"On Saturday two prisoners were capitally convicted at the Old Bailey of high treason, viz. Isabella Condon, for coining shillings in Cold-Bath-Fields; and John Field, for coining shillings in Nag's Head Yard, Bishopsgate Street. They will receive sentence to be drawn on a hurdle to the place of execution; _the woman to be burnt_, and the man to be hanged." I presume that the sentence which the woman underwent was not executed. The barbarous fulfilment of such a law was, it may be hoped, already obsolete. The motives, however, upon which this law was grounded is worth noting:-- "In treason of every kind," says Blackstone, "the punishment of women is the same, and different from that of men. For, _as the decency due to the sex forbids the exposing and publicly mangling their bodies_, their sentence (which is to the full as terrible to sensation as the other) is to be drawn to the gallows, and there to be burned alive." "But," says the foot-note, "by the statute 30 Geo. III. c. 48., women convicted in all cases of treason, shall receive judgment to be drawn to the place of execution, and there to be hanged by the neck till dead." The law, therefore, under which a woman could be put to death by burning, was repealed in 1790. Blackstone elsewhere says:-- "The humanity of the English nation has authorized, by a tacit consent, an almost general mitigation of such part of those judgments as savours of torture and cruelty: a sledge or hurdle being usually allowed to such traitors as are condemned to be drawn; and there being very few instances (and those accidental or by negligence) of any persons being embowelled or burned, till previously deprived of sensation by strangling." This corroborates the conclusion of E. S. S. W., that the woman he describes was strangled at the stake to which her neck was bound.