6 - Martyrdom

Summary

During the High and Late Middle Ages, in some parts of western Europe, men and women who were convicted of the same crimes were executed in different ways. In Brabant, Germany and France men were usually hanged, or if they were nobles, decapitated with an axe, but women were either burnt at the stake or buried alive. This custom was established by law and various statutes, and became embodied in the operating legal system. Only in the late fifteenth century were these methods of executing women, gradually and at a varying pace in different places, changed to hanging. The cruelest forms of putting people to death, devised with the explicit intention of intensifying and prolonging the condemned person's agony, were imposed upon those who were convicted of high treason (crimen laesae maiestatis). And since the ritual of execution had a special symbolic and educational meaning, their bodies were also specially degraded. One way of doing so was to burn the corpse, or only its internal organs (especially the heart, in which the villain had plotted his treason). But even those convicts were not burnt alive. As a rule, high treason was not a feminine crime, though there were cases of women who were charged with a type of murder that was equated with treason – e.g. when a vassal murdered his seigneur, a servant his employer, or a woman her husband. Women who were convicted of such a murder were burnt at the stake, even in England, where as a rule women were not executed by this method for other crimes. A woman who was convicted of a (failed) attempt to murder her husband was burnt at the stake. A thirteen-year-old maidservant who was found guilty of murdering her mistress was also burnt alive. But in those same days, four menservants who had strangled their master to death were dragged through the streets, hanged and then decapitated. According to one of the Castilian penal codes, a woman who murdered her husband was to be burnt at the stake, whereas a man who murdered his wife was to be hanged (and if it transpired that he had killed her because she had committed adultery, he was to be acquitted.)