Talk:Hanged, drawn and quartered

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Scotland

At least one Scotsman was HDQ in Scotland under Scottish law, see the biography article on David Hackston (and where there is one there are probably more). -- PBS (talk) 21:13, 21 December 2012 (UTC)

Drawing= dragging or disembowelling?

Ian Morimer is cited by Parrot of Doom in the Guy Fawkes page as a proponent of the 'drawing = dragging to a place of execution' interpretation (see http://www.ianmortimer.com/essays/drawing.pdf). Mortimer cites the chronicle of Henry Machyn for 1554 as his favoured primary source, focussing on the following entries:

"The … day of May was arraigned at the Guildhall Mr. William Thomas, clerk to the council, and cast to suffer death, to be drawn and quartered."

and

"The eighteenth day of May was drawn upon a sled a particular man named William Thomas, from the Tower unto Tyburn, the allegation of treason. He was clerk to the council. And he was hanged and after his head struck off and then quartered. "

to support the view that drawing referred to dragging to Tyburn, even though the word 'drawn' followed 'to suffer death'.

However, the same chronicle also contains the following entry:

"The thirteenth day of January there was a man drawn from the Tower through London upon a sled unto unto Tyburn, and there hanged, drawn, and quartered for counterfeiting the Queen's signet."

This entry appears to indicate that there were two usages for 'drawn' in 1554 - the man was drawn (i.e. dragged) to Tyburn and then drawn (i.e. disembowelled) at Tyburn after being hanged. For me, this supports the OED definition of drawing that Mortimer is unhappy with. My understanding is that many prisoners would be humiliated by being 'drawn' to Tyburn for execution - not just those convicted of treason, and therefore sentenced explicitly to "hanging, drawing and quartering". Conversely, it also appears to be the case that many, but not all, of those convicted of treason were disembowelled as part of their sentence, so it should not be a surprise that this element of the punishment would be referred to in the sentencing. Maybe contemporary sources were just inconsistent with their usage of the term 'drawing'?

I'm no historian, or editor, so I'm not going to make edits to the page, but I just flag this for consideration to those better qualified than I am. Gilgamesh4 (talk) 14:20, 4 February 2013 (UTC)

Obsolescence

What, exactly, does it mean for a sentence to become "obsolete"? Is that really the best descriptive term we have for this? —BarrelProof (talk) 23:42, 23 June 2013 (UTC)

What are you referring to? Eric Corbett 23:45, 23 June 2013 (UTC)

I believe he is talking about the Lede, 3rd paragraph, first sentence.