Posted on 02/19/2004 1:28:53 PM PST by vannrox
The remains of at least 60 criminals executed during the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries were found in a medieval moat at Oxford Castle.
Excavations in a medieval moat around Oxford Castle have so far yielded the remains of 60 to 70 criminals, mostly men in their twenties, executed during the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries. Archaeologists believe that dozens more await discovery. "This excavation has given us a much greater understanding of the way in which the bodies of executed criminals were treated in postmedieval England," said Andrew Norton, the field archaeologist running the dig.
The victims, all of whom are thought to have been hanged, seem to have been denied a Christian burial. They were interred in unconsecrated ground, and some 20 percent of them were buried face down or on their sides. Most were not buried in a traditional Christian east-west alignment, thus depriving them of the opportunity to rise from the dead facing Jerusalem on the Day of Judgment.
A number of dead had been used for medical instruction or experimentation after death. Three skulls were found with their tops skillfully sawed off, while the neck of another individual had been carefully cut through the seventh vertebra. The bodies may have been used for flesh or muscle dissections, but no archaeological traces have been identified so far. Two sawn-off crania--but not the skulls they were once attached to--were also unearthed.
Historians believe the dissected victims were used by anatomy schools at the University of Oxford's Christ Church College or at the old Ashmolean, most likely under royal license granted during the reigns of Elizabeth I, James I, or Charles I. At that time the Crown allowed four executed criminals a year to be used for academic purposes.
Archaeologists have discovered moving evidence of the pain suffered by the executed. In many cases, their hands were tightly clenched. Two individuals had held onto their own clothes with such tenacity that in one case a button and, in another, a fragment of clothing was found inside their clenched skeletal fists.
Death on the gallows generally occurred by slow strangulation; it would have taken up to a half an hour for a person to die. (Instant death through hanging, by the use of a drop through a trapdoor that broke the condemned person's neck, was only gradually introduced in the late eighteenth century.)
In the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries, death sentences were passed for everything from theft and burglary to treason and murder. Apart from holding political prisoners and debtors, prisons were usually used to detain people while they awaited trial; prison sentences were rarely given as punishment. The accused were acquitted about half of the time; of those convicted, half were flogged and the rest hanged.
Interestingly, a few of the executed were female. These women, mostly in their late forties or early fifties, may well have been hanged for witchcraft. Archaeologists have also found the remains of a child about 12 years old who appears to have been hanged and buried face down with the bottom half of his legs bent back as if they had been tied to his upper legs.
Latter Day Saints (Mormons). I think that they call it "Proxy Baptism"
I understand that until the railroads were built, people stayed pretty close to home, which probably meant some inbreeding or at least a very narrow gene pool.
Why is that?!?
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I've read of cases in the antebellum South where slaves were offered their freedom on condition they would go to Liberia, and they preferred slavery to what seemed a death warrant.
LOL!
After the discovery of Australia...
One small mistake. In England, the long drop was introduced in the late nineteenth century (1800s), not eighteenth.
> the neck of another individual had been carefully cut through the seventh vertebra
Which is one way certain traditions advocated laying a vampire to final rest.
To shed some light on ancient beliefs about such things, here's something I was reading recently in a book about Celtish archaeology (Daithi O Hogain, The Sacred Isle: Belief and Religion in Pre-Christian Ireland, Chapter 2, 45ff)--note the parallels with the above:
". . .there was a general belief that buried treasure was guarded by spirits of animals. . .It was commonly believed that buried treasure was guarded by a human spirit, and indeed several stories are told of a person having been deliberately put to death upon the burial of a trove, so that his ghost would act as guardian. . .hostages could be treated with great cruelty in early Ireland. . .
". . .The notion that the head or bones of a dead person continued to have some kind of power is illustrated by a very special type of motif. . .Eoghan Beal. ..ordered that a red javelin be placed in his hand, and that he be standing upright and facing northwards against the Ulstermen, 'for they will not go to battle against Connacht while my grave faces them and while I myself are arranged in that manner'. His northern foes are reported to have later set aside this impediment by exhuming his body and burying him in another place, with his face downwards. . .Inherent in this tradition was the idea that the spiritual part of the individual survived death, and that in this way the dead person could still be a force to be reckoned with. . .That special properties were believed by the Iron Age Celts to reside in buried heads is clear from the archaeological record. There was a common custom in Celtic Britain to behead bodies before interring them, and many skulls have ben found under the foundations of buildings of the period. The discovery of some decapitated bodies, and of human skulls unaccompanied by other bones, in burial sites in Ireland indicates that such practices were known here also. There is also strong confirmation of a related rite in accounts of the Continental Celts. . ."
I beg to differ, Ma'am! Georgia was a debtor's colony, not a penal colony. And after 231 years, we still haven't out of debt.
I believe Australia, Tasmania, and possibly New Zealand were truly penal colonies.
It's pretty controversial- the Mormons got a lot of bad PR for 'baptising' Holocaust victims a little while back.
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