Judicial Violence

This was a violent age, even though ‘popular’ historians are inclined to slaver rather too much over the details and to forget that judicial violence remained a feature of English society for several thousand years. The last woman to be publicly burned in England for petty treason (in this instance for counterfeiting) was executed in 1789. Women were still being publicly hanged as late as 1868, and there was a working gallows at Wandsworth Prison until 1994, tested every six months and still displayed as a museum piece. The death penalty was mandated in the Middle Ages with a frequency that we today might regard as barbaric, even though juries showed a marked reluctance to condemn to the gallows anyone not convicted of homicide. Until increased by a statute of Edward I to a minimum of one shilling, the theft of goods worth no more than four pence was deemed a capital offence, and children as young as fourteen were considered old enough for the rope. In certain localities, local punishments still operated. Thieves in the Scilly Islands were left on a rock to be swept away by the tide. At Dover, they were thrown from the cliffs.

Elsewhere, the general rule was that felons should be hung, though, as early as 1076, the public beheading of Earl Waltheof had suggested that noblemen might expect distinction, in death as in life. The lord’s private gallows was as significant a symbol of his lordship as the deer park or the seigneurial mill or dovecote. Hanging itself could prove a messy affair. The gallows might collapse, the rope break or the prisoner make a run for sanctuary. At a time of only poor understanding of the distinction between death and life, the person hanged might be cut down too early, or even recover from the hanging. Like other ‘miraculous’ escapes either from danger or from death, this occurs as a regular theme in miracle stories of the saints. In 1335, the vicar of Cowley in Oxfordshire was charged with burying alive a thief, hanged nearby but not yet dead. In an age without doctors to certify death, the vicar’s offence was perhaps not manslaughter but lack of due professional diligence.

Into the 1290s, the death penalty in itself had been deemed sufficient punishment for all save a handful of crimes. The very worst of traitors might be humiliated as well as hung, dragged by horses through the public streets on a hurdle or an animal skin, as was the fate of William de Marisco, the Lundy pirate, who in the 1230s had plotted the death of King Henry III, or Peter of Wakefield, a Yorkshire prophet who preached that King John was about to be toppled from his throne and who was drawn and then hung in 1213 when his prophecy failed to come true, his body torn apart between the horses before ever it reached the gallows. But such cases were extraordinary. Only from the 1290s, as Edward I began to grow impatient with the speed of progress in Wales and Scotland, was the full array of judicial violence brought to bear upon his enemies. Thomas de Turberville, convicted in 1295 of treasonable conspiracy with the French, the Scots and the Welsh, was dragged on an ox-hide from Westminster to Cheapside and hung at Smithfield, with six tormentors dressed as devils to attend his final moments. His body was left to rot on the gallows ‘so long as anything of him should remain’.

The punishments meted out by Edward to the leaders of Welsh and Scottish resistance, above all perhaps the deliberate dismemberment of Dafydd of Wales, of the Lord Rhys (leader of the 1287 Welsh rising) and of William Wallace, signalled a new brutality in English dealings with reluctant colonials. None of these ‘traitors’ was of Anglo-French noble birth, even though Dafydd and the Lord Rhys might claim that the blood of King Arthur flowed in their veins. In 1306, however, and in response to Robert Bruce’s final defection, Edward for the first time turned his anger not just against noble prisoners but against women, ordering the execution of John, Earl of Atholl (the first earl to have been executed, rather than killed in battle, since the beheading of Waltheof in 1076) and the imprisonment of Isobel, Countess of Buchan and of Mary, Robert Bruce’s sister, deliberately displayed in cages of wood and iron in the castles of Berwick and Roxburgh. Judicial violence had jumped the species barrier, from foreign enemies to the Anglo-Norman aristocracy. From this to the execution of English earls, the deposition and murder of kings and the killing fields of the civil wars of the fifteenth-century was only a short chronological step.