There was another horrible method of poisoning the ground, and therefore the air, namely the practice of burying in tiny churchyards, crowded with the dreadful dead, not yet restored to the dust and ashes from whence they came. The fire, as I have said, restored the churchyards to their pristine purity of soil. The people, in this respect as well, for they learned nothing, did their best to restore the old conditions. As the population increased, they nearly succeeded; the revelations of Dr. Walker in 1843 made the world shudder at the enormities daily committed. This, too, we have altered; the crowded, stinking churchyard is now a tiny spot of green with a tree in it and a bench and a border of flowers. Only we may note that while we have cleaned out and filled up cesspools, and stopped the burial of the dead in our midst, and ceased to drink well water, we have arranged for the introduction into the soil of a new and perhaps equally fatal poison: the earth is now black and reeking with gas. It is, perhaps, a scientifically interesting point to learn how long it will be before the atmosphere, charged with gas, which all our millions breathe, will encourage or develop another pestilence. And it will be a much more costly business to burn down all London once more in the twentieth than it was in the seventeenth century in order to purge and purify the soil again.
The next great danger always hanging over the City was that of famine. The uncertain character of our climate, the occurrence of long rains, untimely frost, summer with no warmth or sunshine, blight and murrain, the ravages of war, and especially of civil war, the devastation caused by plague and pestilence, the difficulty of importing grain from abroad: all these causes conspired to make famine an ever-present danger. Terrible famines are reported to have happened in the third and fourth centuries; there were pestilences which accompanied times of great scarcity. In the year 1086 there was a famine, in 1150 there was a great dearth in London, another in 1195, another in 1257. The worst famine ever experienced by London was that of the year 1315-16 (see [p. 51]). It came after a succession of wet seasons and bad harvests, and nothing in the history of famines can be worse than the horrors of those two years: people lay out in the open streets and on the highways dying of starvation, they and their children; men fought for food everywhere; there were stories of mothers devouring their own offspring; the prisoners in the gaols murdered and devoured each other. Another terrible famine occurred in the year 1338; London, however, felt it little, because the Mayor imported grain from Prussia: outside London the people were making bread out of ivy berries and fern roots.
[CHAPTER XIII]
CRIME AND PUNISHMENT
PRISONER BEING SENTENCED AND TAKEN TO EXECUTION
From MS. in British Museum. Harl. 4375.
In Saxon London we have to consider the amazing ferocity of the punishments, and the severity of the penance ordered (though evaded), but in this era we may be surprised at the comparative mildness of the mediæval punishments. Criminals were hanged, it is true, with greater frequency than at present. They were also sometimes sentenced to have their right hands lopped off, but the Alderman was generally present, and ready to pardon the offenders on submission; chiefly we read of pillory and stocks; if a second or third offence, pillory with banishment from the City. The stocks were also a favourite form of punishment, being a kind of pillory; they were for the most part movable stocks—just two beams laid alongside each other with holes for the feet; sometimes there was a ducking stool; sometimes a rogue was clapped in prison—a noisome, stinking place, full of fever; in extreme cases, he was put on penance, that is bread and water, until he died. Of burning there were few examples until the reign of Henry V. Margaret Jourdain, the witch, who assisted Eleanor Cobham, was burned. Murder, burglary, and highway robbery were punished by hanging. Runaway labourers were branded; sacrilege or rape was punished by hanging; child-stealing—a common offence,—scolding, and other offences of women, were punished by the stocks. The punishment of women by drowning was practised in very early times by the ancient Germans and Anglo-Saxons. It was continued down to the middle of the fifteenth century, when it was finally, but not formally, abolished. But women were drowned on the Continent in the eighteenth century. Among the Anglo-Saxons, women who were convicted of theft were thrown over a cliff into the sea, or submerged in any piece of water—stones being tied round the neck. The London places of execution were the Thames and the pools of St. Giles, Smithfield, St. Thomas Watering, and Tyburn. Sometimes the criminal was sewn up in a sack with a snake, a dog, an ape—but where did they get that ape?—and a cock. In the tenth century a woman was thrown from London Bridge into the Thames. In the year 1200 a woman of Southfleet was drowned for stealing cloth, and in the year 1244 one, Ann of Lodbury, was drowned in St. Giles’ Pool.
In the reign of Henry III. the penalty of drowning began to be changed for that of hanging. One woman, Ivella de Balsham, in that reign was pardoned because, although hanged on Monday at the ninth hour, she was found living on Tuesday at sunrise. It was thought a great innovation when women were first hanged at Paris, and when it was begun, in the reign of Charles VII., a great concourse of people, especially of women, flocked together to witness it. “La dite femme pendue toute deschevelee revestue d’une longue robe ceinte d’une corde sur les deux jambes jointe ensemble au dessous de genoux.”
In Burgundy they suffocated the adulterous woman in mud. At Hastings and Winchelsea they had no other form of capital punishment. Burying alive was sometimes, but seldom, practised. On one occasion a party of English soldiers, at the siege of Meaux by Henry V., were cut off, and they were all killed except one man, who escaped by flight. The King caused him to be buried alive with his dead companions. At Sandwich there was a place called Thieves’ Down, where criminals were formerly buried alive.