In the 19th century, committing a crime in Surrey often carried a rather more severe punishment than it does today.People could be condemned to death and executed for any one of up to 200 different crimes on the statute books at the start of the 1800s, from robbery or rape, to the theft of sheep and arson.As Martin Baggoley documents in his book Surrey Executions, the start of the century saw criminals from across the county hanged in front of hundreds and sometimes thousands of people, usually...
