Page:Archaeologia volume 38 part 1.djvu/80

64 Certain modes of Capital Punishment teeth, but they were much worn. The hair was twenty inches long, and of a light brown colour, the skin resembling tanned leather, and the bones saturated with the ferruginous water of the moor. That this woman came by a violent death, and was staked down alive in the mud, was shown by a considerable heaving up of the left knee, close over which one of the wooden hooks was so tightly secured that it was found difficult to disen- gage it from the ground. The features are said to have expressed a feeling of desperation. The hands and feet were well preserved, and apparently did not belong to a person of the working class. The body bore no marks of injury, except those from the exhumation. German antiquaries have maintained that the woman thus interred was Queen Gunhild, who, according to historical notices, was enticed to Denmark by Harald Blue-tooth, and there by his order sunk in a moor ; but, although the clothes found with the body resemble those discovered in other graves of the last period of paganism in Denmark, there seems to be no reason for ascribing it to Gunhild. Be this as it may, the foregoing account affords us a vivid picture of this particular mode of punishment. Nor is this the only discovery of the kind in northern Europe. In the year 1S17 a body was found in the turf-moor at Frideburg, in East Friesland, fastened down with stakes and branches of oak. By order of the authorities it was examined, and found to be that of a woman.* The facts here reviewed lead to certain deductions. We have seen that our Teutonic forefathers, in the times of heathenism, regarded the criminal as a fit offering to the gods. The two principal modes of sacrifice in such cases, were hanging and drowning, and the ignominy of one of these punishments, which, though now obsolete, continued long after the establishment of Christianity, was probably heightened by the fact that it was inflicted more paganorum. We have seen that death on the sea-shore, where the tide ebbed and flowed, was the punish- ment inflicted on the criminal convicted of sacrilege ; and this leads me to conclude with a few remarks on a memorable passage in English history. The chroniclers, especially William of Poictiers and Ordericus Vitalis tell us, that after the fatal battle of Hastings, when Harald's mother supplicated for the Ixxly of her gallant son, she was tauntingly told, that the sea-shore was the appro- priate place of sepulture for a perjured man. Ordericus says, that the corpse was delivered to one of the retainers of the victor, with orders to bury it near the Spangenberg, Neues Vaterl. Archiv, B. ii. 8. 59.