd tensions over the retrieval of bodies by surgeons intent on dissection escalated into physical violence. Linebaugh's use of these sources begins with the Audit Book 1715-1785 from which he builds a convincing case. Despite the survival of most of the records of the Company, the Audit Book 1675-1714 has been missing since at least the late nineteenth-century (Young 416). Yet in 1674, the final year of the previous surviving audit book, there is the first hint that difficulties were starting to be encountered in retrieving bodies. Up until this time the expenses incurred at the gallows are stable except for inflation. Yet in April that year on top of the usual ten shillings "for his expences about ye body then" the Beadle, Peter Smith, was paid a pound (a tenth of his annual stipend) "ffor his paynes Extraordinary" in relation to securing "ye body" (Audit Book 1659-74), as were the Common Sergeant, the Common Cryer and the "Serants of the Counter" recompensed in an unnamed dispute. By 1711 the Barber-Surgeons' actions were visible enough that Samuel Waters resolved that he would retrieve his friend John Addison's body from Tyburn gallows when he "heard that the sd John Addison was to be Anatomised." In doing so he warned the Barber-Surgeon's Beadle, who had a legal warrant and the support of the Sheriff 's Officers, that "if they would not lett them carry it away quietly they would by force" (Waters).

The complex of influences that Linebaugh identifies as the major causes of dissent at the gallows in the early eighteenth century did not come into play in an instant; they built gradually over time. This article is set against a background of research into the practices of the dissection of felons at the Company across the seventeenth century (Cregan 1999, 2004, 2008) and as such comes from a perspective informed by the greater professional harmony and homogeneity within the Company of that period. From its incorporation, the Company had exercised the right to license surgeons to practice in the City of London, to conduct regular public dissections and to fine members of the Company under its by-laws for conducting dissections outside the Hall without permission. The records of St. Olaves Silver Street, where the bodies of felons dissected by the Company were interred, make clear that they had also been retrieving bodies for what were known as "public" dissections—that is three days of anatomical lectures for members and apprentices of the Company—after most quarterly Sessions since at least the 1640s (Cregan 2008). Bodies were claimed at the gallows from the hangman by the Beadle and Porter, placed in a coffin and covered with a pall (both reusable) for transport back to the Hall. There could be no great delay between execution and anatomy at a time when effective preservation was not available. This suggests it had always been done in plain view but that it was undisputed until the early eighteenth century.

One of the factors that increased the tensions at the gallows was a rise in the number of those wanting to conduct dissections outside the Company's purview, which in turn increased competition for bodies. It is the claim of this article that a hitherto little-discussed but extremely popular farce first staged during the period of hiatus in the Company's financial records, Ravenscroft's 1696 adaptation of Hauteroche's The Anatomist, played a part in raising public awareness of the practices of anatomy. Linebaugh cites Gay's reference to the dissection of felons in The Beggar's Opera, strongly suggesting an awareness of the importance of popular representations in relation...