> England punished all felonies by death for centuries
No.
For less than a century, during peak "Bloody Code" almost all felonies specified a death sentence .. that doesn't in any way mean that all felonies were punished by death.
A large number of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century statutes specified death as the penalty for property offences (even minor ones), meaning that the vast majority of the people tried at the Old Bailey could be sentenced to hang.
This body of statutes, which later came to be criticised as a “Bloody Code”, meant that one could be executed for stealing as little as a handkerchief or a sheep. Nevertheless, judicial procedures prevented a blood bath by ensuring that sentences could be mitigated, or the charge redefined as a less serious offence.
[..]
As a result, as documented on the Digital Panopticon website, between 1780 and 1868 less than a fifth of convicts sentenced to death were actually executed.
Interesting, thank you for that clarification. It looks like execution rates were as high as 30 per 100,000 in 1600, dropping to under 5 per 100,000 by 1700: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5955207/
No.
For less than a century, during peak "Bloody Code" almost all felonies specified a death sentence .. that doesn't in any way mean that all felonies were punished by death.
Take it from the Old Bailey: https://www.oldbaileyonline.org/about/punishment