Free The British Execution: 1500–1964 (Shire Library) by Stephen Banks Page A

evolved as a merciful concession to their gentility.

    A hanging in Anglo-Saxon England. Death came by slow strangulation. (Reproduction of a manuscript in Strutt’s Antiquities (1793), Vol. I, Plate XV.)
    Traitors, no matter how highly born, could expect more exemplary punishment. High and petty treason were defined in the Treason Act of 1351, but terrible penalties were already being imposed. Jean Froissart’s Chronicles gives a detailed account of the sentence imposed in 1326 upon Hugh Despenser the Younger, a one-time favourite of Edward II. After his faction was defeated by Queen Isabella, Hugh was dragged by horses to a high gallows and suspended for a time. However, before he could expire he was cut down and tied to a ladder. His genitals were then cut off and thrown into a fire and his intestines were slowly pulled out from his body and burnt. According to Froissart, he emitted one long hideous shriek before his heart was finally cut out, his body quartered and beheaded and the pieces exhibited on the gates of London.
    As troubled as England was throughout the High Middle Ages ( c . 1000–1300) and into the Late Middle Ages ( c . 1300–1500), executioners of these times were little troubled either by heretics or witches. Heresy did not appear in England until the time of the theologian John Wycliffe ( c . 1330–84). Wycliffe’s followers, a somewhat disparate group known as the Lollards, have been connected, albeit not without some difficulty, with the Protestants of the later Reformation. Lollardy, among the middling classes, penetrated Oxford University and influenced the royal court for a time. Henry IV (1367–1413) and Henry V (1386–1422) both determined to stamp it out. A statute in 1401, De Heretico Comburendo (2 Hen.4 c.15), authorised the burning of heretics, and one of the most important Lollards to suffer this fate was Sir John Oldcastle. In 1417, he was hung in chains over a fire at St Giles Fields in London. Lollardy did not entirely disappear, however, and throughout the fifteenth century there were occasional burnings.

    The Tower of London in 1415, as depicted in a Flemish illustration to the poems of the duc D’Orleans, who was held there after being taken captive at Agincourt. (1500 British Museum series III. I.)
    Of witchcraft however, there was little sign. Witchcraft is not a particularly ancient offence in the British Isles. Indeed, the very early church had denied that there could be such a thing as witchcraft at all. It was not a felony in royal courts, although there had been some prosecutions in ecclesiastical courts. However, from the fourteenth century onwards a fear of witches spread through the continent, much enhanced in 1486 by the publication of Heinrich Kramer and James Sprenger’s Malleus Maleficarum , the ‘Hammer of Witches.’ However, when Henry VII (1457–1509) defeated Richard III at the battle of Bosworth Field in 1485, he inherited a kingdom that was, for the most part, barely troubled by religious schism and one that had resisted the witchcraft hysteria sweeping the continent. Henry, careful to cement his power, did little to alter this state of affairs. However, when his son succeeded to the throne in 1509 things began to change.

    Sir John Oldcastle is roasted in chains in 1417. (Engraving by T. Smith in Fox’s The Primitive Martyrs , 1563 . )

    The execution of the Earl of Derby in the marketplace of Bolton in 1651 in revenge for his sacking of the town.

PUNISHING THE BRITISH
    I N VIEW OF WHAT WAS TO FOLLOW , it is one of the great ironies of history that Henry VIII (1491–1547) was granted the title of ‘Defender of the Faith’ by Pope Leo X. This was in recognition of his publication of a book, Assertio Septem Sacramentorum , acknowledging the supremacy of the Pope and the sanctity of marriage. Henry has earned his place as one of the most ruthless of all English monarchs. In 1532, he reintroduced the horrific punishment of boiling for poisoners, after a