The Heads on the Stone Gate of London Bridge Were Replaced So Often That a Specific Court Officer Was Paid to Manage the Rotation

The Stone Gate was the southern gatehouse of Old London Bridge — the masonry tower that controlled the bridge’s south end at the Southwark approach, opposite the Drawbridge Gate at the bridge’s north end. It was built between 1209 and 1212 as part of the original bridge construction by the master mason Peter de Colechurch, was rebuilt several times between the 13th and 17th centuries (most importantly after the 1437 collapse of the north end of the bridge), and was demolished along with the rest of Old London Bridge in 1831 when the John Rennie replacement bridge opened a few metres upstream.

The Stone Gate’s secondary function, for three and a half centuries (1305–1660), was the public display of the heads of senior traitors executed by the English crown.

The first head

The first head was William Wallace’s, mounted on a spike above the Stone Gate on 23 August 1305 — the day Wallace was hanged, drawn, and quartered at Smithfield for treason against Edward I. The quarters of the body went to Newcastle, Berwick, Stirling, and Perth as warnings to the Scottish populations of the major Scottish border towns; the head went to London Bridge as the warning to London itself.

The choice of London Bridge as the head-display location was deliberate. The bridge was the only fixed crossing of the Thames in central London; everyone entering or leaving the city from the south had to pass directly beneath the Stone Gate. The displayed head was therefore visible to approximately 4,000 daily transit users at the peak of medieval London Bridge traffic — a public-information broadcast frequency that no other location in the city could match.

The Wallace head was displayed for several years. By the 1320s the original head was probably no longer recognisable as a head (the rotting would have produced a skull within about a year, and London weather would have worn the skull progressively over subsequent years), but the Wallace precedent had established the Stone Gate as the standard English head-display location.

The process

The mechanical process of producing a Stone Gate displayable head was systematic. After the execution (typically at Tyburn or at the Tower of London) the executioner would sever the head from the body, hand it to a designated court officer (variously known as the Keeper of the Heads or the Bridge Master’s deputy depending on the period), and the head would be transported to the bridge in a covered basket.

The head would then be processed in three steps. First, the head was parboiled in a copper of water and herbs to discourage immediate decomposition and to remove the soft tissue of the face and scalp. Second, the boiled head was dipped briefly in molten tar from the bridge’s roofing-tar supply (a black pitch normally used for waterproofing the bridge’s masonry joints) to seal the remaining tissue against weathering. Third, the tarred head was mounted on a long iron spike (about 2 metres long) and the spike was driven through a pre-prepared socket in the Stone Gate’s parapet wall.

The Stone Gate’s parapet could accommodate up to about 30 heads at one time. In quiet political periods the display was substantially fewer (perhaps 5–10 simultaneous heads); in active political periods (the Tudor religious purges, the Civil War period, the Restoration regicide executions) the display approached the gate’s full capacity.

The heads were maintained by a designated City of London officer. The Keeper of the Heads post is documented in the City of London accounts from at least the 1390s; the post-holder received a small annual stipend (about £4 per year in the 15th century, rising to about £12 by the early 17th century) plus a per-head supplemental fee for each individual head processed. The Keeper was responsible for collecting heads from the execution sites, performing the boiling-and-tarring preparation, mounting the heads on the parapet, monitoring the display for wind damage or skull deterioration, and removing the heads when they became unrecognisable or when the displaying authority decided to discontinue a particular display.

The notable heads

The total number of heads displayed on the Stone Gate over the three-and-a-half centuries of the practice is approximately 250–300. Most of them belonged to politically-significant individuals whose identities are known from contemporary execution records. The most-noted include:

William Wallace (1305) — Scottish leader. The founding head.

Roger Mortimer (1330) — executed at Tyburn after Edward III’s coup against the Mortimer-Isabella regency. His head was on the Stone Gate for about a year before being released for burial.

Wat Tyler (1381) — leader of the Peasants’ Revolt. His head was on the gate for about six months.

Sir Thomas More (1535) — Lord Chancellor, executed for refusing to acknowledge Henry VIII’s supremacy over the English Church. His head was on the gate for one month before being removed by his daughter Margaret Roper, who reportedly bribed the Keeper of the Heads to release it for burial. The Roper recovery of the head is unusual; most relatives were not permitted to recover heads while the political need for display continued.

Bishop John Fisher (1535) — executed for the same reason as More, two weeks before More. His head was on the gate for two weeks. The Fisher head was noted by several contemporary observers as “growing fresher” rather than decaying — a phenomenon attributed at the time to divine intervention, more likely the consequence of an unusually-cold July combined with the period’s standard tarring procedure.

Henry Walpole (1595) — Jesuit priest, executed for treason. His head was on the gate for about three months.

Sir Walter Raleigh (1618) — executed at Westminster. Raleigh’s head was not actually displayed on the Stone Gate; his widow Elizabeth Throckmorton kept the head in a red leather bag for the remaining 29 years of her life, after which it was buried with their son Carew Raleigh at West Horsley. The Raleigh case is the most-notable example of a senior traitor’s head that was diverted from the standard Stone Gate display.

Oliver Cromwell (posthumous, 1661) — Cromwell had died in 1658 and been buried at Westminster Abbey, but the Restoration parliament voted to exhume his body and execute him retrospectively for the regicide of Charles I. His exhumed body was hanged at Tyburn on 30 January 1661 (the 12th anniversary of Charles I’s execution) and the head was mounted on the Stone Gate that afternoon. The Cromwell head remained on the Stone Gate for approximately 25 years — the longest single-head display in the gate’s history — before being blown down in a storm in approximately 1685. The fallen head was recovered by a passing London merchant and entered the private antiquities market. It eventually came into the possession of the Cambridge college Sidney Sussex (Cromwell’s old college) in 1960 and was buried in an unmarked location somewhere in the college chapel.

The end of the practice

The Stone Gate display practice ended gradually. The last fresh head was probably that of Major-General Thomas Harrison, one of the Restoration regicides, executed at Charing Cross on 13 October 1660. The other regicide heads followed through 1660–1662. By the late 1670s the practice had become both administratively cumbersome (the Keeper of the Heads post was difficult to fill and the City of London corporation was looking for budget reductions) and politically anachronistic (the public-information function had been largely superseded by the rapidly-growing London printed press of the 1670s and 1680s).

The last documented head display on the Stone Gate was 1672 — an unnamed Jacobite conspirator. The Stone Gate continued in its primary function as the southern bridge gatehouse but was no longer used for head display after that date. The display sockets in the parapet were filled in during a routine masonry repair in the 1720s. The Stone Gate itself was demolished along with the rest of Old London Bridge in 1831.

The southern approach to the modern London Bridge — the John Rennie 1831 replacement bridge that was sold to Robert McCulloch in 1968 and re-erected in Lake Havasu City, Arizona — has no head-display equivalent. The Romanesque-revival gatehouse that the City of London Corporation considered building at the 1831 bridge’s southern end (to commemorate the medieval Stone Gate) was rejected on cost grounds. The site of the medieval Stone Gate is now substantially under the modern A3 road that approaches Tower Bridge from the south.