Although the treatment of the remains of the victims of suicide and hanging varied with the circumstances of their crimes and their places of execution, their ceremonies were often designed to arrest the unquiet spirit, their most common elements being the night, the crossroads and the stake. In 1977, during excavations for a new flyover on the A14 in Cambridgeshire, twelve skeletons were discovered beneath a crossroads between the old villages of Dry Drayton and Oakington. Since a nearby field had long been known as Gallows Piece, and medieval records showed that Crowland Abbey kept a gallows at the same crossroads (as was common for abbeys of the time), this suggested that the bodies were those of executed criminals (though some may also have been the victims of suicide). One gallows at a crossroads is clearly depicted on the Agas map outside the Postern Gate of the Tower of London (see Figure 5.1). The execution of criminals at such crossroads sites dates back at least to Plato's Laws (348 bce) where it is stated that murderers of their own family members should be dispatched ‘at an appointed place without the city where three ways meet’. Plato directs of certain murderers: ‘the magistrates who are servants of the judges shall kill him; then they are to throw him down naked at a specified crossroads outside the city’. In Roman times, crucifixion also often took place at crossroads, or by roadsides. In his history of crossroads burials in England, Andrew Reynolds records that, of twelve Anglo-Saxon boundary burials studied, ten were ‘either beside or adjacent to routeways’. Anglo-Saxon execution cemeteries in general were ‘often associated with a hundred meeting place, a market or major highway’. Though identified from at least the Middle Anglo-Saxon era, it is the ninth to twelfth centuries that see the major development of crossroads burials in England. This lasts until the early nineteenth century, when they are finally banned.

As Johnston suggests, it was crossroads’ status as ‘unclaimed “nowheres”’, that meant they were considered ‘appropriate places to leave materials expelled from society’, including ‘the polluted remains of household purification rituals’ or όζυθύμια.