This is an early record of a judgment to hang in terrorem, and of chains for the purpose.[22]
Gower, a contemporary poet, says:—
“And so after by the Lawe
He was into the gibbet drawe,
Where he above all other hongeth,
As to a traitor it belongeth.”
Again, during the second Northern Rising, in 1536, the Duke of Norfolk hung and quartered, as the usual punishment for high treason, seventy-four men at Carlisle, but the bodies of Sir Robert Constable and Ashe were hung in chains at Hull and York respectively, as special cases. And the Duke blames the Earl of Cumberland for not having hung certain persons in chains, as he had directed; he airily adds, speaking of other examples in Yorkshire, that “they all hang still in chains, notwithstanding that I have had no small intercession for many of them.”[23]
We gather from these items that, although the public exposure of the body entire formed no legal part of the punishment for high treason, it was sometimes added to it for the increase of the shame. Whether the ensanguined, quivering quarter of a man, uplifted high on a gateway, had a more deterrent effect than a whole body slowly wasting away in chains, we are, fortunately, not now called upon curiously to determine.
It may here be mentioned that the punishment for high treason differs in one important particular from that for murder. The head must be severed from the body after the hanging. The man must be drawn to the gallows, and may not walk; he must be cut down alive; his entrails taken out and burnt before his face. Then the head cut off—“headed,” and finally the body quartered, and the head and quarters remaining at the king’s disposal. This was the English law, as finally settled by the Statute of Treason of 25 Edward III. (1351). Such a sentence had been first carried out, as it appears, upon a pirate named William Marise, in 1241. Notable examples are those of Wallace, 1305;[24] the elder and the younger Despencers, 1326;[25] Hotspur, 1403;[26] and they are notable examples of shocking barbarity; and not least memorable though, happily, last, the executions after “the —45,” in exact accordance with the ancient statute of four centuries before. It is recorded that one of these last victims struggled for a few moments with William Stout of Hexham, the fiend who, for twenty guineas and the clothes, did the bloody business, when he opened his bosom and plucked out his heart.[27] It is a dreadful subject, which one almost shrinks from touching; but it may be added that none of the thirty-two sufferers at Carlisle for “the —45” were hung in chains; they died the ferocious death for high treason.[28]
As a curiously mitigated example we may mention the case of the five gentlemen attached to the Duke of Gloucester, who were arraigned and condemned for treason in 1447. They were hung and immediately cut down alive, stripped naked, their bodies marked for quartering, and then, no doubt very much to their surprise, pardoned.
In Jersey, during the administration of the Duke of Somerset, uncle of Edward VI., two pirates were condemned and hung in chains, as appears from the following extract from the registers of the island:—
“Placita Catallia cum justicia reallis ten’ die xviijo Mensis Januarii An’o Domini Milleo quinmo lo coram Ballj in p’na Clement Lemp’re, Jo’his de Carteret, Ricardi Dumaresq, Nicoll’ Lemp’re, Jo’his Lemp’re, Edwardii Dumaresq, Edwardii de Carteret, Laurentii Hamptoune, Georgii de Carteret, Jo’his de Soullemont.