Albertus Leoninus, from the Low Countries, one of the ablest lawyers of the sixteenth century, says, speaking of the Romans, “If any one killed himself his body was cast out upon a dunghill to have common sepulture with dogs, &c.; but, however, it was more customary to have his goods confiscated, and his body hung on the _furca_, or gibbet. All such persons as hung upon this gibbet were, by the laws, denied sepulture; and a sentry, says Petronius, was set to watch them, lest anybody should come by night and steal them away.”[19] The memorable words, “and sitting down they watched Him there,” cannot fail to occur to the mind. Our Saviour, with all reverence be it said, was gibbeted--“nail’d, for our advantage, on the bitter cross,”[20] and it was not until long after that great Sacrifice--perhaps not until the fifth century--that the cross became the generally recognized Christian sign, and gradually took the place of the Chi Rho ☧ emblem. The number of Saints who suffered, and were exposed upon the cross or gibbet, is larger than that of those who died the death in any other way. Saint Ferreolus, martyred in 212, is shown in “Die Iconographie der Heiligen” with a gibbet proper near him; Saint Anastatius, martyred in 628, is represented in a fresco in the church of SS. Vincent and Anastatius, in Rome, upon a gibbet, and pierced with many arrows; and the martyr Saint Colman, who suffered in the year 1012, is shown in “Das Passional” of 1480 hanging on a gibbet; in “Die Attribute der Heiligen” he stands in the _sclavine_ of a pilgrim, with a rope in his hand, indicating the manner of his death.[21] Chapter II. Hence, as we have seen, gradually arose, side by side with the capital punishment of hanging on the gallows in its simplicity--which may be almost said to be as old as the world itself--the custom of publicly exposing human bodies upon gibbets as warnings to others. We gather from the “Vocabulary of Archbishop Alfric,” of the tenth century, and from early illuminated MSS., that the gallows (galga) was the usual mode of capital punishment with the Anglo-Saxons. It can hardly be doubted that in certain cases, as with the Romans, the body of the “fordemed”--in the case of decapitation the “heafedleas bodi”--remained _in terrorem_ upon the gibbet, as Robert of Gloucester, _circa_ 1280, has it, referring to his own times:-- “In gibet hii were an honge,” though not necessarily as part of the sentence, as appears always to have been the case in England. An obscure poet, Robert Brunne, has:-- “First was he drawen for his felonie, & as a thefe than on galwes hanged hie.” In the numerous enactments concerning the administration of the criminal law, from the “Statute of Westminster the First,” in 1277, to the Act of George II. in 1752, no cognizance is taken of the hanging of bodies of criminals in chains. Such a treatment of the carcass was, like the rack, rather an engine of state than of law.