The British Execution: 1500–1964 (Shire Library) by Stephen Banks

Technically, the death penalty was still available for high treason and piracy with violence, but these too were made non-capital in the Crime and Disorder Act 1998. Finally it was done.

    Ruth Ellis was hanged on 11 July 1955, the last woman to be executed in Britain. ( The Illustrated London News .)

FURTHER READING
    Bailey, B. The Hangmen of England: A History of Execution from Jack Ketch to Albert Pierrepoint . W. H. Allen, 1989.
    Cooper, D. The Lesson of the Scaffold: The Public Execution Controversy in Victorian England . Allen Lane, 1974.
    Emsley, C. The English and Violence Since 1750 . Hambledon, 2005.
    Gatrell, V. A. C. The Hanging Tree: Execution and the English People, 1770–1868 . Oxford University Press, 1994.
    Halliday, S. Newgate: London’s Prototype of Hell . Sutton, 2006.
    Potter, H. Hanging in Judgment: Religion and the Death Penalty in England . Continuum, 1993.
    Sanson, H. Executioners All: Memoirs of the Sansons from Private Notes and Documents, 1688–1847 . Spearman, 1962.
    Spierenburg, P. The Broken Spell: A Cultural and Anthropological History of Pre-Industrial Europe . Rutgers University Press, 1991.