When hanging is considered way too good for them

Edward I, not to be messed with If you’re into violent and gross, then October 3 should hold a special appeal for you because it on that date, in 1283, the first certified hanging, drawing and quartering of a nobleman took place. If you’re not, you don’t want to know. It’s really gross.

What you don’t want to know is not that Dafydd ap Gruffydd is the first nobleman to have it done to him. Nor is it that, as the profusion of “d”s and the double “ff” will have suggested, he was a Welsh rebel against English rule. It’s what exactly goes into being hanged, drawn and quartered.

Now medieval law was harsh for a reason. The administrative resources of the state were limited and chaos, political and general, was a frighteningly clear and present danger, so you needed convincing deterrents. (I would add that in those days there was rather less sympathy for the criminal vis-à-vis the law-abiding person also.) Thus in 1238 a man who tried to assassinate King Henry III was, according to Matthew Paris, “dragged asunder” before being beheaded and having portions of his body dragged through a major city. Other such spectacles involved “disemboweling,” a rather clinically euphemistic term suggesting the withdrawal of the previously conferred embowelment rather than being gutted like a fish… or worse.

Which brings me to 1283 and the drawing. It was not, I assure you, the creating of your portrait to remember you after the other stuff although there is at least one singularly gruesome extant drawing of the procedure. It was the drawing out of your entrails. And before you laugh it off, to some extent anyway, on the grounds that after they hang you it’s all just desecration, when you were hanged before being drawn and quartered they didn’t drop you hard through a trapdoor with the rope behind your ear, cleanly breaking your neck as in the more merciful later version of death by hanging.

Oh no. Not at all. Instead they just dangled and strangled you for a while, before a jeering crowd that had followed you as you were pulled through the streets tied to some wood first, very possibly naked. You, not the crowd, I mean. And it’s important to the story because as HDQ matured as a punishment, after the warmup strangling they cut off your personal bits and burned them before your bulging eyes to emphasize that you were unworthy to have progeny. Then they “drew out” your embowelment and added it to the blaze, before cutting you into four pieces and displaying them to underline that crime does not pay.

It was first performed, along more or less these lines, to Dafydd ap Gruffydd because his rebellion against English authority and proclamation of himself as Prince of Wales and Lord of Snowdon so enraged Edward I that he demanded his courtiers think up some dramatic new form of punishment. Which they did, including putting his head on top of the Tower of London while his arms and legs went on a grand tour. (William Wallace apparently got off lightly, being beheaded before the really messy stuff got going.) Who says there was no progress in the Middle Ages?

I jest, in part. There was plenty of less bloody progress, from universities to Parliament. But there was also creativity in criminal justice for people who knew the stakes were high when they challenged the king’s authority. You have to admit this new punishment was memorable, and would make you think three times minimum about raising the standard of revolt. And I should also note that HDQ is eerily like a slow, gruesome form of execution John Smith describes being used by the aboriginal inhabitants of Virginia, and by racially motivated lynchings in the American South into the 20th century, which brings into question its originality and shows how similar people are in all times and places in a distinctly unflattering way.

I do not approve of hanging, drawing and quartering even for those clearly guilty of terrible crimes. I cannot. Not even for treason, genocide or for rape causing injury or death for which I would impose the death penalty.

There are things you can’t punish properly and you just send the person to a much higher court as quickly as the wheels of true justice can turn. And I find all mutilations of corpses, and of living people, an affront to the image of God in which I believe we are made, even in the heat of the moment in battle, let alone with calm deliberation. But I do sympathize with the desire for effective deterrence in criminal justice of a sort we don’t seem to achieve these days. And I suspect medieval people would be profoundly shocked at our endless and unaffordable legal proceedings, ruinous even for the innocent, and the light sentences we hand out to people we know have done terrible things. And rightly so.

We have moved too far from justice that was swift and severe. But hanging, drawing and quartering is still way too gross.

It happened todayJohn Robson
Not even numbers

October 2 is the anniversary of the start of the Parsley Massacre in 1937. Which despite the name is not remotely comic. It was a five-day massacre of Haitians in the Dominican Republic. And I for one knew nothing about it.

Not much is known. Estimates even of casualties vary enormously, from fewer than 600 to around 20,000. It’s not even known whether butchers working for Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo really did force potential victims to say the word “perejil,” Spanish for parsley, to see particularly from how they pronounced the “r” and the “j” whether they spoke with a French or Haitian Creole language or a Dominican Spanish one.

We do know that it was carried out on Trujillo’s orders. And he was a nasty dictator who dominated the Dominican Republic for decades whether officially holding office or not. He’s a bit unusual among nasty dictators in that he had the habit of renaming cities and mountains for himself one associates with ideologically grandiose tyrants without having had much in the way of systematic ideas. He mixed in a few laudable policies like opening doors to Jews fleeing Nazi persecution in the 1930s despite a general brutal denial of rights to anyone and manipulation of popular fear of disorder generally and crime by ethnic Haitians in particular. But really all that’s beside the point here.

What matters is to give at least passing remembrance to a group of poor, desperate people massacred in a dark corner of history and the globe, largely unnoticed at the time and forgotten since. The fact that we aren’t even sure to an order of magnitude how many perished under horrible conditions even by the standards of Dominica underlines just how little value anyone seems to have attached to them at the time or later.

The massacre had no geopolitical consequences. It didn’t even awaken the conscience of the world, or part of it, as the Holocaust and Holodomor did. True, Trujillo himself was eventually assassinated, in 1961, but more as part of failed sordid political maneuvering than in retaliation for all the murders he ordered and organized. And really it is hard to devise an appropriate punishment for having as many as 50,000 people killed over three decades, although I certainly favour executing such people.

What we can do is remember. Especially those wiped out so thoroughly, and with so little notice or protest, that they lack even a number let alone names.

It happened todayJohn Robson
Wish I'd said that - October 2, 2016

“It is in the face of death that the riddle of human existence becomes most acute. Not only is man tormented by pain and the advancing deterioration of his body, but even more so by a dread of perpetual extinction.”

The Pontifical Council for the Laity quoted in Pope John Paul II’s October 1 1999 “Letter to the Elderly”

Famous quotesJohn Robson
Left to the Naive

Robespierre Meanwhile back in France, October 1 is the anniversary of the first meeting of the Legislative Assembly in 1791, the body that gave us the terms “left” and “right” in politics. But mostly left.

Try to follow a quick dismal backstory here. In 1789 the hapless Louis XVI summoned the French parody equivalent of a Parliament, the Estates-General, for the first time since 1614. It promptly deadlocked, and then the “Third Estate,” the commoners, decided their chamber was the whole legislature and turned itself into the National Assembly. Then it became the National Constituent Assembly on the theory that the sovereign authority of the French people was in its hands.

It then proceeded to be in practice the entire government, a system known as “convention government,” where instead of checking the executive the legislature takes on that role as well and who’s going to stop us? Then it dissolved following elections to the Legislative Assembly, which despite the pale twitching figure of the king still wandering the stage was another example of convention government, with one unhelpful twist.

The rules for the 1791 election included that nobody who had sat in the National Assembly could be elected to the Legislative Assembly. Which given the foul odor in which the monarchy rightly found itself meant supreme power was almost entirely in the hands of people with no experience in national affairs. Instead they were buffeted by events and manipulated by power brokers operating outside the formal system including one Maximilien Robespierre, who had been in the National Assembly and in fact had put forward the motion that none of its members would be eligible for the Legislative Assembly.

As events spun out of control in 1792 and the king was arrested, the Legislative Assembly decided to dissolve itself less than a year after first meeting, and summon a new National Convention. And to that body Robespierre returned to direct the increasingly ghastly Reign of Terror including as a member of the Orwellian Committee of Public Safety that was effectively the executive branch in France during the worst excesses of the Revolution. (It is because it happened under the National Convention that we call this highly unsatisfactory arrangement “convention government.)

Would all this have happened with more experienced members in the Legislative Assembly? Very possibly. The pressures that exploded in France between 1789 and 1794 had been building for a very long time, from long before the last futile pre-revolutionary summoning of the Estates-General. But with all due respect to the undesirable qualities of career politicians, there is something to be said for experience and a steady hand in turbulent waters. And it sure didn’t help that France lacked those from 1791-92.

It’s not the only reason left devoured right more or less literally in this period. But it did help set the stage for it.

It happened todayJohn Robson