[192] Louis XIV., ‘Ordonnance criminelle,’ A.D. 1670, xxii. 1, in Isambert, Decrusy, and Taillandier, Recueil général des anciennes lois françaises, xviii. 414.
[193] Erskine-Rankine, Principles of the Law of Scotland, p. 559.
[194] Stephen, History of the Criminal Law of England, iii. 104. For earlier times see Bracton, De Legibus et Consuetudinibus Angliæ, fol. 150, vol. ii. 504 sq.
[195] Stephen, op. cit. iii. 105.
[196] Foinitzki, in von Liszt, La législation pénale comparée, p. 548.
The horror of suicide also found a vent in outrages committed on the dead body. Of a woman who drowned herself in Edinburgh in 1598, we are told that her body was “harled through the town backwards, and thereafter hanged on the gallows.”[197] In France, as late as the middle of the eighteenth century, self-murderers were dragged upon a hurdle through the streets with the face turned to the ground; they were then hanged up with the head downwards, and finally thrown into the common sewer.[198] However, in most cases the treatment to which suicides bodies were subject was not originally meant as a punishment, but was intended to prevent their spirits from causing mischief. All over Europe wandering tendencies have been ascribed to their ghosts.[199] In some countries the corpse of a suicide is supposed to make barren the earth with which it comes in contact,[200] or to produce hailstorms or tempests[201] or drought.[202] At Lochbroom, in the North-West of Scotland, the people believe that if the remains of a self-murderer be taken to any burying-ground which is within sight of the sea or of cultivated land, this would prove disastrous both to fishing and agriculture, or, in the words of the people, would cause “famine (or dearth) on sea and land”; hence the custom has been to inter suicides in out-of-the-way places among the lonely solitudes of the mountains.[203] The practice of burying them apart from other dead has been very wide-spread in Europe, and in many cases there are obvious indications that it arose from fear.[204] In the North-East of Scotland a suicide was buried outside a churchyard, close beneath the wall, and the grave was marked by a single large stone, or by a small cairn, to which the passing traveller was bound to cast a stone; and afterwards, when the suicide’s body was allowed to rest in the churchyard, it was laid below the wall in such a position that no one could walk over the grave, as the people believed that if a woman enceinte stepped over such a grave, her child would quit this earth by its own act.[205] In England persons against whom a coroner’s jury had found a verdict of felo de se were buried at cross-roads, with a stake driven through the body so as to prevent their ghosts from walking.[206] For the same purpose the bodies of suicides were in many cases burned.[207] And when removed from the house where the act had been committed, they were commonly carried out, not by the door, but by a window,[208] or through a perforation specially made for the occasion in the door,[209] or through a hole under the threshold,[210] in order that the ghost should not find its way back into the house, or perhaps with a view to keeping the entrance of the house free from dangerous infection.[211]
[197] Ross, ‘Superstitions as to burying Suicides in the Highlands,’ in Celtic Magazine, xii. 354.
[198] Serpillon, Code Criminel, ii. 223. Cf. Louis XIV., ‘Ordonnance criminelle,’ A.D. 1670, xxii. 1, in Isambert, Decrusy, and Taillandier, op. cit. xviii. 414.
[199] Ross, in Celtic Magazine, xii. 352 (Highlanders of Scotland). Atkinson, Forty Years in a Moorland Parish, p. 217. Hyltén-Cavallius, Wärend och Wirdarne, i. 472 sq. (Swedes). Allardt, ‘Nyländska folkseder och bruk,’ in Nyland, iv. 114 (Swedish Finlanders). Wuttke, Der deutsche Volksaberglaube der Gegenwart, §756, p. 474 sq. Schiffer, ‘Totenfetische bei den Polen,’ in Am Ur-Quell, iii. 50 (Polanders), 52 (Lithuanians). Volkov, ‘Der Selbstmörder in Lithauen,’ ibid. v. 87. von Wlislocki, ‘Tod und Totenfetische im Volkglauben der Siebenbürger Sachsen,’ ibid. iv. 53. Lippert, Christenthum, Volksglaube und Volksbrauch, p. 391. Dyer, The Ghost World, pp. 53, 151. Gaidoz, ‘Le suicide,’ in Mélusine, iv. 12.
[200] Schiffer, in Am Ur-Quell, iii. 52 (Lithuanians).