HAMPSHIRE, with its beautiful countryside, is now one of Britain’s most sought after counties to live in. But there was a time when the realities of everyday life and death were harsh in the extreme.

Floggings and public executions, including being hung, drawn and quartered and burned alive at the stake, were all enacted in the name of justice in Hampshire.

Georgian times are often considered to be an era of learning and good taste, when the aristocracy came to take the water at Southampton and the Dolphin Hotel in the High Street was home to genteel soirées of card playing and dancing.

But there was a much darker, and crueller side to Hampshire society when it came to crime and punishment.

Records from the mid-1700s show those who fell foul of the law in Winchester had could expect little mercy.

The last burning at the stake in Hampshire was in Winchester when a woman named Mary Bayley, who with her lover John Quinn, a seaman, was tried and convicted at Winchester’s Lent Assizes in 1784 for the murder of her husband.

The official court report says: “That having been convicted of petit treason, she should be drawn on a hurdle from the gaol to the place of execution, and there burnt with fire until she be dead, and that John Quinn, being also convicted of murder, that he be hanged at the same place and time, and that his body be delivered to Mr Charles Lyford, surgeon, to be dissected and anatomised.”

It was said a portion of the stake to which the prisoner was tied could still be seen standing at Gallows Hill more than 40 years later.

Punishment by iImprisonment was rare, probably owing to the lack of accommodation, and so the usual penalty was a public whipping in the Corn Market.

All judicial floggings were administered by the Beadle, who sometimes received instructions as to the standard of severity in the ominous words “large strokes”.

For more serious offences the penalty in the 1780s could be even more barbaric than public floggings.

On Saturday, August 14, 1782 David Tyrie, a Royal Navy clerk, was hanged, drawn and quartered at Southsea Common for trying to sell naval secrets to France.

A fight took place for portions of the body, and the unburied remains were left exposed on the beach.

The man’s head was preserved as a showpiece for many years by the keeper of Gosport Bridewell, who putpublicly claimed it, placed it in a bag and carried it home under his arm.

Brutality of this kind began to disappear when public executions were abolished and the law began to take an interest in reform as well as in punishment.