Chronicles of Newgate, Vol. 1: From the twelfth to the eighteenth centuryGriffiths, Arthur
History
Chronicles of Newgate, Vol. 1: From the twelfth to the eighteenth century
Griffiths, Arthur
Criminals -- Great Britain; Newgate (Prison : London, England); Prisons -- England; Punishment -- Great Britain
As Maine says, "The punishment of death is a necessity of society in
certain stages of the civilizing process. There is a time when an
attempt to dispense with it balks two of the great instincts which lie
at the root of all penal law. Without it the community neither feels
that it is sufficiently revenged on the criminal, nor thinks that the
example of his punishment is adequate to deter others from imitating
him." Hence all penal legislation in the past included some form of
inflicting the death sentence. These have differed in all ages and
in all climes: about some there was a brutal simplicity; others have
been marked by great inventiveness, great ingenuity, much refinement
of cruelty. Offenders have been stoned, beaten, starved to death; they
have been flayed alive, buried alive, cast headlong from heights, torn
to pieces by wild animals, broken on the wheel, crucified, impaled,
burnt, boiled, beheaded, strangled, drowned. They have been killed
outright or by inches, enduring horrible agonies;[172:1] after death
their bodies have been dismembered and disembowelled, as a mark of
degradation. Irresponsible tyrants went further than lawgivers in
devising pains. The Sultan Mechmed cut men in the middle, through the
diaphragm, thus causing them to die two deaths at once. It is told of
Crœsus that he caused a person who had offended him to be scratched
to death by a friller's carding-combs. What the Vaivod of Transylvania
did to the Polish leader, George Jechel, may be read in the pages of
Montaigne. The frightful barbarity to which he and his followers were
subjected need not be repeated here.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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