On this date in 1771, Henry Stroud and Robert Campbell were hanged at Bethnal Green Road — a pointed message to the Spitalfield working class. Their hanging was tit for tat in an exchange of deadly violence between the state and laboring Londoners. Two years before, an anti-union law making it a capital crime to cut silk out of looms had actually been put to use with the hanging of two as part of the suppression of a Spitalfields weavers riot. This execution provoked in the following months a horrifying mob vengeance against the independent weaver who had testified —...