Dear Mr. Cornwell

Many thanks for writing the latest Sharpe book – ‘Sharpe’s Assassin’ that I have just enjoyed reading.

I hope that you don’t mind but there is something that I would like to draw to your attention. You refer to the possibility of a guillotine being used at some point in Halifax, West Yorkshire, long before it’s alleged invention by that fiendish Frenchman. This is absolutely true and the device still exists in reconstructed form on its original site in Halifax to this day.

The reason that most people fail to identify this machine and its location is that it is referred to as the ‘Halifax Gibbet’, located on Gibbet Street just outside the town centre. The execution machine was installed in the 13th century to execute thieves who, by the scale of their activities, were endangering the developing textile industry and therefore the king’s revenue through taxation. The last execution was recorded in 1650 but at some point they must have got a bit carried away as the rate of execution apparently gave rise to the old Northern English prayer – ‘From Hell, Hull and Halifax good lord preserve us’. Not sure quite what Hull did to deserve inclusion but there you go.

Something I found fascinating is the fact that the peg that restrained the blade prior to its descent was apparently attached by a cord to any convenient farm animal (executions were carried out on market days) that when driven off released the blade to execute the criminal leaving no human to blame or, presumably, to bear the brunt of any criminal reprisals.

Interestingly the original blade from the gibbet, that resembles a rather large axe head, is preserved in the Bankfield museum in Halifax. Among other fascinating exhibits this excellent museum also displays the history of the Havercake regiment from its beginnings in 1702 as the Earl of Huntingdon’s Regiment of Foot to its demise, when it was amalgamated with the Prince of Wales’s Own Regiment of Yorkshire and The Green Howards to form the Yorkshire Regiment on 6 June 2009 providing another Sharpe connection.

Please keep up the good work and continue to provide my wife and I with meaningful reading material.

Yours sincerely

R. W. Duckworth