"The Criminal Law Consolidation Act of 1861 reduced the number of capital crimes to four, murder, high treason, piracy and arson in a Royal Dockyard, (this was a separate offence, not high treason). In reality, except for four executions for attempted murder, this act was more of a tidying up exercise as nobody else had been hanged for a crime other than for murder since 1837.
There were a series of laws in the Victorian English legal system known as the "Bloody Code". This name was derived from the fact that there were a huge number of crimes for which the death penalty could be imposed.
In 1815 the number of crimes that carried the death penatly was 215! Some of the most interesting of those were:
