Execution: A Guide to the Ultimate Penalty (13 page)

CAVE OF ROSES

This was a rare and little-known Swedish method of execution in which the victim was confined in a cave which was already occupied by numerous snakes and poisonous reptiles. In the darkness he would then be stung or bitten to death. The use of the cave for such a purpose was abolished by King Gustavus III in 1772.

CRUCIFIXION

‘The almost unbearable agony was intensified by the added brutality of blows to the limbs; the face and torso were scourged by hooked instruments, and honey was applied to the face so that the vicious attention of insects added to the torment.’

This method of capital punishment immediately conjures up in most people’s minds the scriptural pictures of Jesus dragging the heavy cross along the dusty path leading to the place of execution. However, it seems highly likely that this representation is erroneous; a cross of such a size would be too heavy for one man to transport, and was in any case at variance with the practice at that time.

Contemporary records show that the victim, after being flogged, would be forced to carry only the wooden cross-piece to the execution site. There he would be stripped, then made to lie on his back, his arms outstretched along the cross-piece, to which they would be either bound with cords or secured by long nails driven through the palms of his hands.

The cross-piece, with its human burden, would then be roped or nailed to a long stake which, if not already implanted deep in the ground, would be lifted, then lowered into a prepared socket in the earth. To ensure that the weight of the victim didn’t tear the hands from the nails and thereby allow the body to fall to the ground, a block of wood, the
suppedanem
, was hammered into the vertical stake immediately beneath the feet, the victim being further transfixed by more nails driven through his insteps and soles.

The almost unbearable agony was intensified by the added brutality of blows to the limbs; the face and torso were scourged by hooked instruments, and honey was applied to the face so that the vicious attention of insects added to the torment. Many days would pass before death brought blessed relief.

The earliest form of crucifixion required little more than a tree trunk to which the victim was nailed, and was widely used by the Greeks and Romans, the Persians and the Carthaginians. As with other products of man’s fertile imagination, the passage of time brought refinements, and different types of cross came into use. One, the
crux immissa
, consisted of four arms mounted at right-angles at the top of the stake, the victims being secured by their hands, and weights tied to their feet, thereby permitting output to be quadrupled. The
crux commissa
had three arms, and the
crux decussata
was in the form of a St Andrew’s cross, on which the victim was spreadeagled and mutilated.

In order to provide a spectacle for the public, batches of victims were crucified at the same time, some variation being introduced by hanging some upside-down on the cross. This position was comparatively merciful, as it rendered the victim unconscious within a matter of minutes.

When dead, the bodies were left on the cross as a deterrent, to rot until only the bones nailed to the shaft remained. This practice, the equivalent to the gibbets in European countries, is evidenced by the account of ‘the seven sons of Saul, sacrificed at the beginning of the barley harvest, in the full blaze of the summer sun, hanged there until the fall of the rains in October’.

Eventually, crucifixion was abolished in the Roman Empire on the orders of Emperor Constantine in
ad
345. Not so, however, in Japan where, until as recently as the nineteenth century, a particularly barbaric variation was practised. Tied to a cross with ropes, the victim was then impaled with lightweight spears, these weapons being passed with exquisite slowness through non-vital parts of the body, and only a substantial bribe, paid beforehand, would induce the executioner to deliver the first thrust through the heart.

In England ancient chronicles report the fate of those afflicted with religious fervour: ‘A man of Oxenford faynyd hym to be Cryst, and was crucified at Addurbury.’ Similarly, ‘A man that faynyd hym selfe Cryste at Oxynforde, he was cursyde [crucified] at Aldermanbery at London, the yere of oure Lorde Mccxxij.’

In France the practice survived until 1127, when the assassin Bertholde, guilty of murdering Emperor Charles the Righteous, was crucified on the orders of Louis the Bulky.

CYPHON

This was a rare method of execution, but none the less macabre. It was described by the Greek dramatist Aristophanes (448–388
bc
) as one in which the naked victim was secured by his neck and wrists in the pillory, then left to endure the burning rays of the sun and the attacks of stinging insects, which were attracted by a mixture of milk and honey with which he had been smeared.

Should he, against all the odds, survive for 20 days, he was taken down and, as a degradation, dressed in women’s clothes before being escorted by large crowds to the cliffs, over which he was thrown head first.

DIELE

Instead of having a guillotine, the blade of which requires tall uprights in order to gain momentum, why not have two short uprights, then simply rest the blade on the nape of the kneeling victim’s neck and hit the top of the blade with a mallet, thus driving the cutting edge into, and hopefully through the victim’s neck?

That, as portrayed in old prints, would seem to have been the design and
modus operandi
of the diele, one of which was used early in the fifteenth century by John of Bavaria to dispatch the ringleaders of a revolt. It is highly likely that such a machine could have been the forerunner of the Italian mannaia seen by Père Jean-Baptiste Labat on his journeys through Spain and Italy in 1730.

DROWNING

‘Two barges laden with people stopped at a place called Prairie-au-Duc... More than eight hundred persons of all ages and both sexes were inhumanly drowned and cut to pieces.’

Wherever there was water, there was a free and straightforward method of disposing of unwanted members of society, whether they were common thieves or murderers, sorcerers or witches. The capital cities of most countries being situated on rivers meant that, for instance, those found guilty of bigamy or patricide in Ancient Rome could be thrown into the Tiber, their bodies first being wrapped in sheets of lead or tied in a sack. In France, in the reign of Charles VI, men committing sedition were tried in Paris and drowned in the Seine, while in Istanbul, Turkey, unfaithful wives were fettered and dropped into the Bosporus.

In England, London’s Thames was a perfect receptacle for convicted mutineers and pirates, and any law-breakers captured in the grounds of the lord of Baynard’s Castle also finished up in that city’s river. In the shires powerful barons maintained their own sets of gallows together with a quagmire, or drowning pit, the former on which to hang male offenders, the latter in which to immerse female thieves.

As a method of determining the guilt or otherwise of suspected criminals, water was considered indispensable, for it was common knowledge that water, being under divine influence, would automatically reject those guilty of sin or crime. So the accused person, naked, with hands and feet bound, would have a rope tied about his or her waist, a knot being tied in the rope about 18 inches from the body.

With witnesses crowding the banks or shore, the suspect would be thrown into the water. The knot sinking out of sight denoted innocence, but woe betide the unfortunate if, somehow, he or she managed to remain on or near the surface.

In the Middle Ages, when superstition was rife, trial by water was widely used in the identification of witches and sorcerers, due to the fact that those consorting with the devil possessed the unique characteristic of being lighter than water, a test maintained by James I to be infallible.

Anyone suspected of being a witch would be examined by a ‘qualified’ witch-finder such as the notorious Matthew Hopkins, who would ‘prick’ for guilt using a needle to search for any insensitive places on the woman’s body. Once allegedly located, such a place was taken as positive evidence of acquaintanceship with the devil, and as confirmation she would be put to trial by water.

Trussed crossways, right-hand thumb to the big toe of the left foot, left-hand thumb to the big toe of the right foot, she would be secured about the waist in the middle of a long rope and, the men on each end standing on opposite banks of the river or stream, she would be lowered into the water. Again, sinking indicated innocence, though doubtless a considerable period could elapse pending agreement between the witnesses. And should those on the rope already be convinced of her guilt, all they needed to do would be to hold the rope taut, thereby keeping her on the surface.

So, if not only for irrigation purposes, but also for dealing with thieves, vagabonds and those who cast spells on cattle, crops and people, interference with the course of a river provoked much dispute. In 1313 ‘a presentment was made before the justices at Canterbury that the prior at Christ Church had for nine years obstructed the high road leading from Dover Castle to Sandwich by a water-mill, and the diversion of a stream called Gestlyng, where felons condemned to death should be drowned, but could not be in that manner because of want of water.

‘Further, that he raised a certain gutter by 4 feet and the water that passed that way to the gutter ran to the place where the convicts were drowned and from whence their bodies were floated to the river, but that after the gutter was raised, the drowned bodies could not be carried into the river by the stream as they used to be, for want of water.’

At sea, of course, death by drowning was the obvious method of dealing with those guilty of maritime crimes as early as 1189, when a proclamation issued by the king stated: ‘Richard, by the grace of God, King of England, Duke of Normandy, etc. To all his men going by sea to Jerusalem [to the Crusades], greetings; know ye, by the common council of all good men, we have made the underwritten ordinances.’ And the first one decreed that ‘he who kills on shipboard shall be bound to the dead man and thrown into the sea’.

In Scotland the penal code included drowning as a penalty until it was abolished in 1685, though while it was in force it claimed many lives. Helen Stirk of Perth, accused of heresy, was found guilty. When taken to the river, she handed over her baby to a spectator and was then thrown into the river to die. At Edinburgh in 1611 a man was drowned for stealing a lamb, and on 29 January 1624 Helen Faa, a gypsy, and ten other women were drowned in the Nor’ loch. Four years later, on 2 August 1628, George Sinclair, convicted of incest with his two sisters, and James Mitchell, guilty of bestiality, met a similar death, as did Margaret Wilson, aged 18, and Margaret McLachlan, aged 63, on 11 May 1685, both of whom were overheard to say that James VII of Scotland was not entitled to rule the Church as he wished.

In those years raiders operated on both sides of the border with England, and in 1567 the regent of Scotland made an attempt to restore order. In a surprise raid on the town of Hawick on market-day he captured red-handed 36 border thieves. Thirteen were hanged there and then, and nine were drowned in the nearest pool with heavy stones about their necks.

Nor did Ireland overlook this form of execution. In 1570 large numbers of prisoners captured by the government forces were stripped naked and pushed into the bogs, to drown in the mud. Two years later the Irish caught a number of Scottish prisoners and drowned 400 of them. But even worse was to come in the following century when, in 1641, the Catholics of Ulster, whose estates had been confiscated and who had been oppressed by harsh restrictions, entered into a conspiracy to wipe out the English settlers, with the aid of French troops promised by Cardinal Richelieu. The plot was discovered on the eve of the uprising, and frustrated, but carnage on a wide scale followed. As little or no action was taken by Charles I to quell the insurrection it went on for some years, during which time between 40,000 and 50,000 people lost their lives. One of the countless atrocities that took place before Oliver Cromwell brutally crushed the warring factions occurred when, as described in a book published in 1680, ‘In Tirawly thirty or forty English, who had yielded to go to Mass, were given the choice, whether they would die by the sword or be drowned. They chose the latter and so, being driven to the shore, these barbarous villains with their naked swords forced them into the sea, the Mothers with their Children in their arms, wading to the Chin, were overcome by the waves, where they all perished.’

On the Continent German women guilty of infanticide were, according to the criminal code enacted by Emperor Charles V, to be buried or impaled, although as a concession they could be drowned, but only ‘where water for the purpose was convenient at hand’. In sixteenth-century Nuremberg this took place on a wooden stage built out into the River Pegnitz, and from it the woman, enclosed in a sack, was thrown in and kept below the surface by means of a long pole wielded by the assistant executioner. One poor wretch contrived to free herself from the sack, but despite her frantic pleas for mercy she was not reprieved, and her death struggles continued for almost an hour before she finally vanished beneath the surface.

Another who suffered was Apollonia Voglin of Lehrberg who, on 6 March 1578, gave birth to a child at the farm of her employer. Desperate and frightened, she killed the infant but, the corpse being discovered, she was tried and found guilty, subsequently being drowned at Lichtenau.

For mass-drowning, however, one need look no further than France at the end of the eighteenth century, when the inhabitants of the Vendée, that lovely stretch of country through which the River Loire flows, revolted against the many tyrannical edicts issued by the leaders of the French Revolution in Paris. Unwilling to accept the harsh directives, they rose against the government, which forthwith resolved to crush the insurgents by means of the guillotine, the fusillade (firing squad),
sabrade
(sabre charge) and, worst of all, the
noyade
, by drowning.

The revolutionary army, under the command of Representative Carrier and his deputy Lamberty, swept through the countryside, wreaking terrible vengeance on all who resisted. The Vendeans rallied to the cause and, in the fierce engagements that followed, large numbers of them were taken prisoner. What happened to them was described in a report sent to the commune headquarters in Paris on 31 December 1793:

‘The number of brigands which have been brought here within the last ten days is incalculable. They arrive at every moment. The guillotine being too slow, and as shooting them means the expenditure of powder and ball, one has adopted the plan (on a
pris le parti
) of putting a certain number in big boats, conducting them to the middle of the river about half a league away from the town, and there sending the boat to the bottom. This operation is continually taking place.’

Nor were soldiers the only victims. Anyone suspected of harbouring, assisting or even sympathising with the Vendean aims was put to death. And so it was that the first
noyade
took place when, one evening in November 1793, 90 priests, some nearly 80 years of age, were crammed into the hold of the small sailing-vessel
La Gloire
. Sick and starving, covered with vermin, they huddled together, not knowing their fate. But when the sun rose next morning, the hold was empty, and Lamberty described gleefully to his superior how their captives had been brought on deck in pairs, to be stripped and bound, then loaded into barges, from which they were later plunged into the watery depths. As a gesture of their appreciation of the deputy’s ingenuity, Carrier and the committee rewarded him with the ownership of
La Gloire
, four francs being paid to each of the sailors who assisted him in the executions.

Many more
noyades
– cynically christened ‘vertical deportations’ by Carrier – were to take place. In the town of Angers large numbers of prisoners were held, posing a problem in view of a threatened attack by Vendean forces. The problem was solved by one of their generals, Robert, a man who had been a comedian in Paris before the Revolution. He reported his solution in an account sent to the Minister of War on 29 November: