A village on the banks of a brook of the same name, it became a place of execution as early as the fourteenth century. At first elm trees in the district served as hanging trees, but later a gallows was erected roughly on the same site now occupied by Marble Arch. Here, in addition to innumerable highwaymen, murderers and traitors, perished the abbot and monks of the Carthusian monastery replaced by Charterhouse and a great many Catholic priests up to 1688. Tyburn is depicted in a painting of Catholic martyrs in Brompton Oratory
.