Touring in 1600: A Study in the Development of Travel as a Means of EducationBates, E. S. (Ernest Stuart)
History
Touring in 1600: A Study in the Development of Travel as a Means of Education
Bates, E. S. (Ernest Stuart)
Europe -- Description and travel; Europe -- Social life and customs; Travel -- History
Among these exceptional customs and regulations should be mentioned
those concerning weapons in Italy. At Lucca no knife might be carried
unless blunted at the point; in the Papal States, a sword was allowed,
but no short, easily hidden, weapon; in Venetian territory fire-arms
only were forbidden; elsewhere a license from the local authorities
had ordinarily to be obtained for wearing a sword, and in Florence the
license only referred to day-time. This is Moryson's account of the
regulations; before his time the regulations were laxer, and later they
became stricter, which gave a great impetus to the poisoning trade; in
fact, the bakers in Lombardy were mostly Germans, and those of Rome,
Jews, the Italians being unwilling to trust their fellow countrymen.
Such subjects naturally suggest executions, which formed one of the
commonest and principal "sights" throughout Europe. Lithgow landed at
the Piazzetta at Venice just when a friar was being burnt alive there
for getting fifteen nuns with child in a year. It was in Venice, too,
that Moryson saw two young senators' sons, who had had too uproarious
a night, have their hands cut off at the places where they had done
the mischief, their tongues cut out where they had sung blasphemous
songs, and finally beheaded by a sort of guillotine in the Piazza. And
when he was staying at Leipzig, where, as was the custom in Germany,
adultery was punishable by death, a case had recently occurred of
a girl giving birth to an illegitimate child in a church, during
service. It was under consideration when he left whether an ancient
precedent should not be revived to meet her case, that she should be
tied up in a sack with a cat, a cock, a snake, and a dog, all alive,
and so drowned. To quote one more as a sample of many, there is the
detailed description of a man being broken on the wheel at Hamburg,
by Taylor the "water-poet." The place of execution was on a mound,
so that the enormous crowd could see well; moated, to keep the people
at a distance, and approached by a drawbridge which was raised during
the execution; the criminal was drunk, according to custom. In Germany
exceptional criminals were on view for some days before execution,
nailed by the ears to posts. Torture accompanying execution was common,
and branding and mutilation things that no traveller could well avoid
seeing. But none seemed to want to avoid them: Evelyn went to the
Châtelet prison at Paris to look on while a prisoner underwent legal
torture. The only occasions that seem to have struck them as too
horrible was when the headsman bungled matters: a Dutchman at Paris
saw one try sixteen times and then have to be assisted. And as in the
towns, so by the wayside. Gallows and wheels bearing the bodies of men
and sometimes of women, dying, dead, or decaying, were continually
to be seen: Taylor says he counted seven score between Hamburg and
Prague, and Moryson mentions a criminal hanging in chains near Lindau,
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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