“John Wyte, Bernabé Le Quesne, Sébastian Alexandre, criminels pour leur démérites de cas de crime pirates et larons de mer accordant leur confessions sont condampnés à estre pendus et estranglés de cy a ce que mort en ensuyve savoir est ledit John Wyte sur une potence hault eslevée à la pointe de devers Ste Katherine et ledit Bernabey Le Quesne sur une potence hault élevée p’eillement sur le bec et pointe de Noirmont aux lieux les plus eminens desdites Montaignes et la leurs corps demeurer enchâinés por y estre consumés et pourrys, et le dit Sebastien est respité par certaines considerations prises et considérées en Justice, et tos leurs biens meubles et héritages confisqués en la maison du Roi ou des Seigneurs aux q’ls il app’tiennent” (Cour du Catel).[29]
In Hakluyt’s “Voyages” we find the following:—“Hereupon the souldiers besought me not to hang them, but rather let them be shot throw, and then afterwards, if I thought good, their bodies might be hanged upon gibbets along the haven’s mouth.”[30]
The numerous allusions to gibbets by Shakespeare show how common they were in his day.
It will have been observed in the foregoing remarks that the words “gallows” and “gibbet” have been used indifferently in the quotations both for hanging a man from, and for exposing him upon. It would appear that, at least with us at the present day, gallows is the thing upon which men suffer, and gibbet the object upon which they are set forth. Hence the expression to gibbet a man by calling attention publicly to nefarious deeds, and, as the one thing has given us the verb, so the other furnishes the language with an adjective equally expressive, and a person by his “gallous” conduct stands a fair chance of reaching the gallows at last. A gallows may by particular use become a gibbet, but not contrariwise, and the same remark may be said to apply to Potence and Gibbet.
Chapter III.
Whilst such horrors were going on in England we may be sure that the Germans, with their dogged brutality, were not behind-hand. With them the bodies of traitors and highwaymen, as well as of murderers, were fixed upon poles, set upon wheels, impaled alive, or hung upon gibbets. Three prints from “La Cosmographie Universelle de Münster,” 1552, give some notion of the sternness of the Teutonic penal code.