From the Cornhill Magazine.

PUNISHMENT IN THE DAYS OF OLD.

were called on to name anything in particular in which a great falling off from the past is visible we should certainly designate the gibbet as one of the little matters in which we have most degenerated from the perfection of our sires.

It is only after tedious investigation and with much reluctance, that we are brought to hang up an occasional scoundrel; and we are glad of any excuse that may enable us to dispense with the last disgusting act of the tragedy. But our ancestors were not so squeamish. In their view axe and cord were specifics for every disorder that could affect the body politic, and they applied both unrelentingly. And we are even more unworthy of our sires in the matter of secondary inflictions. Penal servitude and transportation may be excellent things in their way; but our fine old English gentlemen and their foreign contemporaries would have scoffed at such effeminate devices. Did any one among these dangerous classes exhibit a taste for illegal drilling, or handling edge tools-sword or pen-in a dangerous way, or taking a sly aim from behind a wallthey seldom bothered themselves with mere humdrum precautionary measures, but proceeded at once to place a restraint on his propensities by that particular form of ventilation which his case suggested.

GREAT as we think ourselves in science, ingenious device, and huge construction, it must after all be admitted that we fall very far short of our progenitors, and that not merely in matters of no moment, but in almost all great and noble things, from the building of a church or the forging of a stout blade up to a good hard-hitting prize fight. The very best of our painters would rejoice to hold a taper to Raphael or Rubens; but whether they would be altogether worthy of the office is quite another thing. Our poets would sing very small indeed besides Dante or Chaucer; though we have not the slightest doubt that one or two of them could earn a five shilling fine for "brawling" as well as, if not better than the latter, or get up a seditious riot as cleverly as the former. Few of our architects, we suspect, could pass the ordeal applied to freemasons in those days. Even Mr. Bennet himself would be compelled to hide his diminished head in presence of the horologer who constructed the clock that ornamented the dome of Dantzic. The bonnets and chignons of 1868 are very fair in their way, but they are the merest trifles in comparison with the superb head-dresses of the fourteenth century, when it was usual to enlarge the city gates to admit the tower of coils that rose story on story, over every pretty face. The heaviest swell among us would cut a remarkably poor figure besides a Gaveston, a Courtney, a Bonnivet, or a Bussy d'Amboize; or rather, any of these gallants would cut a very poor figure in him, for assuredly they would either disdain to recognize his exist ence as "a man and a brother," or drill a few holes in his body for presuming to aspire to their fellowship in such unworthy garb. And even that battle of battles which poets sang, and bishops, it is whispered, consecrated with their presence-the combat between Sayers and Heenan-was as a satyr to Hy-less he considered himself not all unlucky perion contrasted with the tournament, in splendor, in gallantry, and especially in black eyes and bloody noses. But if we

There were few things in those good old days that might not be rendered criminal according to the temper of the particular time and tyrant. Did a court physician fail to cure, they hung him up or cut him down as happened to be most convenient; nor was he much better off when the utmost success attended his efforts. Cottier, the physician of Louis XI., atoned for the skill with which he had prolonged the hated life of his master, with a fine of 50,000 crowns-equal to as many pounds of our money. And doubt

to escape so easily, for the two Augustine monks who undertook the cure of Charles the Mad, when every sensible practitioner

shrank from the task, were beheaded and quartered on the next relapse of their patient.

dominions escorted by the Black Prince and 30,000 men. As Charles held the passes of the Pyrenees both brothers applied to him— the one offering a couple of towns for free passage, and the other a large sum that the defiles might be barred. The offers were equally tempting and Charles made up his mind to earn them both. He took the money and then excused himself from obstructing the march of the invaders by hiring one Oliver de Mauny to waylay him and

had passed the King of Navarre demanded his release. But de Mauny had profited too well by his employer's example to keep strictly to his bargain. He pocketed his hire, and then affecting to consider the king as a true prisoner of war, refused to part with him except on the customary terms— a large ransom. Most people would have given way to anger under such barefaced extortion, but not so Charles, who, thorough ly appreciating such a pretty piece of perfidy even when exercised on himself, chuckled over it with the greatest relish, and in short, agreed at once to his very good friend's

himself and everybody else, consented to accompany the Vile one to Tudela in order to

And the merchant of “lang syne" was no better off than the surgeon. An archbishop of Cologne once built a strong castle at the intersection of four roads, and presented it, with his blessing, to a poor relation who had been in the army. When the soldier desired to be informed how he was to maintain his garrison, since the excellent prelate had omitted to assign him a salary, the latter re-clap him in prison. When the Black Prince plied very significantly by pointing out the situation of the fortress, and the poor relation made such good use of the hint that he died a millionaire. Indeed, it was not a remarkable thing in those days for gentlemen to break up every road except that one which led immediately under their battlements, in order to facilitate their pillage of the trader. Sometimes when the neighboring princes found themselves in difficulties they made war on the rich burghers, especially of Flanders, robbing and ravaging until the merchants came to terms and bought them off, while those who had no such prey handy betook them to what was termed "borrow-demand. The latter, perfectly satisfied with ing"-a transaction the nature of which is very neatly illustrated by the following anecdotes:-The good people of Ghent, hav-receive his pay, which he did directly he ening once upon a time lent our Edward III. tered the town-only it was on the scaffold 200,000 crowns, ventured several years after and from the hands of the hangman. to request payment-a proceeding so pre-course it required some little dexterity to inposterously absurd that it drew roars of duce close-fisted people to part with their laughter from the Lords of the Council to cash on such terms; but the kings and whom the deputies applied. Nor was this princes of the Middle Ages were always by any means harsh treatment. The lively equal to the occasion, and the Tudors and Duke of Orleans having, in a fit of religious Plantagenets brilliantly so. Everybody fervor, vowed to pay his debts called his knows how King John coaxed a loan from creditors together by sound of trumpet. the Hebrew, and such persuasives as a few He really was sincere, and made what he weeks' lodging in the pleasant domicile considered ample arrangements, but he reck-called "Little Ease," or a campaign as a oned without his host. The crowd, 800 and common soldier against the wild borderers, upwards, that presented themselves at the were applied with success to an obstinate appointed time horrified him, and, despairing banker by the last Royal Harry. It need of being able to satisfy them otherwise, he scarcely be said that the example of the flogged a dozen or so by way of example, King was never lost upon the courtier. And and dismissed the rest with hideous threats thus-so far as his relation with the poweras to what would befall should they still per-tul extended-the wealthy plebian was in a sist in teasing him with their paltry bills. perpetual dilemma. It was dangerous to And Charles the Vile, of Navarre, squared | lend and equally so to withhold. For when an account in a smilar way. Henry of Transtamar having expelled his brother, Peter the cruel, the latter was returning to his

Of

a creditor became too importunate a judicious application of whip, knife, or noose, abated the nuisance; while the capitalist

who refused to do a little bill ran the risk of having himself and his business suspended together.

into the nearest river; in other quarters, again, they were stoned to death, or hunted down, and slaughtered like wolves; while But violence was then the universal rem- the few survivors endeavored, too often in edy. Nothing could mitigate the horrors of vain, to shelter their wretchedness among famine or pestilence like a massacre of the the woods and rocks. Occasionally, indeed, Jews and lepers; and it was the easiest affection rose stronger than disgust and terthing in the world to put down a popular ror, and snatched the victim from destructumult by stringing to the trees, or still more tion, or sought to mitigate his fate by sharconvenient sign-posts, as many of the mob ing it with him. But as for the Jews, they as authority could contrive to lay hands on. experienced no mercy whatever. Such of Here are a couple of instances, taken almost them as escaped instant massacre were comat random out of ten thousand. The Cru- mitted to prison and subjected to the torture. saders brought the leprosy home from the Their shrieks of agony rang from every dunEast, and uncleanly habits, bad food, and geon; and, when these were stilled, a thousdefective sanitary arrangements rendered it and fires blazed to devour them-160, infor a period a really formidable epidemic, cluding male and female, infant and grandwhile its loathsome nature invested it with sire, perishing in a single one at Toulouse. exceeding terror. The lepers were every- It was not until the commencement of anothwhere immured in hospitals, which were er reign that the atrocities ceased; and then erected and maintained by charity. Between" acts of grace" were put forth, which-ad1314 and 1321 a series of famines and pesti-mitting the reality of the conspiracy and lences destroyed vast multitudes, probably the justice of the punishment inflicted-ada third of the whole population of Europe. In the last of those years startling rumors were heard in all directions. It was told that the Spanish Moors had determined to exterminate the Christians from the face of the earth; that they had employed the Jews to effect their purpose; that the Jews, again, had deputed the task to the lepers, and that these miserable beings had agreed to carry out the strange design by infecting all the healthy round them with their own hideous malady. It was further stated that the lepers had actually deliberated the matter in four grand convocations, attended by deputies from every lazar-house in Europe, with the exception of two in England-an exception which gave the story a greater seeming of reality; and that they had finally decided to effect their object by poisoning all the springs, and by the still more dreaded means of magic spells. The story was exactly suited to the era, and was everywhere greedily credited, especially in France, whose king and people took the lead in punishing the assumed criminals. That country was soon in one of its numerous tiger fits-and, it need scarcely be added, the scene of unutterable horrors. Here, the lazar-house and their inmates were burnt together; there, the lepers were pushed at the point of the lance

vised that the revenues of the lazar-houses might be restored; that such of the unfortunate lepers as had escaped, and who were sternly prohibited from following any occupation by which they could maintain themselves, might be mercifully permitted to live on by the help of charity, that is supposing charity not to have been killed off so far as they were concerned by the horrible accusation; and that the Jews might be allowed to leave their prisons between sunrise and sunset, in order to raise the money by which the great favor of exile was to be bought. Nor did the occasional rioter fare very much better than Jew or leper. In the reign of Henry III. the Londoners happened to quarrel with the people of Westminster at a wrestling match. The former grew riotous, broke a good many heads, and pulled down several houses-much to the amusement of nobility and knighthood, which happened, in considerable force, to be looking on. But the rioters having foolishly extended the latter portion of their performance to some tenements belonging to the Abbot of Westminster, the aspect of things underwent a great change in the view of the lordly proprietors. The latter instantly mounted and charged, capturing several dozens of the mob, and dispersing the rest. The ringleaders

were hanged at once, without form or pro-l'Hermite. One of the victims had not long cess, and the remainder of the captives dis- before been appointed a counsellor of the missed, with their feet chopped off. Parliament of Paris by Louis, and now the ferocious tyrant caused the severed head to be invested with the usual cap of office, and deposited in its proper place among the members of that legal body, when assembled in their hall. Again and again did the powerful of those ages, which respected the text, "Touch not mine anointed," too profoundly to bring the crowned felon himself to the scaffold, execute him by substitute,in the persens of such of his servants as happened to fall the first into their hands. The Count of Harcourt and three other gentlemen were beheaded by John, King of France, in 1355, and twenty-two years later two others of equal rank by his successor Charles, in punishment of a few of the numerous crimes perpetrated by their master, that same Charles the Vile, one specimen of whose handiwork we have already related. But the reprobate himself did not finally escape. His death was not indeed a judicial one, but it was fully as terrible. Being accustomed, in his later years, to sleep in night-clothes that had been steeped in spirits of wine, these at last took fire-it was whispered that his servants deliberately ignited them-and thus the monster perished in some such agony as it had delighted him to inflict.

The thousands who died for witchcraft show how dangerous it was to be ugly or poor in the "glorious days of old;" and, as hundreds of instances attest, it was almost as fatal to be conspicuous for wealth, and especially for beauty. Indeed, from the days of Elgiva to those of Mary Stuart, a fair lady is scarcely ever mentioned by the Chroniclers except as the subject of a tragedy. Nor are we without recorded instances of gentlemen who were ruined solely by their good looks. It was not, indeed, any unwomanly repugnance to his handsome face that induced Queen Matilda to consign the Saxon Brihtrick to perpetual imprisonment; though those who remember the rather eccentric style of wooing-a good thrashing and a roll through a mud-puddlewhich finally fixed her affections on the Conqueror, might be inclined to think otherwise. But, exceptional as she showed herself to William. it is quite certain that Matilda was even more than sufficiently appreciative of personal graces in the case of Brihtrick, since she was so taken with that mediæval exquisite, when ambassador at her father's court, that she actually offered him her hand. And it was to punish his refusal that, years after, the unforgiving queen begged the Saxon from her husband as her share of the English spoil.

Occasionally there were rulers who delighted to place people in such ticklish positions that any course of action might be interpreted into treason. Our own Elizabeth had some knowledge of this particular branch of "kingcraft." But its supreme master-not even excepting the author of the celebrated ambiguity, "Spare not to kill the King is well," was Louis XI. Certain citizens of Arras having requested his permission to visit the Court of Burgundy on business, Louis told them in person that he considered them quite capable of deciding that small matter without troubling him. Taking the King's reply for assent, they set out-twenty-three in number on their journey; but before they had traversed a league they were stopped, brought back, and decapitated by that gloomy official, Tristam

The medieval penal code eschewed monotony just as carefully as weakness. Its capital and other corporal punishments might be rather more frequent than modern prejudice approves of, but excellent care was taken to divest them of tedious uniformity. Mr. Justice Tresilyan, the very worthy predecessor of Jeffreys, was quite an artist in this species of deadly variety, as the followers of John Ball and Wat Tyler experienced, some of whom he hanged four times over before he allowed them to die. But clever as our English adepts were-and some of them were exceedingly so-we must admit that they competed but poorly with their continental rivals, with whom, in the good old time, death was beyond all question the veritable "king of terrors." Thanks to our novelists, the reading public is pretty well acquainted with the commoner appliances of torture, and we are therefore not under the necessity of enlarging on such

was conducted to the torture chamber-a den amply supplied with all the necessary implements-and subjected to its amenities according to the discretion of his judges. This over, the captive was sped through the last act of the tragedy. He was unbuckled from his iron bed, and directed to kiss a bronze statue of the Virgin, that stood at the end of the passages leading from the chamber, as the seal of whatever declaration had been wrung from his agony. Wearily he dragged himself along, with tottering limbs and failing strength, until, as he raised his lips to the mild face of the Madonna, a trapdoor gave way beneath his tread, and precipitated him, fathoms down, upon a series of delicately poised wheels

All horrent with projecting spears— which his fall set in rapid motion. Nor do we exaggerate in the least, for the fragments of the murderous machinery, stuck thickly over with bits of bone and pieces of dress still remain at the bottom of the fearful oubliette. More awful still was the punishment of the iron coffin, wherein the prisoner saw his dungeon contracting round him day by day and hour by hour, the sides stealing up and the roof creeping down-slowly, steadily, silently-passionless as fate, and as remorseless-the dread machinery maintaining the calm monotony of its march, through lingering days and nights of horror, until the final collapse crushed him.

fascinating items as the rack, the wheel, the thumbscrew, and the boot. But these were only the everyday forms of punishment. There were always individuals, princes and politicians, especially of the Byzantine empire, who rose superior to such vulgar usages, and with whom "killing by inches" was not a mere figure of speech, but a dread reality. Indeed some of their detestable inventions of cruelty have obtained as wide celebrity as the bull of Phaloris, There was the "chambre a crucer"-a heavy chest, short, shallow, and lined with sharp stonesin which the sufferer was packed, and the lid, heavily weighted, shut down on him. There were the "bernicles,” consisting of a mattress, an which the victim was fastened by the neck with bullock's sinews to keep him from moving, while his legs were passed through a kind of stocks, and crushed between two great logs of wood, on the uppermost of which a man was seated; the process being repeated on the third day, which, as the old chronicler tells us, "is the cruelest thing that ever was heard of." ⚫ There were the iron cages of Louis XI., in which some of his victims spent years, and which were so maliciously contrived that every position-standing, sitting, or lying was equally uncomfortable to the occupant. But, unquestionably, the master contrivances of all these delicate inventions for producing excruciating agony were the "baiser de la vierge" of Baden Baden, and the" iron coffin" of Lissa. In the former the prisoner, blindfold and fastened in a chair, was lowered by a windlass through a well-like shaft, reaching from the top of the castle deep down into the heart of the rock on which it stands, so deep-for the shaft still exists that the visitor passing beneath can barely discern the glimmering daylight at the top. Here he was immured in a dungeon hewn out of the living stone, and fitted with a door of the same material a foot thick, so artfully constructed that it was not to be dis-ed the hand of her daughter to one of the tinguished from the adjoining wall. In this miserable cell, surrounded by darkness that might be felt-silent, helpless, hopeless, like a toad in the centre of its block-he remained until the hour of trial. He was then brought before his judges, who awaited him, masked and solemn, in a larger excavation, called the Hall of Judgement. From thence he

But even the worst of these was mildness itself when compared with the infernalities occasionally practised on a few exceptional victims of exasperated power. Regicides were tortured with more than Indian ferocity, until the body was incapable of further suffering. Jornandi, a descendant of the Norman conquerors of Sicily, in requital for rebellion against the Emperor Henry VI., was enthroned naked on a seat of red-hot iron, and crowned with a similar diadem. A noble matron of Constantinople, having refus

infamous parasites of the second Theodore Lascares, that ingenious tyrant caused the obstinate dame to be stripped and enclosed to the neck in a sack along with a number of cats, who were pricked into furious exercise of tooth and talon by a couple of executioners. Another of these worthy rulers, Justinian II., was accustomed to punish his