2022-05-19
58 分钟We finish off our Medieval True Crime miniseries with a look at two hangings from the year 1484 and explore some of the practices surrounding and meanings of hanging as a mode of execution in medieval Europe. Today's Text Knox, Ronald, and Shane Leslie, editors and translators. The Miracles of King Henry VI. Cambridge UP, 1923. References Merback, Mitchell B. The Thief, the Cross and the Wheel: Pain and Spectacle of Punishment in Medieval and Renaissance Europe. U of Chicago P, 1999.
This is medieval death trip for Wednesday, May 18, 2022.
Episode 90 Medieval true crime four in the shadow of the Gallows pole hello, and welcome to Medieval Death Trip, the show where we explore the wit and weirdness of medieval texts.
I'm your host, Patrick Lane, and we're back from our semester long hiatus to kick off a new run of episodes for the summer by first wrapping up our medieval true crime miniseries.
This is part four, and this will be the last installment of the series proper, at least for the foreseeable future.
But that does not mean were done with tales of murder and felony.
In fact, I know we will be returning to the coroner's rolls at some point, and maybe ill call that part five of the series, or maybe that will just be another episode of Medieval Death trip.
But todays text gives us a nice terminal point for the series since it takes us to a 15th century execution, the end, or at least one end of the judicial process of criminal investigation and the end of our time period.
But it also brings us back, in a way, to where we started with this mini series.
But we'll come to that.
We're going to hear about two different executions in today's text, but they both involve the most common mode for putting someone to death in the Middle Ages, hanging.
Now, if you're eager to get to the medieval text, then you can use the chapter feature to skip, because otherwise buckle in.
Were going to take a bit of a long journey into the subject of hanging and other medieval forms of capital punishment.
So hanging was one of the most versatile methods of execution applied to a wide range of capital crimes, probably because it was relatively cheap and easy within the resources and capabilities of any locality.
That said, there was across Europe a conventional matching of type of execution to type of crime that we see referenced in texts.
And according to convention, hanging was the punishment for thieves, and that's how we see it used in today's text, whereas murder, rape and aggravated theft were to be punished with breaking by the wheel, a topic I want to come back to in a future episode.
Heresy and sodomy were punished by burning crimes of impurity, needing the purging fire to take away their stain, though arsonists were also burned in a simpler, let the punishment fit the crime kind of logic, drowning was prescribed primarily for female offenders who committed infanticide or crimes against religion or moral transgressions like adultery.
Certainly a link to witchcraft and devilish temptation is in there, which seems to have some deep traditional connections to ritualistic drownings in pre christian european cultures and of course, if you were of the nobility and were found guilty of most any of these crimes, you had a customary right to a more dignified and compared to most of these other methods, considerably less painful execution by decapitation.
In fact, many appeals we have court records for are not attempts to get a guilty verdict overturned, but instead are efforts to get a sentence to a more dishonorable form of death commuted to decapitation by the sword.
Of course, there are plenty of exceptions to these standard conventions.
For one thing, particularly infamous crimes would be met with particularly brutal sentences, drawing and quartering and such.