Singing the News of Punishment

This article explores the pan-European phenomenon of the execution ballad, songs that told the news of true crimes and their punishment by public execution. Looking at examples across nine languages, from the sixteenth through the nineteenth century, this comparison reveals that these ballads share multiple features in textual content and format: a recognisable, formulaic narrative; sensationalist and emotive language; and a conservative perspective that confirms that the condemned is guilty and that ‘justice’ is being served. We also note key regional differences, such as in the use (or not) of contrafactum, the setting of new lyrics to familiar melodies, in the use of the first versus third person voice, and in the depiction of graphic violence, both of the crime committed and the execution. Ultimately, we argue for the existence of an almost universal tradition in Europe of how to sing the news of punishment.

All Masters

This chapter looks at the causes and methods behind the Jacquerie’s sudden emergence after 28 May. The massacre at Saint-Leu-d’Esserent was a watershed moment that enabled the rapid transformation of latent resentments into large-scale, violent rebellion. Due both to recent military developments and economic dislocation connected with the Black Death, rural commoners in northern France were experiencing a crisis of the ‘moral economy’ severe enough to make some of them undertake previously unimagined action. But immediate mobilization required previous preparation. As sociologists have demonstrated, rebellion is not a process that happens by chance even if it is made possible by opportunity. It appears that the Jacquerie’s leaders were able to take advantage of pre-existing efforts to ready the countryside’s defences, as well as social and professional networks among commoners in the Beauvaisis. By 31 May, the rebellion was sufficiently organized to capture a traitor and transfer him to a local captain elsewhere who carried out a public execution attended by hundreds of witnesses. The story of this ‘traitor’ is indicative of the kinds of relationships that facilitated the revolt’s almost instantaneous mobilization, as well as the individual and accidental trajectories that led people to join or to eschew the Jacquerie, and how their paths might change over time.

A SODOMY SCANDAL ON THE EVE OF THE FRENCH WARS OF RELIGION

This article uncovers a sodomy scandal that took place in the Benedictine abbey of Morigny, on the eve of the French Wars of Religion, in order to tackle an apparently simple yet persistent question in the history of early modern criminal justice. Why, despite all of the formal and informal obstacles in their way, did plaintiffs bring charges before a criminal court in this period? The article investigates the sodomy scandal that led to the conviction and public execution of the abbey's porter Pierre Logerie, known as ‘the gendarme of Morigny’, and situates it in the wider patterns of criminal justice as well as the developing spiritual crisis of the civil wars during the mid-sixteenth century. Overall, this article demonstrates how criminal justice in this period could prove useful to plaintiffs in resolving their disputes, even in crimes as scandalous and difficult to articulate as sodomy, but only when the interests of local elites strongly aligned with those of the criminal courts where the plaintiffs sought justice.

House-Destruction as a Ritual of Punishment in Early Modern Europe

The public execution of criminals was a familiar ritual of early modern European society. This article, however, examines the less frequent practice of ordering that a criminal’s house be ritually demolished following the execution. In many cases, the destroyed house was then replaced by a monument which was intended to simultaneously obliterate and perpetuate the criminal’s memory. Rare as it was, ritual house-destruction was a surprisingly widespread practice, undertaken at various times between 1520 and 1760 in France, Germany, Spain, Italy, Portugal and the Netherlands. Though punitive house-destructions had been undertaken in medieval Europe, the practice acquired new overtones in the early modern era. This article examines how and when this striking form of punishment was applied in early modern Europe and considers why authorities would order the destruction of property in order to enshrine the memory of particularly serious crimes.

Last Words and Dying Speeches

Chapter 7 focuses in detail on the gallows speeches printed in Scotland between the late sixteenth and the late eighteenth centuries. It provides the first detailed examination of this form of cheap print in a Scottish context. The dying words spoken by convicted felons on the scaffold before their execution were as popular as the spectacle of capital punishment itself. Printed sheets containing these farewell orations sold on the streets and were a staple form of popular literature. Their contents reveal much about the nature of public execution in Scotland, the attitudes of the authorities towards sin and crime, and the behaviour of sufferers on the point of death.

The Spanish Pachacuti

As Philip II saw his empire teeter in the late 1560s, he sent Francisco de Toledo to Peru as his viceroy. Toledo began his work there by rewarding Spaniards who had remained loyal to the Crown during the civil wars, and he started to reorganize the native populations living across the Andes. Although he was initially positive about Inca-era institutions, Toledo came to see the Incas as tyrants, and he spent time in Cuzco gathering testimony to prove that Philip II had no special obligations toward the descendants of Inca emperors. When Toledo learned that a Spaniard had been murdered in Vilcabamba, he sent troops into the holdout Inca kingdom to destroy it and punish the last Inca. The viceroy choreographed the public execution of the prince Tupa Amaru as a lesson to native populations.

Love and War of an Iranian Reactionary

The article centers around the life and social activities of Ali Khan Arshad od-Doule Sardar Arshad, prominent revolutionary of 1905–1911 in Iran. Dramatic details of Ali Khan’s private life show that Iranian society was not as bigoted and stagnated as it may seem today, but there were certain social elevators in it, and a person of rather humble origin could even marry the Shah’s daughter, provided there was love. Ali Khan’s socio-political status evolved from a supporter of the Constitutional Revolution to a staunch defender of Iranian absolutism, who laid down his head for Mohammed Ali-shah and his version of the good for his country. More broadly, the fate of Sardar Arshad illustrates another specific feature of the Iranian society, distinguished by extreme instability. A guarantee of security for members of the political elite lay in personal loyalty and family-clan ties. For Iranian politicians, these ties have always been stronger than their obligations to the party, or their ideological views. However, the Constitutional Revolution brought some new tidings, such as the extreme bitterness of the political confrontation. This happened because during the revolutionary events the number of revolutionaries formed the so-called “small nation”. For this “small nation” everyone who did not share their views was alien. A vivid example of this process was the public execution of the prominent Iranian religious authority Sheikh Nuri, prosecuted for his support of absolutism.

Choosing Death: The Making of Martyrs in Early American Criminal Narratives

In 1701 Puritan minister John Rogers published the criminal narrative of Esther Rodgers, who had been convicted of infanticide and executed. Esther Rodgers appears in Rogers’s Death the Certain Wages of Sin not as a depraved criminal or even a repentant sinner but as a courageous Christian martyr. Much of the productive recent scholarship on Rodgers studies the way her criminal status operated in the public sphere generally or print culture specifically, but the literary construction of her legal criminal status reveals a larger negotiation over marginalized individuals’ ability to consent and dissent in early New England and an unexpected orientation toward choice in early American literature. Rogers and his contemporaries engaged the conventions of the early modern criminal narrative to organize the chaos of maternal tragedy according to fictions of choice and the conventions of ancient and antique scripture to recast execution as a prelude to salvation. But in the ill-fitting spaces between the criminal’s story and the forms to which these authors suited it, readers could see a character who was something more—or less—than murderer or martyr: a sympathetic victim granted the ability to consent only in order to certify her legal culpability, religious conversion, and complicity in the macabre spectacle of her own public execution.