Edward Ravenscroft's The Anatomist and the "Tyburn Riots Against the Surgeons"

�� ��� In “The Tyburn Riots Against the Surgeons” (1975) Peter Linebaugh used as one of his core documentary sources the surviving archives of the Worshipful Company of Barber-Surgeons of London, a precursor to the Royal College of Surgeons. The Company’s audit books contain evidence of the extra payments to the Beadle and Porter of the Company in relation to disputes at the Tyburn gallows as crowd tensions over the retrieval of bodies by surgeons intent on dissection escalated into physical violence. Linebaugh’s use of these sources begins with the Audit Book 1715-1785 from which he builds a convincing case. Despite the survival of most of the records of the Company, the Audit Book 1675-1714 has been missing since at least the late nineteenth-century (Young 416). Yet in 1674, the final year of the previous surviving audit book, there is the first hint that difficulties were starting to be encountered in retrieving bodies. Up until this time the expenses incurred at the gallows are stable except for inflation. Yet in April that year on top of the usual ten shillings “for his ex pences about ye body then” the Beadle, Peter Smith, was paid a pound (a tenth of his annual stipend) “ffor his paynes Extraordinary” in relation to securing “ye body” (Audit Book 1659-74), as were the Common Sergeant, the Common Cryer and the “Serants of the Counter” recompensed in an unnamed dispute. By 1711 the Barber-Surgeons’ actions were visible enough that Samuel Waters resolved that he would retrieve his friend John Addison’s body from Tyburn gallows when he “heard that the sd John Addison was to be Anatomised.” In doing so he warned the Barber-Surgeon’s Beadle, who had a legal warrant and the support of the Sheriff ’s Officers, that “if they would not lett them carry it away quietly they would by force” (Waters). The complex of influences that Linebaugh identifies as the major causes of dissent at the gallows in the early eighteenth century did not come into play in an instant; they built gradually over time. This article is set against a background