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
1 - The Body in Space: Describing the Distribution of Dismembered Traitors in Late Medieval England
- 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
The right arm ended up on the bridge of Newcastle-upon-Tyne, the left at Berwick, and the right foot at Perth. The Chronicle of Lanercost also reported that the left foot went to Aberdeen. The head, of course, was set on London Bridge. And so, in the summer of 1305, Edward I marked his empire with the severed body parts of William Wallace.
The body swinging in the wind on a gibbet, the limb rotting on the gate of a city, the severed head staring down from London Bridge or the tower at York – these blazons drew the attention of the chroniclers in late medieval England. The execution narratives of this age tell the story of the body in space – dismembered and distributed with a very deliberate geography. The Chronicle of Lanercost reports that after Dafydd of Wales was quartered in 1282, his limbs were:
exposed in four of the ceremonial places in England as a spectacle; to wit – the right arm at Bristol, the right leg and hip at Northampton; the left leg at Hereford. But the villain's head was bound with iron, lest it should fall to pieces from putrefaction and set upon a long spear shaft for the mockery of London.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The English Execution Narrative, 1200–1700 , pp. 15 - 32Publisher: Pickering & ChattoFirst published in: 2014