BURNHAM-ON-CROUCH, an urban district in the southeastern parliamentary division of Essex, England, 43 m. E. by N. from London on a branch of the Great Eastern railway. Pop. (1901) 2919. The church of St Mary is principally late Perpendicular, a good example; it has Decorated portions and a Norman font. There are extensive oyster beds in the Crouch estuary. Burnham lies 6 m. from the North Sea; below it the Crouch is joined on the south side by the Roch, which branches into numerous creeks, and, together with the main estuary, forms Foulness, Wallasea, Potton and other low, flat islands, embanked and protected from incursions of the sea. Burnham is in some repute as a watering-place, and is a favourite yachting station. There is considerable trade in corn and coal, and boat-building is carried on.
BURNING TO DEATH. As a legal punishment for various crimes burning alive was formerly very wide-spread. It was common among the Romans, being given in the XII. Tables as the special penalty for arson. Under the Gothic codes adulterers were so punished, and throughout the middle ages it was the civil penalty for certain heinous crimes, e.g. poisoning, heresy, witchcraft, arson, bestiality and sodomy, and so continued in some cases, nominally at least, till the beginning of the 19th century. In England, under the common law, women condemned for high treason or petty treason (murder of husband, murder of master or mistress, certain offences against the coin, &c.) were burned, this being considered more "decent" than hanging and exposure on a gibbet. In practice the convict was strangled before being burnt. The last woman burnt in England suffered in 1789, the punishment being abolished in 1790.
Burning was not included among the penalties for heresy under the Roman imperial codes; but the burning of heretics by orthodox mobs had long been sanctioned by custom before the edicts of the emperor Frederick II. (1222, 1223) made it the civil-law punishment for heresy. His example was followed in France by Louis IX. in the Establishments of 1270. In England, where the civil law was never recognized, the common law took no cognizance of ecclesiastical offences, and the church courts had no power to condemn to death. There were, indeed, in the 12th and 13th centuries isolated instances of the burning of heretics. William of Newburgh describes the burning of certain foreign sectaries in 1169, and early in the 13th century a deacon was burnt by order of the council of Oxford (Foxe ii. 374; cf. Bracton, de Corona, ii. 300), but by what legal sanction is not obvious. The right of the crown to issue writs de haeretico comburendo, claimed for it by later jurists, was based on that issued by Henry IV. in 1400 for the burning of William Sawtre; but Sir James Stephen (Hist. Crim. Law) points out that this was issued "with the assent of the lords temporal," which seems to prove that the crown had no right under the common law to issue such writs. The burning of heretics was actually made legal in England by the statute de haeretico comburendo (1400), passed ten days after the issue of the above writ. This was repealed in 1533, but the Six Articles Act of 1539 revived burning as a penalty
for denying transubstantiation. Under Queen Mary the acts of Henry IV. and Henry V. were revived; they were finally abolished in 1558 on the accession of Elizabeth. Edward VI., Elizabeth and James I., however, burned heretics (illegally as it would appear) under their supposed right of issuing writs for this purpose. The last heretics burnt in England were two Arians, Bartholomew Legate at Smithfield, and Edward Wightman at Lichfield, both in 1610. As for witches, countless numbers were burned in most European countries, though not in England, where they were hanged. In Scotland in Charles II.'s day the law still was that witches were to be "worried at the stake and then burnt"; and a witch was burnt at Dornoch so late as 1708.
BURNLEY, a market town and municipal, county and parliamentary borough of Lancashire, England, at the junction of the rivers Brun and Calder, 213 m. N.N.W. of London and 29 m. N. of Manchester, on the Lancashire & Yorkshire railway and the Leeds & Liverpool Canal. Pop. (1891) 87,016; (1901) 97,043. The church of St Peter dates from the 14th century, but is largely modernized; among a series of memorials of the Towneley family is one to Charles Towneley (d. 1805), who collected the series of antique marbles, terra-cottas, bronzes, coins and gems which are named after him and preserved in the British Museum. In 1902 Towneley Hall and Park were acquired by the corporation, the mansion being adapted to use as a museum and art gallery, and in 1903 a summer exhibition was held here. There are a large number of modern churches and chapels, a handsome town-hall, market hall, museum and art gallery, school of science, municipal technical school, various benevolent institutions, and pleasant public parks and recreation grounds. The principal industries are cotton-weaving, worsted-making, iron-founding, coal-mining, quarrying, brick-burning and the making of sanitary wares. It has been suggested that Burnley may coincide with Brunanburh, the battlefield on which the Saxons conquered the Dano-Celtic force in 937. During the cotton famine consequent upon the American war of 1861-65 it suffered severely, and the operatives were employed on relief works embracing an extensive system of improvements. The parliamentary borough (1867), which returns one member, falls within the Clitheroe division of the county. The county borough was created in 1888. The town was incorporated in 1861. The corporation consists of a mayor, 12 aldermen and 36 councillors. By act of parliament in 1890 Burnley was created a suffragan bishopric of the diocese of Manchester. Area of the municipal borough, 4005 acres.
BURNOUF, EUGÈNE (1801-1852), French orientalist, was born in Paris on the 8th of April 1801. His father, Prof. Jean Louis Burnouf (1775-1844), was a classical scholar of high reputation, and the author, among other works, of an excellent translation of Tacitus (6 vols., 1827-1833). Eugene Burnouf published in 1826 an Essai sur le Pâli ..., written in collaboration with Christian Lassen; and in the following year Observations grammaticales sur quelques passages de l'essai sur le Pâli. The next great work he undertook was the deciphering of the Zend manuscripts brought to France by Anquetil du Perron. By his labours a knowledge of the Zend language was first brought into the scientific world of Europe. He caused the Vendidad Sade, part of one of the books bearing the name of Zoroaster, to be lithographed with the utmost care from the Zend MS. in the Bibliothèque Nationale, and published it in folio parts, 1829-1843. From 1833 to 1835 he published his Commentaire sur le Yaçna, l'un des livres liturgiques des Parses; he also published the Sanskrit text and French translation of the Bhâgavata Purâna ou histoire poétique de Krichna in three folio volumes (1840-1847). His last works were Introduction à l'histoire du Bouddhisme indien (1844), and a translation of Le lotus de la bonne loi (1852). Burnouf died on the 28th of May 1852. He had been for twenty years a member of the Académie des Inscriptions and professor of Sanskrit in the Collège de France.
See a notice of Burnouf's works by Barthélemy Saint-Hilaire, prefixed to the second edition (1876) of the Introd. à l'histoire du Bouddhisme indien; also Naudet, "Notice historique sur M.M. Burnouf, père et fils," in Mem. de l'Acad. des Inscriptions, xx. A list of his valuable contributions to the Journal asiatique, and of his MS. writings, is given in the appendix to the Choix de lettres d'Eugène Burnouf (1891).
BURNOUS (from the Arab. burnus), a long cloak of coarse woollen stuff with a hood, usually white in colour, worn by the Arabs and Berbers throughout North Africa.
BURNS, SIR GEORGE, Bart. (1795-1890), English shipowner, was born in Glasgow on the 10th of December 1795, the son of the Rev. John Burns. In partnership with a brother, James, he began as a Glasgow general merchant about 1818, and in 1824 in conjunction with a Liverpool partner, Hugh Matthie, started a line of small sailing ships which ran between Glasgow and Liverpool. As business increased the vessels were also sailed to Belfast, and steamers afterwards replaced the sailing ships. In 1830 a partnership was entered into with the McIvers of Liverpool, in which George Burns devoted himself specially to the management of the ships. In 1838 with Samuel Cunard, Robert Napier and other capitalists, the partners (McIver and Burns) started the "Cunard" Atlantic line of steamships. They secured the British government's contract for the carrying of the mails to North America. The sailings were begun with four steamers of about 1000 tons each, which made the passage in 15 days at some 8½ knots per hour. George Burns retired from the Glasgow management of the line in 1860. He was made a baronet in 1889, but died on the 2nd of June 1890 at Castle Wemyss, where he had spent the latter years of his life.
John Burns (1829-1901), his eldest son, who succeeded him in the baronetcy, and became head of the Cunard Company, was created a peer, under the title of Baron Inverclyde, in 1897; he was the first to suggest to the government the use of merchant vessels for war purposes. George Arbuthnot Burns (1861-1905) succeeded his father in the peerage, as 2nd baron Inverclyde, and became chairman of the Cunard Company in 1902. He conducted the negotiations which resulted in the refusal of the Cunard Company to enter the shipping combination, the International Mercantile Marine Company, formed by Messrs J.P. Morgan & Co., and took a leading part in the application of turbine engines to ocean liners.