The disembowelled, hanged, castrated, burned, beheaded and dismembered body of the executed criminal in late medieval and early modern England has shocked, intrigued and fascinated historians, who for the last thirty years have primarily viewed the execution ritual as a manifestation of a specific technology of power, an important step in the state's long march to a monopoly of violence and a symbol of what makes medieval man ‘the other’. Yet the violence of these events has so overwhelmed their interpretation that it has often crowded out all other considerations and left many historians so distracted by what was done to the body on the scaffold that they have often failed to look closely at the history of the ritual. What has frequently been missed is that there was no single interpretation of a ritual that lasted for over five hundred years. The ceremonies described in this book were read in different ways across the centuries of their history, for as David Garland has argued, punishment is a social artefact that is not wholly explicable in terms of its purpose – it has a cultural style, a historical tradition and a dependence on discursive conditions – all of which change with time. Punishment is also the product of the political exigencies that shape its purpose. Thus, a ritual that began in England in the thirteenth century and ended in the eighteenth century cannot be expected to have a single interpretation.