Chapter Hand the Sail to Hangmen of H by Brewer's Phrase & Fable

Hangman's Acre, Gains, and Gain's Alley (London), in the liberty of St. Catherine. Strype says it is a corruption of "Hammes and Guynes," so called because refugees from those places were allowed to lodge there in the reign of Queen Mary after the loss of Calais. (See also Stow: History, vol. ii.; list of streets.)

Hangman's Wages 13½d. The fee given to the executioner at Tyburn, with 1½d. for the rope. This was the value of a Scotch merk, and therefore points to the reign of James, who decreed that "the coin of silver called the mark-piece shall be current within the kingdom at the value of 13½d." Noblemen who were to be beheaded were expected to give the executioner from £7 to £10 for cutting off their head.

"For half of thirteen-pence ha'penny wages
I would have cleared all the town cages,
And you should have been rid of all the stages
I and my gallows groan."
The Hangman's Last Will and Testament.
(Rump Songe.)

    The present price (1894) is about £40. Calcraft's charge was £33 14s., plus assistant £5 5s., other fees £1 1s., to which he added "expenses for erecting the scaffold."

Hangmen and Executioners.
   (1) BULL is the earliest hangman whose name survives (about 1593).
   (2) JOCK SUTHERLAND.
   (3) DERRICK, who cut off the head of Essex in 1601.
   (4) GREGORY. Father and son, mentioned by Sir Walter Scott (1647).
   (5) GREGORY BRANDON, (about 1648).
   (6) RICHARD BRANDON, his son, who executed Charles I.
   (7) SQUIRE DUN, mentioned by Hudibras (part iii. c. 2).
   (8) JACK KETCH (1678) executed Lord Russell and the Duke of Monmouth.
   (9) ROSE, the butcher (1686): but Jack Ketch was restored to office the same year.
   (10) EDWARD DENNIS (1780), introduced as a character in Dickens's Barnaby Rudge.
   (11) THOMAS CHESHIRE, nicknamed "Old Cheese."
   (12) JOHN CALCRAFT; MARWOOD; BERRY; etc.
   (13) Of foreign executioners, the most celebrated are Little John; Capeluche, headsman of Paris during the terrible days of the Armagnacs and Burgundians; and the two brothers Sanson, who were executioners during the first French Revolution.
    Hudibras, under the name of Dun, "personates" Sir Arthur Hazelrig, "the activest" of the five members impeached by King Charles I. The other four were Monk, Walton, Morley, and Alured.