Burning of women in England
Over a period of several centuries, female convicts were publicly burnt at the stake, sometimes alive, for a range of activities including coining and mariticide.
The English jurist William Blackstone supposed that the difference in sentencing, although "full as terrible to the sensation as the other", could be explained by the desire not to publicly expose a woman's body.
In the latter half of the eighteenth century, changing attitudes to such public displays prompted Sir Benjamin Hammett MP to denounce the practice in Parliament.
[4] As the most egregious offence an individual could commit, viewed as seriously as though the accused had personally attacked the monarch, high treason demanded the ultimate punishment.
[6][7] In his Commentaries on the Laws of England the 18th-century English jurist William Blackstone noted that the sentence, "to be drawn to the gallows, and there to be burned alive", was "full as terrible to the sensation as the other".
Bishops were empowered to arrest and imprison anyone suspected of offences related to heresy and, once convicted, send them to be burned "in the presence of the people in a lofty place".
Persons declared guilty, such as Bartholomew Legate and Edward Wightman, could still be burned under a writ of de heretico comburendo issued by the Court of Chancery.
For the killing in 1546 of Anne Askew, charged with heresy and tortured at the Tower of London, a "Substantial Stage" was built to seat the various officials who presided over her burning.
[15] A pamphlet detailing the burning in April 1652 of Joan Peterson, the so-called Witch of Wapping, also describes the execution of Prudence Lee, found guilty of mariticide.
Historically, while fewer women than men were subjected to capital punishment, proportionately more were acquitted, found guilty of lesser charges, or pardoned if condemned.
"[26] Commenting on Harris's execution, The Daily Universal Register claimed that the act reflected "a scandal upon the law", "a disgrace to the police" and "was not only inhuman, but shamefully indelicate and shocking".
[28] Though sympathetic to reform of England's Bloody Code,[29] Lord Chief Justice Loughborough saw no need to change the law: "Although the punishment, as a spectacle, was rather attended with circumstances of horror, likely to make a more strong impression on the beholders than mere hanging, the effect was much the same, as in fact, no greater degree of personal pain was sustained, the criminal being always strangled before the flames were suffered to approach the body".
Must not mankind laugh as our long speeches against African slavery—and our fine sentiments on Indian cruelties, when just in the very eye of the Sovereign we roast a female fellow creature alive, for putting a pennyworth of quicksilver on a half-penny worth of brass.
Pitt, himself a lawyer, 'tis hoped, will not suffer this cruel remain of savage legislation to escape his notice, and continue a disgrace to the enlightened sense of this country.
[33]Although in his objections to Wilberforce's 1786 bill Loughborough had noted that these women were dead long before they suffered the flames, many newspapers of the day made no such distinction.
As many objections may also have been raised by the perceived inequity of drawing and burning women for coining, whereas until 1783, when the halting of executions at Tyburn removed ritualistic dragging from public view, men were simply drawn and hanged.
Following Phoebe Harris's burning in 1786, as well as questioning the inequality of English law The Times complained about the location of the punishment and its effect on locals: When remission of burning was refused, the scene of inhumanity should have been changed; the consequences have been serious; several persons in the neighbourhood of Newgate lying ill, have been severely affected by the smoke which issued from the body of the unhappy female victim.
