Page:Archaeologia volume 38 part 1.djvu/72

56 Certain modes of Capital Punishment was forthwith drowned in a pond called Bikepole. The judges were Sir Henry de Cobham and many other eminent men of the country.* Stowe, in his Survey of London, says, " By S. Giles Churchyard was a large water called a Poole : I read in the yeere 1244 that Ann of Lodbury was drowned therein."" The worthy old chronicler does not tell us that this woman was judicially put to death, but the manner in which he relates the circumstance leads us to infer that she was a criminal condemned to that mode of punishment. There was water adapted for this purpose in Smithfield, a very ancient place of execution ; and the circumstance, that Tybourn and St. Thomas-a- Watering were both places of execution, may be ascribed to the fact of their offering facilities for either manner of death. In these three cases the criminals were women; but this description of punish- ment was also awarded to offenders of the male sex. When the English set sail for the Holy Land, Richard the First published an edict for the preservation of order in his army. He who killed another, while the expedition was afloat, was to be bound to the corpse and thrown into the sea. If the homicide occurred on land, the slayer and the slain were to be bound together and buried in the same grave." Of these two modes of punishment the latter, at least, was known in the English army as recent as the year 14*2:2. At the siege of Meaux by Henry V. a party of English soldiers was surprised and cut off. One man only escaped by flight, and he was forthwith condemned, by the English King, to be buried alive with his slain comrades.' 1 That drowning and burying alive were common punishments of malefactors of either sex we find in the Annals of Sandwich under the year 1313, when the jury of the hundred of Cornylo present before Henry de Stantone and other justices itinerant, at their session at Canterbury, that the Prior of Christ Church had, for nine years past, obstructed the high road leading from Dover Castle to Sandwich by the sea-shore, by means of a water-mill, which the Prior had erected at Lidene ; and that the said Prior, ten years before, had diverted the course of a certain stream called the Gestlyng, where felons condemned to death within the hundred should be drowned, but could not be executed in that way for want of water." It appears also from the Custumal of Sandwich that there was formerly a spot near that town called Thieves-downs, in which criminals were buried alive/ Spelman, Glnssarium Archajologicum, v. Furca et Fossa. b Edit. 1633, p. 11. ' Qui homincm in navi intcrfecerit, cum mortuo ligatus projiciatur in mare. Si autem eum ad terrain interfvcerit, cum mortuo ligatus in tcrru infbdiatur. Hovcden, sub anno. 4 Ilanmtc, Hist, des Dues dc Bourgugne, sub anno 1422. ' Boys, Hist, of Sandwich, p. 664. ' Et omncs c[ui condcmpnati sunt in illo casu debeut vivi sepeliri in loco ad hoc dupututo super SundouiK.*,