Last Words and Dying Speeches

Chapter 7 focuses in detail on the gallows speeches printed in Scotland between the late sixteenth and the late eighteenth centuries. It provides the first detailed examination of this form of cheap print in a Scottish context. The dying words spoken by convicted felons on the scaffold before their execution were as popular as the spectacle of capital punishment itself. Printed sheets containing these farewell orations sold on the streets and were a staple form of popular literature. Their contents reveal much about the nature of public execution in Scotland, the attitudes of the authorities towards sin and crime, and the behaviour of sufferers on the point of death.