In Chauncy’s “History of Hertfordshire” it is stated:-- “Soon after the King came to Easthampstead, to recreate himself with hunting, where he heard that the bodies which were hanged here were taken down from the gallowes, and removed a great way from the same; this so incensed the King that he sent a writ, tested the 3rd of August, Anno 1381, to the bailiffs of this borrough, commanding them upon sight thereof, to cause chains to be made, and to hang the bodies in them upon the same gallowes, there to remain so long as one piece might stick to another, according to the judgement; but the townsmen, not daring to disobey the King’s command, hanged the dead bodies of their neighbours again, to their great shame and reproach, when they could not get any other for any wages to come near the stinking carcasses, but they themselves were compelled to do so vile an office.” This is an early record of a judgment to hang _in terrorem_, and of chains for the purpose.[22] Gower, a contemporary poet, says:-- “And so after by the Lawe He was into the gibbet drawe, Where he above all other hongeth, As to a traitor it belongeth.” Again, during the second Northern Rising, in 1536, the Duke of Norfolk hung and quartered, as the usual punishment for high treason, seventy-four men at Carlisle, but the bodies of Sir Robert Constable and Ashe were hung in chains at Hull and York respectively, as special cases. And the Duke blames the Earl of Cumberland for not having hung certain persons in chains, as he had directed; he airily adds, speaking of other examples in Yorkshire, that “they all hang still in chains, notwithstanding that I have had no small intercession for many of them.”[23] We gather from these items that, although the public exposure of the body entire formed no legal part of the punishment for high treason, it was sometimes added to it for the increase of the shame. Whether the ensanguined, quivering quarter of a man, uplifted high on a gateway, had a more deterrent effect than a whole body slowly wasting away in chains, we are, fortunately, not now called upon curiously to determine.