{"id":1280,"date":"2019-10-28T12:52:37","date_gmt":"2019-10-28T12:52:37","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.uwe.ac.uk\/research-business-innovation\/?p=1280"},"modified":"2019-10-28T12:53:11","modified_gmt":"2019-10-28T12:53:11","slug":"romancing-the-gibbet-sites-of-extraordinary-punishment-in-georgian-england","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.uwe.ac.uk\/research-external-engagement\/romancing-the-gibbet-sites-of-extraordinary-punishment-in-georgian-england\/","title":{"rendered":"Romancing the Gibbet: sites of extraordinary punishment in Georgian England"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

As part of the Being Human Festival 2019, Professor Steve Poole is co-hosting an event on 14 November that explores \u2018dark tourism\u2019 sites of extraordinary public execution in Georgian Britain. Read all about it in his post below: <\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Steve Poole, University of the West of England, Bristol<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

“Ralph Hoyte and I first came up with the idea for Romancing the Gibbet in 2014 and pitched it to the first Being Human festival. Here\u2019s the premise: Ralph is a poet concerned with embedding language in the landscape, a situated poetry working in tandem with the experience of Place. I\u2019m a social historian interested in the representation of emotional trauma in the historic environment. What might we make if we worked together?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In 2014, Ralph was developing digital conversations between\nthe Romantic poets Coleridge and the Wordsworths in the Quantock Hills above\nNether Stowey in the later 18th<\/sup> century, and I was completing some\nresearch about the extraordinary and occasional practice of hanging criminals at\nremote rural crime scenes in the same period. In many cases, the executed body\nwas then left to slowly decompose in an iron gibbet cage suspended high over\nthe landscape.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Conventional histories assess the evidence surrounding\nevents like these but struggle to represent their emotional and affective\nimpact on the environment in which they were staged and in the consciousness of\nthe people they targeted. We wondered whether a fusion of historical research\nand poetic response, cast as a situated performance piece close to an execution\nsite could get us (and a local audience) closer to understanding the process as\nit was conceived by contemporaries \u2013 as a deep and indelible mark on the\ncollective memory of a community.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So, augmented by a live soundscape created by the environmental artist Michael Fairfax, we staged two bespoke Being Human performances along these lines at Warminster, Wiltshire (where two men were hanged on a hill overlooking the town after murdering a farmer and his servant in 1813) and at Nether Stowey, Somerset (where a man was hanged for the murder of his wife in 1789). Built around lengthy balladic interpretations, these went down astonishingly well and attracted a brilliantly mixed audience of local history buffs, creative writing fans and curious local residents.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

Our next objective was to make some more permanent immersive\nlandscape interventions, adapting the performance pieces and making them more\naccessible. Ralph and I had both worked a lot with creative digital audio as an\ninterpretation tool so we next threw that experience into building four\ngeo-located \u2018Romancing the Gibbet\u2019 app downloads. We added two new poetry\ncommissions: a fratricidal killing in the estuary at Avonmouth in 1741 and the\nmurder of a labourer on a hill overlooking Chipping Camden in 1772. These\nimmersive landscape trails are designed for use with smartphone and headphones\nin the environment they commemorate. They are not linear guides and they do not\noffer \u2018information\u2019. We see them as situated sound pieces triggered by past\nevents.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

At this year\u2019s Being Human festival we\u2019re promoting all this\nwork \u2013 engaging audiences at community halls in each of the four locales, with\nhistorical discussion, sample performance pieces and specially laid out audio\ntrail tasters. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Why have we stuck with this project for five years now? Partly because we are still learning how our understanding of the world, and what it is to be a human in it, is affected by a finely tuned balance between reason and emotion. Historians haven\u2019t always found it easy to work with imaginative reconstruction, with empathy or with feeling. But here was an historical practice deliberately designed to traumatise, to emotionally scar and to change for generations the ways in which the landscape was read and understood. What\u2019s more, eighteenth century people often used poetry themselves to record them, perhaps because rational explanation was never quite enough.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

For heritage interpretation, making sense of emotional\ncurrents and their relationship to the conventional archive, material culture\nand the natural world seems to me absolutely vital. And working collaboratively\nwith creative industries partners like Ralph has changed the way I think as an\nhistorian.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Creative and even-handed co-production between artists and academics can provoke audiences to think differently about the past and to \u2018remember\u2019 or \u2018know\u2019 things in different ways. Collective memories, tied to Place, may reveal themselves in evidence-based research, but they may also emerge in myths, fictions and folklore. Poetry works with the spectral traces of a half remembered, part imaginary past and is quite at home in it.  But it is no less \u2018authentic\u2019 for all that.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Watch a short film of Ralph and Steve discussing the project here<\/a>. To book tickets for the event please see here<\/a>. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

As part of the Being Human Festival 2019, Professor Steve Poole is co-hosting an event on 14 November that explores \u2018dark tourism\u2019 sites of extraordinary public execution in Georgian Britain. Read all about it in his post below: Steve Poole, University of the West of England, Bristol “Ralph Hoyte and I first came up with … Continue reading “Romancing the Gibbet: sites of extraordinary punishment in Georgian England”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":39,"featured_media":1282,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"wds_primary_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[127,4],"tags":[292,291,289,293,290,74,75,226],"class_list":["post-1280","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-research-business-innovation","category-uwe-bristol-research","tag-being-human-festival","tag-dark-tourism","tag-professor-steve-poole","tag-ralph-hoyte","tag-romancing-the-gibbet","tag-uwe","tag-uwe-bristol","tag-uwe-bristol-research"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.uwe.ac.uk\/research-external-engagement\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1280","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.uwe.ac.uk\/research-external-engagement\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.uwe.ac.uk\/research-external-engagement\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.uwe.ac.uk\/research-external-engagement\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/39"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.uwe.ac.uk\/research-external-engagement\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1280"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.uwe.ac.uk\/research-external-engagement\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1280\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1287,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.uwe.ac.uk\/research-external-engagement\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1280\/revisions\/1287"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.uwe.ac.uk\/research-external-engagement\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1282"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.uwe.ac.uk\/research-external-engagement\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1280"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.uwe.ac.uk\/research-external-engagement\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1280"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.uwe.ac.uk\/research-external-engagement\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1280"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}