Tea at Trianon: The Execution and Burial of Criminals in Early Medieval England

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Friday, November 30, 2018

The Execution and Burial of Criminals in Early Medieval England

From Medievalists:

In later Anglo-Saxon England, executed offenders and, probably also, other social deviants were separated from the rest of the community in death. They were buried in cemeteries far from settlements but in raised landscapes which would have been visible from frequented areas – so-called ‘execution cemeteries’. However, from the second half of the eleventh century, these deviant cemeteries appear to have fallen out of use. This thesis seeks to discover where criminals where buried after the Norman Conquest and examines the influences behind the changes in funerary treatment of judicial offenders.

Numerous published excavation reports and databases were analysed for evidence of funerary deviance – i.e. any trait unusual for normative Christian burial – but with particular focus on evidence for decapitation or for individuals remaining bound at the wrists at the time of interment, both of which are the most direct indicators of potential execution. While 343 individuals were buried in Anglo-Saxon execution cemeteries – sixty-two of these decapitated and seventy-three potentially bound – only three such deviants could be identified from the Anglo-Norman period. To inform on this transformation in burial tradition, historical evidence, particularly legislation and historical chronicles, were used to aid in an examination of capital punishment from c.850 to c.1150 to better understand the treatment of judicial offenders from conviction to execution. (Read more.)