Book contents
- Frontmatter
- CONTENTS
- Dedication
- Introduction: Setting up the Scaffold in Late Medieval and Early Modern England
- 1 The Body in Space: Describing the Distribution of Dismembered Traitors in Late Medieval England
- 2 The Case of the Missing Blood: Silence and the Semiotics of Judicial Violence
- 3 From Augustine to Aquinas: Death, Time and the Body on the Scaffold
- 4 Dressed for Dying: Contested Visions, Clothes and the Construction of Identity on the Scaffold in Early Modern England
- 5 The Last Words of that ‘Cunning Coiner’ Henry Cuffe: Revisiting the Seventeenth-Century Execution Narrative
- Notes
- Works Cited
- Index
2 - The Case of the Missing Blood: Silence and the Semiotics of Judicial Violence
- Frontmatter
- CONTENTS
- Dedication
- Introduction: Setting up the Scaffold in Late Medieval and Early Modern England
- 1 The Body in Space: Describing the Distribution of Dismembered Traitors in Late Medieval England
- 2 The Case of the Missing Blood: Silence and the Semiotics of Judicial Violence
- 3 From Augustine to Aquinas: Death, Time and the Body on the Scaffold
- 4 Dressed for Dying: Contested Visions, Clothes and the Construction of Identity on the Scaffold in Early Modern England
- 5 The Last Words of that ‘Cunning Coiner’ Henry Cuffe: Revisiting the Seventeenth-Century Execution Narrative
- Notes
- Works Cited
- Index
Summary
First his private parts were cut off, because he was deemed a heretic and guilty of unnatural practices, even with the king, whose affections he had alienated from the queen by his wicked suggestions. His private parts were then cast into a large fire kindled close to him; afterwards his heart was thrown into the same fire because it had been false and traitorous, since he had by his treasonable counsels so advised the king, as to bring shame and mischief on the land and had caused some of the greatest lords to be beheaded … The other parts of Sir Hugh thus disposed of, his head was cut off and sent to London.
Certainly, the younger Hugh Despenser bled a lot at his execution in 1326 – yet blood is interestingly absent in the multiple accounts describing this event. In late medieval England the criminal body could be decapitated, disemboweled and dismembered, but it did not bleed – at least not in the narratives describing these executions. From the traitors dismembered by Edward I as he extended his authority over Scotland and Wales to the quartered Thomas Wyatt in 1554, the descriptions of these executions remained significantly bloodless.
Certainly the event itself was not. Dismembered and beheaded, with their hearts sometimes ripped from their chests, men in late medieval England were executed in ways that had to have been occasioned by significant bleeding.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The English Execution Narrative, 1200–1700 , pp. 33 - 48Publisher: Pickering & ChattoFirst published in: 2014