The body in parts: Reading the execution ritual in late medieval England

Historical Reflections

Volumn 29, Issue 2, 2003, Pages 319-339

  Royer, Katherine ^a  

^a CALIFORNIA STATE UNIVERSITY   (United States)

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EID: 40949093151     PISSN: 03157997     EISSN: 19392419     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: None     Document Type: Review

References (72)

1. Sir John Froissart, Chronicles of England, France, Spain and the Adjoining Countries, 3rd ed., trans. Thomas Johnes, vol. I (London, 1808), p. 32
2. Georg Rusche and Otto Kirchheimer, Punishment and Social Structure (New York, 1939), p. 21, and Richard van Dülmen, Theatre of Horror: Crime and Punishment in Early Modern Germany, trans. Elisabeth Neu (Cambridge, 1990), p. 1
3. Petrus Spierenberg, The Spectacle of Suffering: Executions and the Evolution of Repression (Cambridge, 1984)
4. Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process: The History of Manners and State Formation and Civilization, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Oxford, 1994), pp. 159, 516
5. Rusche and Kirchheimer, pp. 20-21
6. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York, 1979), pp. 34, 32
7. As are all rituals according to Renato Rosaldo, Culture and Truth: The Remaking of Social Analysis (Boston, 1989), p. 16
8. Although Esther Cohen concentrates on the late Middle Ages and does describe the evolution of this ritual, she does not specifically address the events surrounding its emergence. Esther Cohen, The Crossroads of Justice: Law and Culture in Late Medieval France (Leiden, 1993)
9. Foucault, p. 49
10. Spierenberg, pp. 12, 77-78
11. van Dülmen, pp. 133, 3, 136
12. The major monographs on capital punishment in England are: V.A.C. Gatrell, The Hanging Tree: Executions and the English People 1770-1868 (Oxford, 1994)
13. Peter Linebaugh, The London Hanged: Crime and Civil Society in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge, 1991)
14. and Albion's Fatal Tree: Crime and Society in Eighteenth-Century England, ed. Douglas Hay, Peter Linebaugh, John G. Rule, E.P. Thompson, and Cal Winslow (New York, 1975)
15. Foucault, p. 47, argues that the tortured body both produced and reproduced the truth of the crime. Only in the trial of the Templars did the English use torture during the Middle Ages, and even then the court had to import its inquisitors from the Continent
16. Richard Evans, Rituals of Retribution: Capital Punishment in Germany 1600-1978 (Oxford, 1996), p. 37
17. van Dülmen, p. 133
18. Foucault, p. 47
19. John Bellamy, Crime and Public Order in England in the Later Middle Ages (London, 1973), p. 203
20. C. Warren Hollister, "Royal Acts of Mutilation: The Case Against Henry I," Albion 4 (1978): 334
21. Matthew Paris, Chronica Majora, ed. H.R. Luard, vol. IV (London, 1872), pp. 193-196
22. See Elizabeth Brown, "Death and the Human Body in the Later Middle Ages: The Legislation of Boniface VIII on the Division of the Corpse," Viator 12 (1981): 2221-70, for a discussion of the practice of the posthumous dismemberment of the royal family and nobility in late medieval Europe
23. Chronicle of Lanercost 1272-1336, trans. Herbert Maxwell (Glasgow, 1913), pp. 77, 82
24. Froissart, p. 105, describes Edward l's request to his son regarding the disposition of his body. However, Michael Prestwich argues that Froissart's account was more the reflection of Edward's posthumous reputation than actual fact
25. See Michael Prestwich, Edward I (New Haven, 1997), p. 557
26. See Caroline Walker Bynurn, Fragmentation and Redemption: Essays on Gender and the Human Body in Medieval Religion (New York, 1992), pp. 239-97
27. In 1063 King Gruffydd of Wales was slain by his own men, who brought his head to King Edward. The head of Llywelyn ap Gruffydd, the Prince of Wales, was removed following his death in battle in 1282; it was sent on a lance for display on the Tower of London to be placed next to his brother's, which was ceremoniously severed on the scaffold. Sir Maurice Powicke, The Thirteenth Century 1216-1307 (Oxford, 1962), pp. 428-429
28. According to John Hayward, Henry Percy's body was delivered to the Earl of Furnivall in 1403 to be buried, but was later taken up and quartered with the head sent to London, where it was said to have brought Henry IV great "contentment." John Hayward, The First and Second Parts of John Hayward's The Life and Raigne of King Henrie Illl, ed. John J. Manning (London, 1991), p. 250. Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, ed. and trans. G.N. Garmonsway (London, 1953), p. 191
29. Prestwich,Edward I, p. 51
30. In The History of English Law Pollock and Maitland argued the Normans brought these practices with them to England. F. Pollock and F. Maitland, The History of English Law, 2nd ed., vol. I (Cambridge, 1968), pp. 49, 88
31. See also John Beckerman, "Adding Insult to Inuria: Affronts to Honor and the Origins of Trespass" in On the Laws and Customs of England: Essays in Honor of Samuel E. Thorne, ed. Morris Arnold, Thomas Green, Sally Scully and Stephen White (Chapel Hill, 1981), p. 176
32. and T.F.T. Plucknett, Edward I and the Criminal Law (Cambridge, 1960), p. 79
33. Asser, Life of King Alfred, trans. Simon Keyes and Michael Lapidge (London, 1983), p. 105
34. John Hardyng, The Chronicle of John Hardyng; Public Transactions from the Earliest period of English history to the beginning of the reign of King Edward the Fourth together with the Continuation by Richard Grafton to the Thirty fourth year of King Henry the Eighth, ed. Henry Ellis (London, 1812), pp. 221-224
35. William of Malmesbury, Gesta Regum Anglorum, vol. I, ed. and trans. R.A.B. Mynors, R.M. Thomson, and M. Winterbottom (Oxford, 1998), p. 311
36. John Gillingham, "1066 and the Introduction of Chivalry into England" in Law and Government in Medieval England and Normandy: Essays in Honour of Sir James Holt, ed. George Garnett and John Hudson (Cambridge, 1994), pp. 31-55
37. Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, p. 158
38. Foucault, pp. 3-31
39. Michael Prestwich, The Three Edwards: War and State in England 1272-1377 (London, 1980), p. 110
40. For example, Edward I imprisoned the sister of Robert Bruce in a wooden cage in the castle at Roxburgh in the aftermath of the Scot's revolt. See Powicke, pp. 402-429, 714
41. Powicke, pp. 402-429
42. Chronicle of Lanercost, p. 35
43. Hardyng, p.301
44. Prestwich, The Three Edwards: War and Slate in England 1272-1377, p. 113
45. Brut, vol. II, ed. F.W.D. Brie (Oxford, 1960), p. 223
46. "The Song on the Execution of Simon Fraser" (MS. Harl. 2253, folio 59), cited in Political Songs of England, ed. and trans. Thomas Wright (London, 1830), pp. 22- 221
47. and Powicke, p. 714
48. Chronicle of Lanercost, p. 35
49. St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, ed. and trans. Timothy McDermott (Allen, TX, 1989), p. 389
50. William Baldwin, A Myrrore for Magistrates (London, 1559), folio 67, STC 1248
51. Aquinas, p. 389
52. Hardyng,p.221
53. Piers Gaveston and the Despensers fell afoul of the king's enemies, not Edward Il's justice
54. John Bellamy, The Tudor Law of Treason (London, 1979), pp. 12 and 47
55. C.J. Neville, "The Law of Treason in the English Border Counties in the Later Middle Ages," Law and History Review 9 (1991 ): 1-30
56. Nigel Saul, Richard Il (New Haven, 1997), pp. 73-74
57. Bellamy, The Tudor Law of Treason, p. 12
58. Knighton, p. 241
59. Saul, pp. 74-75, 73
60. The Westminster Chronicle, ed. and Irans. L.C. Hector and Barbara Harvey (Oxford, 1982), pp. 15-19
61. According to the Westminster Chronicle, p. 315, the crowd at the execution of Nicholas Brembre was moved to tears, and John Hayward, p. 203, wrote that those who watched the execution of Roger Clarindon were filled "with pittie and greife by behoudling it."
62. Westminster Chronicle, p. 15
63. Francis Bacon in The Historie of the Raigne of King Henry the Seventh (London, 1622) STC 1159, 131
64. Finding the right balance between the two became a preoccupation of medieval social critics. Too much mercy led to charges of corruption and inattention to justice; too little brought complaints about royal severity. According to Vita Edwardi Secundi, trans. N. Denholm-Young (London, 1957), p. 10, one of the charges against Piers Gaveston was that he helped obtain pardons from the king for "robbers and homicides"; yet, when Henry Percy's head was sent to London and his quarters to other cities in the realm, Henry IV was accused of cruelty
65. See Hayward, p. 250
66. See An English Chronicle of the Reigns of Richard Il, Henry IV, Henry V, and Henry VI, ed. John Silvester Davies (London, 1855), pp. 10, 21
67. Saul, p. 466
68. The cases of De Vere, de la Pole and Tresilian centered around whether those who had procured the statute appointing the council should be punished as traitors. The judges to whom this question was presented in 1387 recognized that by the narrow definition of the 1352 statute, such actions were not treason, although they called the perpetrators traitors. At their trials in 1388 Parliament basically made up the rules as it went along to achieve the desired result and executed these men as traitors. Further legal gymnastics were necessary in order to convict the secondary players in the drama: Simon Burley, John Beauchamp, John Salisbury and James Berners. By 1398 the tables had turned and the Appellants found themselves accused of treason after the pardons they had received in 1388 were repealed. The 1352 law may have narrowed the definition of treason, but the events of Richard ll's reign indicated that where there was a will there was a way to use it to destroy political enemies. See Saul, pp. 173-174, 191-194, and 377-379
69. W.M. Ormond, The Reign of Edward III: Crown and Political Society in England 1327-1377 (New Haven, 1990), p. xii
70. Ormond, p. 24, argues that Edward III had at first resisted decentralizing the administration of justice but ceded more power to the shires after 1349 in the wake of the Ordinance of Labourers, the enforcement of which was placed in the hands of the landholders in the shires rather than the royal justices. He writes that this set the stage for a compromise in which the landholders in the shires received greater control of local justice in exchange for their support of the crown. This also enhanced the popularity of the crown which appeared to be addressing the issue of disorder which pleased the commons. Prestwich, pp. 233-234, states that the government had to change its tactics after 1352, and an attempt was made at the request of the commons to make the financing of the war less painful by using fines raised by the local justices to reduce the burden of the lay subsidies. This proved insufficient to quell complaint, so in 1357 the crown abandoned its claims to a large part of the profits of justice in return for a grant of taxation. In other words, Edward III ceded the control and the profits of justice to the localities in exchange for a grant of taxation
71. Bernard William McLane, "Juror Attitudes Toward Local Disorder: The Evidence of the 1328 Lincolnshire Trailbaston Proceedings" in Twelve Good Men and True: The Criminal Trial Jury in England 1200-1800, ed. J.S. Cockburn and Thomas Green (Princeton, 1988), p. 40
72. and Ormond, p. 24