OLD-TIME TREASON PUNISHMENT

Huntly Press and District Gazette, Volume XV, 24 July 1931, Page 1

OLD-TIME TREASON PUNISHMENT

Punishment for high treason in the olden days was barbarous and gruesome. It was the most heinous crime known to man. The sentence in the case of a man found guilty was that he should be drawn on a hurdle to the place of execution, that there he be hanged by the neck, but not till he be dead, and that while yet alive he must be disembowelled (drawn) and that his body divided into four quarters the head and the quarters to be at the disposal of the Crown. So far as a woman traitor was concerned, her punishment until the time of the French Revolution was that she should be drawn to the place of execution and there burnt, but in 1790 hanging was substituted for burning. It is extraordinary to remember that drawing, beheading and quartering were only abolished so recently as 1870. Long before that, however, public sentiment had come to disapprove of the gruesomeness of the details attending an execution for treason, and the last time a traitor’s head was pub lically exhibited on Temple Bar was in 1746, after the Jacobite rising.