The Time Traveller's Guide to Elizabethan England (52 page)

Punishments

If you are indicted of a felony, misdemeanour or trespass you need to know what sentence to expect. The following accounts for most of the punishments that these courts can deliver, in relation to the offences committed.

Hanging.
If you hide in a dark corner of Francis Hunt’s stables in Colchester on Christmas Eve 1575 you will see a servant enter, position a bucket behind Mr Hunt’s mare, drop his hose and bugger the animal. Unfortunately for the servant, Mr Hunt himself is hiding in the shadows. He reports the servant to the JPs and, at the next gaol delivery, sees him sentenced to be hanged.
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You might find it perverse that the statutory punishment for having sex with a horse is death, while a woman selling an eleven-year-old girl to strangers for sex is merely paraded around the city in a cart – but such is Elizabethan life.
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Capital punishment is applied in relation to capital offences, and a horse, being a man’s property, has more legal protection from sexual abuse than a poor girl.

Hanging is the most common punishment for manslaughter, infanticide, murder, rape, arson, causing death by witchcraft, grand larceny (theft of goods worth more than 12d), highway robbery, buggery (unnatural sexual acts, normally with an animal) and sodomy. If you are indicted for any of these, the constable of the hundred or manor where you are arrested will take you to the county gaol where you will await the next assize session. This is when the royal judges from the Court of Queen’s Bench or the Court of Common Pleas arrive to deliver justice. There are just six circuits covering the whole country, and each judge needs to go round all the counties in his circuit, so you might have to wait some months in gaol before you have your day in court.

The sessions in London take place quarterly and, as Thomas Platter notes, ‘rarely does a law day in London in all the four sessions pass without some twenty to thirty persons, both men and women, being gibbeted’.
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It is hardly an exaggeration. At the sessions held at Newgate gaol on 21 February 1561, seventeen men and two women are found guilty of capital offences and taken off to be hanged at Tyburn. At the next sitting of the court three days later, eighteen men and two
women are ordered to be hanged.
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On this occasion the Barber-Surgeons of the city are allowed to select one of the fresh corpses for anatomical experimentation. Many notorious criminals look on their execution as a chance to show off, giving away souvenirs to the crowd who turn out to watch them die. In 1583 a famous pirate wears crimson taffeta breeches on the day of his execution; he tears them off and gives shreds of them to his friends as he walks to his death.
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Most people are placed in a cart to be transported to the gallows. When the cart reaches the place of execution, they are made to stand. A leather hood is placed over the head of each condemned man and woman and a noose around their necks. The nooses hang in a line from a triangular frame supported on three sturdy posts. Then the cart is pulled away, leaving them all suspended, slowly being strangled by their own weight. They try to breathe and their bodies start to jerk in a sort of dance; it is then that their friends will step forward, take hold of the body and pull it down suddenly, to break the neck and hasten death. Where a violent offence such as murder was committed with malice aforethought, the gallows is set up as close to the scene of the crime as possible, even if it means that it has to be erected in the precincts of a church. On several occasions during the reign you will see gallows set up by the west door of St Paul’s Cathedral, after people have been found guilty of murder in the city’s largest churchyard. For pirates there is a special place of execution: at the low-water mark at Wapping. There all the ships entering the port of London see the dead mariners suspended with their feet in the water: the bodies remain there until three tides have covered them. Henry Machyn records such a hanging on 25 April 1562, when five sailors are executed for robbery at sea.
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One has the noose around his neck when a reprieve comes for him from the privy council. It seems Appletree is not the only one to escape death by the blessing of a moment.

As you can see, not everyone condemned to death actually hangs. Some escape due to their connections with people of influence. Others claim Benefit of the Clergy. This is an ancient law which states that, if a man can read a passage from the Bible, he should be judged as a priest and handed over to his bishop for punishment; in such cases he will not hang, but will be branded on the left hand with a hot iron (he will hang if caught a second time). Many grave crimes, such as rape, arson, highway robbery and forcible entry, are beyond the scope
of Benefit of the Clergy, having been specifically excluded by various kings down the ages; but the old law is still used regularly to escape the noose in cases of theft and manslaughter, despite increasing literacy. Ben Jonson reads ‘the neck verse’ to escape execution after killing a fellow actor in a duel in 1598. Obviously women cannot plead Benefit of the Clergy, as they cannot be priests; however, women can ‘plead their belly’. Pregnant women cannot legally be executed, but must be allowed to give birth first. Hence many women in gaol awaiting the judges try to get themselves with child, hoping to slip through the system afterwards.

As a result of these loopholes, only 24 per cent of those facing serious offences in an assize court are hanged; 35 per cent are acquitted, 27 per cent claim Benefit of the Clergy, 6 per cent successfully plead pregnancy, 5 per cent are whipped, 1 per cent are sentenced to remain in prison for a specific term, and the remaining 2 per cent get away with a fine or die in prison awaiting trial.
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You don’t have to be cynical to see that Benefit of the Clergy probably acts as an incentive to learn to read. Of those who do hang, 75 per cent have been convicted of some form of theft – stealing food, horses, money or livestock – 18 per cent are found guilty of witchcraft, and 6 per cent of murder. The others are rapists, buggerers, sodomites, arsonists and housebreakers.

Drawing, hanging and quartering.
If a man is found guilty of treason he is sentenced to be ‘drawn’ to the gallows on a hurdle or sled, hanged, and then cut down while still alive and eviscerated, with his guts and private parts thrown into a specially prepared fire; then he is cut into quarters. If this happens to you, the butcher employed for the task will cut you in half at the waist, dividing your body in two. Then your head will be severed from your body and your ribcage divided down the middle, so that half your chest and one arm form a quarter. Your pelvis is then cleaved in two, each part with a leg attached, forming the last two quarters. Each of these quarters is then displayed in a prominent place in a town where you are well-known. Your head will probably find its way on to a spike on London Bridge.

This is the full traitor’s death, as suffered by many Catholic sympathisers in Elizabeth’s reign, including Dr John Story, who is ‘drawn from the Tower of London to Tyburn, and there hanged, disembowelled and quartered, his head set on London Bridge and his
quarters on the gates of the city’.
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The ‘drawing’ on a sled to the gallows is a ritualised humiliation, and an important part of the cruel ceremony.
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Robert Mantell, alias Bloys, is executed in this way in 1581 for pretending to be the still-living Edward VI. Six years later a smith living in Hatfield Peverel is sentenced to death for treason for simply expressing his belief that Edward VI might still be alive.
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Anthony Babington, Chidiock Tichborne and twelve other conspirators are sentenced to suffer the same gruesome fate in 1586. Many people turn up to watch their killing; but on this occasion the eviscerations of the first seven are so awful to behold that they evoke sympathy from the crowd. The queen orders that the remaining seven traitors are to be hanged until completely dead before being eviscerated.

Beheading.
The nobility are not hanged for treason, but beheaded. The duke of Norfolk is executed in this manner on Tower Hill (just to the north of the Tower of London) in 1572. The earl of Northumberland is beheaded at York in the same year and the earl of Essex loses his head for high treason on Tower Green in 1601. Most famously of all, Mary, queen of Scots, is beheaded at Fotheringay in 1587 for her complicity in the Babington plot.

The above-mentioned aristocrats are not the only people to be judicially beheaded in Elizabeth’s reign. The Halifax gibbet – a precursor of the guillotine – is used for all those found guilty of theft in the town of Halifax. Here the people do not wait for the assize judges. According to William Harrison, if you steal something worth 13½d or more in Halifax, you will be beheaded forthwith on the next market day (Tuesday, Thursday or Saturday):

The engine wherewith the execution is done is a square block of wood of the length of 4½ feet, which does ride up and down in a slot … between two pieces of timber that are framed and set upright, of five yards in height. In the nether end of the sliding block is an axe, keyed or fastened with an iron into the wood, which being drawn up to the top of the frame is there fastened by a wooden pin … unto the middle of which pin also there is a long rope fastened that cometh down among the people, so when the offender hath made his confession and laid his head over the nethermost block every man there present doth either take hold of the rope (or putteth forth his arm so near to the same as he can get, in token that he is willing to see true justice executed), and, pulling out the pin in this manner, the head-block wherein the axe is fastened doth fall down with such a violence that, if the neck of the transgressor were as big as a bull, it should be cut asunder at a stroke and roll from the body by a huge distance.

Twenty-three men and two women are beheaded in this way over the course of Elizabeth’s reign.

Burning at the stake.
You have already come across instances of people being burnt alive for heresy, such as the Anabaptists in Aldgate in 1575. In addition, women are burnt at the stake for high treason, which is the fate of Mary Cleere in 1576. It is also the punishment for women guilty of petty treason; in 1590 a young woman is burnt to death in St George’s Field, outside London, for poisoning her mistress.
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Peine forte et dure
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When people stand mute in court and refuse to plead guilty or not guilty, they are sentenced to suffer
peine forte et dure
(strong and hard punishment). This means the victim is crushed to death beneath a board on which seven or eight hundredweight of stones are placed, one by one. In order to increase the suffering, a sharp stone is placed beneath the victim’s spine. Astonishingly, some brave souls voluntarily choose this horrible death of their own free will. If a woman wishes to preserve an estate for her children, which will be confiscated if she is found guilty of a crime, she may refuse to offer a plea.
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Margaret Clitherow is crushed to death in 1586, refusing to plead in order to save her children and fellow Catholics from being tortured to testify against her.

Imprisonment.
People are normally locked up in gaol only to restrain them until they can be brought to trial; as we have seen, fewer than 1 per cent of assize cases result in a sentence of imprisonment. However, the privy council threatens people with imprisonment. In 1562 a royal proclamation stipulates that no one may speak of the falling value of money or else be imprisoned for three months and then pilloried.
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Attempts to kill people with witchcraft and eating meat in Lent may also lead to periods of incarceration.

Imprisonment is generally the punishment used for debtors. If a man is accused of failing to pay another man a sum of money that he owes, he is arrested by the constables or watchmen and consigned
to prison, where he must remain until the debt is paid. In London this is the Fleet. The conditions therein are awful – fifty or so men in a room with bare boards and no furniture or blankets, and with many inmates suffering from some disease or other. A debtor has to pay rent for his chamber if he does not wish to lie with the common criminals, and he also has to pay for his food. He is free to receive visitors and even to go out of the prison, if accompanied by a guard and as long as he pays the warden for the privilege. However, doing so only increases his debts. Many prisoners find themselves relegated from the chambers to the grim pit of the prison basement.

Bridewell Hospital in London is the place where people (mostly women) are locked up for vice crimes such as vagrancy, prostitution and domestic disorders. It also has its own courts where the master and governors can proceed without reference to any other external authority. The beds are filthy, the food is ‘fit for dogs’, and the open sewer of the Fleet River runs beside it. Yet this is where poor Frances Palmer is sent in 1603. She has twice been made pregnant by menservants with whom she worked, has most recently given birth in the open street next to an alehouse – and both her children have died. Having been arrested for whoredom and vagrancy, she is taken to Bridewell where it is ordained that she be ‘punished’ – as if she needs further misery.
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Whipping.
This is a common punishment generally used for vagabondage, theft, deceit and sedition. Palliards and wild rogues looking for food and money often end up being whipped out of town before they can obtain either. Petty thieves who steal goods worth less than a shilling (petty larceny) are often sentenced to be whipped. Two men who remove lead from London’s conduits, cutting off the city’s water supply on 30 November 1560, are punished in this way.
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In 1561 a man is whipped through the streets of Westminster and then through London and across London Bridge to Southwark for forging documents in the hand of the queen’s Master of Horse.
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In such cases the sentence is that the culprit be ‘whipped at a cart’s arse’. Tied to the back of a cart, he is stripped half-naked and, as he stumbles along, his back is lashed with leather whips ‘until he bleeds well’. This is also a punishment meted out by JPs to couples who have an illegitimate child: the man and the woman are tied together, stripped half-naked and whipped as they are led twice through the parish.
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