[133] Ibid. xviii. 6 sqq.
[134] Laws of Manu, ix. 232.
[135] Ibid. ix. 280.
[136] Ibid. ix. 270.
[137] Ibid. ix. 277.
[138] Ibid. viii. 371 sq.
Increasing severity has been a characteristic of European legislation up to quite modern times. Towards the end of the thirteenth century, the English law knows some seven crimes which it treats as capital, namely, treason, homicide, arson, rape, robbery, burglary, and grand larceny; but the number of capital offences grew rapidly.[139] From the Restoration to the death of George III.—a period of 160 years—no less than 187 such offences, wholly different in character and degree, were added to the criminal code; and when, in 1837, the punishment of death was removed from about 200 crimes, it was still left applicable to exactly the same offences as were capital at the end of the thirteenth century.[140] Pocket-picking was punishable with death until the year 1808;[141] horse-stealing, cattle-stealing, sheep-stealing, stealing from a dwelling-house, and forgery, until 1832;[142] letter-stealing and sacrilege, until 1835;[143] rape, until 1841;[144] robbery with violence, arson of dwelling-houses, and sodomy, until 1861.[145] And not only was human life recklessly sacrificed, but the mode of execution was often exceedingly cruel. In the beginning of the fifteenth century, the Peine forte et dure, or pressing to death with every aggravation of torture, was adopted as a manner of punishment suitable to cases where the accused refused to plead.[146] Burning alive of female offenders still occurred in England at the end of the eighteenth century,[147] being considered by the framers of the law as a commutation of the sentence of hanging required by decency.[148] Still more cruel was the punishment inflicted on male traitors: they were first hanged by the neck and cut down before life was extinct, their entrails were taken out and burned before their face, then they were beheaded and quartered, and the quarters were set up in diverse places.[149] This punishment continued to exist in England as late as in the reign of George III., and even then Sir Samuel Romilly, the great agitator against its continuance, brought upon himself the odium of the law officers of the Crown, who declared that he was “breaking down the bulwarks of the Constitution.”[150] Such cruelties were not peculiar to the English. On the contrary, as Sir James Stephen observes, though English people, as a rule, have been singularly reckless about taking life, they have usually been averse to the infliction of death by torture.[151] In various parts of the Continent we find such punishments as breaking on the wheel, quartering alive, and tearing with red-hot pincers, in use down to the end of the eighteenth century.
[139] Pollock and Maitland, op. cit. ii. 511.
[140] May, Constitutional History of England, ii. 595. Mackenzie, Studies in Roman Law, p. 424 sq.
[141] Pike, History of Crime in England, ii. 450.