12th Century
In 1171 as part of Henry II’s visitation of Ireland, the Earl of Pembroke, Richard de Clare (known as Strongbow) ordered 70 citizens of Waterford to be thrown into the sea after their legs had been broken. His terror approach to politics was not subtle.
After the Muslim victory at the Battle of Hattin 1187, Saladin wished to purify the land and offered fees for Muslims who would bring Franks to him. A call went out to members of Saladin’s clerical entourage for volunteers to carry out the executions. Volunteers were drawn from mystics, Sufis, lawyers, scholars, and ascetics, most of whom had ever carried out such a deed in their lives before. The prisoners were beheaded in front of the sultan, some more cleanly than others.
After Richard I had recaptured Nottingham Castle (March 1194) he showed mercy when the defenders finally surrendered. However, the two leaders of John’s attempted coup were not so lucky. One was thrown into a dungeon and starved to death. The other was flayed alive.
13th Century
1242 Sir William de Marisco was finally caught after being involved in a plot to kill Henry III. He was hanged until dead, disembowelled and quartered. Probably the first time this punishment was used in England.
Technically “quartering” is actually “quinting” as the head is also separated from the body.
In September 1283 Dafydd ap Gruffudd was condemned to death by an English Parliament convened in the Welsh border town of Shrewsbury. On the basis that he had plotted to kill Edward I he was found guilty of treason and was one of the earliest people in British history to be hanged, drawn, and quartered.
14th Century
1314 James Molay, the last Templar Grand Master was burned to death in Paris.
After Gaveston’s execution in 1312, his head was sewn back onto his body, but because he was had been excommunicated the time of his death, Edward II’s favourite could not be laid to rest until the excommunication was revoked. Piers Gaveston’s corporeal remains were in limbo for two years. His fetid body was embalmed and a cloth of gold was draped over the remains.
In 1326 Hugh Despenser was treated in the way he had previously treated a friend of Roger Mortimer. He was dragged by four horses to his place of execution, briefly hung, eviscerated (removal of genitals and entrails, while still alive – and finally of the heart), beheaded, and quartered. His head was sent to London and the remaining parts of his butchered body were displayed for four years in Newcastle, York, Dover, and Bristol. (See Castle Rising’s She-Wolf Revisited.)
In the Mongol empire ordinary people were beheaded with a sword, but distinguished officers or leaders had their backs broken so that they died without their blood being spilled. Captured royalty tended to be rolled in carpets and trampled by horses and suffocated under blankets.
On 19th March 1330 the Earl of Kent was led out to be executed by beheading for the crime of trying to rescue his imprisoned brother, Edward II. But the people didn’t agree with the verdict or the punishment and the executioner refused to do the deed. While the earl waited they unsuccessfully tried to find a Sergeant-at-Arms willing to fulfill the role. After several hours they promised pardon to a latrine cleaner who was facing execution himself if he would use the axe. The cleaner agreed and the deed was done. When the severed earl’s head was raised the crowd was silent.
1342 a rich citizen of Compiègne, Simon Pouillet was denounced by a relative for declaring at the dinner table that it would be better to be ruled by a good Englishman than a bad Frenchman. Philip VI had him dismembered with a meat axe at Les Halles in Paris.
The Archbishop’s Palace at Lambeth was ransacked and on June 14, 1381 Sudbury himself was taken by the mob from his hiding place in the Tower of London and decapitated on Tower Hill. It was a messy execution and took eight blows of the sword. His Archbishop’s mitre was nailed to his skull and his head was placed on a pole and paraded around parts of London. His head is still preserved today in St Gregory’s Church in Sudbury, Suffolk.
In the retribution that followed the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381, Flemish widows in the city of London were allowed to take part in the executions of the convicted rioters who were beheaded for beheading their merchant husbands only a few weeks before. Flemish wives struggled with heavy axes and killed their husbands’ murderers. The justice was chillingly biblical.
15th Century
02 March, 1401, William Sawtry was the first person to be official burned alive for heresy in England under a new law.
in 1404 a loyalist to Richard II (William Serle) was captured and convicted of encouraging an imposter. His execution took a long time. Brought by stages from Yorkshire through Lincolnshire, East Anglia, Essex, Hertfordshire to London, Serle was publicly hanged in every major town along the way. In each place he was cut down while still alive, to face the same torture in the next market square. Finally at Tyburn he was hanged, drawn, decapitated, and quartered.
In 1411 in the French wars between the Burgundians and the Armangnacs, the Burgundian in charge of the garrison at Soissons (Enguerrand de Bournonville) was captured when the town fell. On the scaffold he asked for a drink and then declared: “Lord God, I ask your forgiveness for all my sins, and I thank you with all my heart that I die here true to my Lord. I ask you, gentlemen, to punish the traitors that have basely betrayed me, and I drink to my Lord of Burgundy and to all his well wishers, and to the spite of all his enemies.”
On 14 December 1417, at St Giles’ Fields – the very ground where his rising had failed – Sir John Oldcastle was executed. The manner of execution was grim and exemplary: he was hanged over a fire, and the gallows itself was burnt while he was still hanging, combining the punishments of both heresy (burning for Lollardy)) and felony (hanging for raising a rebellion). Oldcastle’s two identities were fused into one brutal spectacle.
1421 Philippe de Gamaches, abbot of Saint-Faro, was taken to Paris and threatened by the English with being put in a sack and thrown into the river (typical French punishment for French clergy accused of treason). Gamaches escaped on this occasion.
1425 A notorious brigand chief, Sauvage de Frémainville attempted to assassinate the Duke of Bedford (English ruler in French territory). In Paris he was beaten at the scaffold, denied the chance to make a confession, and the executioner bungled his hanging at the first attempt. He fell from the scaffold breaking his back and leg, and was forced to remount for a second attempt.
31 May, 1431, the captured Joan of Arc (Jehanne d’Arc, La Pucelle, The Maid) was burned to death in the market square at Rouen. Her ashes were scooped up and thrown into the Seine.
During the English occupation during this period there are three recorded instances of women accused of treason being buried alive following the French fashion (quartering being considered too indecent for women).
In 1462 John de Vere, Earl of Oxford was tried and executed for treason by John Tiptoft, Earl of Worcester. The execution was particularly brutal. Oxford was disembowelled, then castrated, and finally, still conscious, burned alive.
In 1470, after being defeated in the Midlands, rebels against Edward IV tried to get to Dover and escape to Calais. Several were captured and executed by impalement – carried out on Edwards behalf by the Constable of Southampton, John Tiptoft, Earl of Worcester.
16th Century
In the summer of 1535 three Carthusians were convicted of high treason for denying the King’s Supremacy. They spent the fortnight preceding their trial in Marshalsea, chained to posts by necks and legs, stewing in their own excrement. They were finally hanged, drawn, and quartered at Tyburn.
On 27 May, 1541, Margaret Pole was executed in the Tower of London. She was a 67 year old innocent noble woman who had been held in prison for two years. Her two principal “crimes” were her close relation to the king (Henry VIII) and her suspicion of his adoption of new forms and doctrines of the Christian belief (birthright and conscience). The Tower’s ax had been entrusted to a deputy of tender years – “a wretched and blundering youth”. The first blow slammed into the old woman’s shoulders and head. The second blow missed completely. It took several attempts to dispatch her. It was cruel butchery that shocked everyone who heard about it.
In 1555, Robert Ferrar, who had fallen under suspicion of both the Edwardian and Marian regimes, finally faced execution. He was “burned with turves and soddes for lack of wood”, after years in prison.
In 1555 the burnings began. In three years 220 men and 60 women died in the bonfires.
1556 was a burning-year still hotter than 1555 with eighty-five executions, and a further eleven protestants dying in prison. Of these victims, most were humble artisans, and twenty-two were women.
1556 John Noyes was executed at Litchfield in Suffolk. When the Sheriff sent men to get burning coals to start the blaze, nearly all the fires in the local houses had been extinguished. The officers had to break down the doors of a house where there was a single remaining chimney which had smoke coming out. Perhaps it was a forlorn gesture of neighbourly solidarity with the local shoemaker. The authorities belatedly realised that killing people in their own parishes might be unpopular. More executions shifted to regional centres and were conducted in batches.
In 1557 the coffins of two dead Cambridge academics (Martin Bucer and Paul Fagius) were exhumed and burned in the marketplace along with copies of their “heretical books”. This was symbolically returning Catholicism to the University. There was also unease about worshipping in places were the graveyards had been “polluted” by heretics. Nearly forty years later, a privy councillor, Francis Englefield, claimed, while in exile in Spain, that Mary had asked him to exhume and burn the body of her father.
In 1569 there was a rising of the Northern Earls against Elizabeth. She executed 450 – three times the number Henry VIII had executed after the Pilgrimage of Grace.
25 May 1570 a smuggled copy of Pius V’s Bull excommunicating Elizabeth was nailed to the door of the Bishop of London’s Palace near St Paul’s. John Felton, a wealthy layman from Surrey was caught and confessed to the dead. He was later hanged and quartered in St Paul’s churchyard (near the scene of the crime). His executioner was a man named Bull.
25 March 1586 Margaret Clitherow of York was pressed to death for refusing to enter a plea to the charge of harbouring Catholic priests.
On 17 February 1597 Janet Wishart was burned in Aberdeen for being a witch. The cost of the execution was just over £11, and this covered the cost of burning and the fee for the executioner.
It was thought that burning witches was a good way of stopping them coming back.
When being burned alive, you were more likely to die of shock, smoke inhalation, or heart failure than a long, drawn-out burning.
17th Century
Guy Fawkes endured endless torture and his bloody and broken body was condemned to a traitor’s death. But on the allotted day (31 January 1606) he cheated the executioner by throwing himself from the scaffold and dying instantly from a broken neck.
In 1642 there was great unease about the execution of a godly Catholic priest, Hugh Green, outside Dorchester. There was a reluctance to pull the ladder from under him (they had to get a clown) and then to cut him down while still alive. The man who was to do the quartering was a timorous barber. The barber took so long that Green came to his senses and sat upright.
In 1660 when the regicide Major-General Thomas Harrison was being hung, drawn, and quartered, he managed a fight-back. While his innards were being burnt in front of him Harrison summonsed up his remaining strength and swung a punch that caught the executioner off guard. The Major-General was immediately decapitated by the embarrassed executioner.
In 1661 the bodies of Cromwell, Ireton, and Bradshaw were dug up and hung from gallows. They had previously escaped execution by dying. This desecration followed the precedent established in 1605 after the Gunpowder Plot when the bodies of Catesby and Percy were exhumed and decapitated.
Elizabeth Gaunt was the last woman to be executed for treason in England on 23 October 1685. She was charged with assisting rebels in the Monmouth rebellion. As she was brought to her execution, Mrs Gaunt reportedly picked up one of the faggots ‘and kissed it’, saying ‘it was of little consideration to her, whether she dyed in the fire’ or ‘in her bed’. All the while, she protested her innocence of treason, claiming that she had merely given charity to the wife and children of the rebel she was deemed guilty of helping, who had come to her ‘ready to perrish for want of bread and cloathing’. She was not strangled first, as was often done out of mercy, but instead left to be consumed alive by the flames.
When the French attacked Algiers in 1683, the French consul, Jean Le Vacher was taken to Baba Merzoug (the largest cannon in the whole of the Mediterranean), pushed into the barrel, which was then discharged. A similar fate happened to another consul in 1688. Baba Merzoug was nicknamed the ‘Consular’.
When the Siege of Vienna finally failed on 11 September, 1683, it was found that the defeated Ottoman Grand Vizier (Merzifonlu Kara Mustafa) had brought his pet ostrich to battle with him. In retreat, he had killed the ostrich.
Despite paying his executioner well, the Duke of Monmouth was literally butchered on the scaffold in 1685. It took the executioner five strokes of the axe to sever the head from Monmouth’s body; after the first stroke, Monmouth was purportedly seen to lift his head in anguish.
Later
In the 300 years before 1782, when there was the last officially sanctioned execution in Switzerland of someone accused of being a witch, it is estimated that perhaps as many as 40,000 Europeans had been executed or lynched for a similar “crime”. In Scotland the last major outbreak was in 1662. Last execution in England was 1684.
The earliest mention of a guillotine as a means of execution was in Halifax, UK in 1206. There are also records of guillotine-type machines in Ireland (1307) and Scotland (1564). In 1792 in Strasbourg and officer designed a machine and got a Paris-based Prussian harpsichord maker to make it. It was tried out in Paris and first used on a guilty victim on 25th April 1792. It became associated with Dr Guillotine after he had a speech to the Parisienne Assembly on a code for executions.
A punishment, occasionally used on both sides of the Indian Mutiny (1857) was to tie a victim to a cannon before they were blown away.