Tyburn with prisoners processed from Newgate Prison in the City, via St Giles in the Fields and Oxford Street. After the late 18th century, when public executions were no longer carried out at Tyburn, they were carried out at Newgate Prison itself and at Horsemonger Lane Gaol in Southwark. The first recorded execution took place at a site next to the stream in 1196. William Fitz Osbert, populist leader who played a major role in an 1196 popular revolt in London, was cornered in the church of St Mary le Bow. He was dragged naked behind a horse to Tyburn, where
The Great Terror trials had become a topic of discussion for a number of Western writers and had underlain books such as George Orwell's "Nineteen Eighty-Four" and Arthur Koestler's "Darkness at Noon". According to the book, the trials and executions of these former Communist leaders were a minor detail of the purges, which together with man-made famines had led to 20 million deaths according to his estimates. In the appendix of the original 1968 edition of "The Great Terror", Conquest estimated 700,000 "legal" executions took place during 1937 and 1938, which was roughly confirmed by the 681,692 executions found in the Soviet archives