Decapitated. To hang. Strangling. Burn alive. Drown. Buried alive. In the sixteenth century there were quite a few ways to perform the death penalty, and almost always it happened to the public. Everyone was welcome.
The contemporary Dutchman probably has a picture of it, thanks to feature films, comics and TV series that play in the past. Often such a public execution is staged therein as a lively fairground attraction to which the audience responds enthusiastically.
Historian Isabel Casteels studied as many sixteenth-century chronicles as possible for her PhD research in which public executions are described by people who were there. She comes to the conclusion that those executions could in principle be very worthy and reasonably modest.
Around 1500 there were, no matter how strange that also sounds, certain rules for executions and attending them, which most people adhered to. The announcements themselves usually also, oddly enough. But as soon as, from 1521, a different religious belief (‘heresy’) also becomes a reason to give people the death penalty, that changes. Then many convicts and part of the public no longer stick to the unwritten rules of the ritual, as a result of which such a public execution suddenly no longer worked as he was intended.
“Chronicles are fantastic sources,” says Casteels. “The chroniclers wrote partly about their own lives, daily life, but at the same time they were also interested in the major political events in the world, and also – especially – for the events in their city.” Their diary -like texts were usually not intended for publication, although such a manuscript was circulating within the urban community. It was passed on or even copied. Much of this lively material has been transcribed in recent years with the help of software that can recognize the letters in manuscripts and put it online. That has become a very nice database: Chronicling novelty. Everyone can look at that.
You would think: the death penalty is the worst punishment you can get. Still it could always be worse
Casteels studied more than thirty chronicles, from cities that are now in the Netherlands or Belgium, containing no fewer than four thousand eyewitness reports of executions with the public.
You would think: the death penalty is the worst punishment you can get. Yet it could always be worse. For example: first torture, break the limbs. Or: first roast someone and only then burn. An example of how it could always be even worse and more horrible, occurred in Amsterdam in 1535, after the rebellion of the re -buyers, who had been violent and was experienced as very shocking by many Amsterdammers. When eleven of the insurgents were executed, they proceeded as follows: “They led her [hen] on a banck, and they cut haer [hun] lively haert uijt and that lot [beul] woerpet [wierp] haer Hart Levendich Int Aensicht to him Luyden Segende Freet Du [vreet jij maar op] dine [jouw] Viddelyke Herte! ”
Casteels: “Public executions were a fixed part of the penalty system, which nobody doubted very much. There was also a thought behind it.” One of the unwritten rules was: the convicted person shows repentance. “If a criminal died in a good way, with repentance about his crime, it could mean that the road to purgatory perhaps was still open to him.”
The corpses of executed re -buyers are hung on the Galgenveld Volewijck in Amsterdam (1535).
Image Rijksmuseum
Is it not remarkable that the sentenced judgments themselves usually kept to the role that they had been widely thought of? “He or she also believed in it. That was the frame of reference for everyone in that period: what you did in your life, but also how you died, had a lot of influence on what happened to you afterwards, the people did not decide on that. That was up to God.”
The convicted person was also expected to have it all worthy, that he did not start screaming. “That he did not get carried away by emotions or fear or pain. That he stayed quietly under it, it did not accept, did not resist.” If he did, the audience rejected that. If the victim repentance, he sometimes received less difficult treatment. For example: he did not have to go to the stake, but was strangled and then simply buried ‘in holy ground’ (in a graveyard for example). If no repentance was shown, the body was usually left outside the city, on the ‘Galgenveld’. It was hung there, or the head was impulated on a pole and the rest of the body exhibited on a wheel.
Special interaction
The idea was also: if the convicted repentance shows, the audience sympathizes with him (or her). “People had to have compassion with the suffering of that person. Not to make jokes about it. It was a very serious matter. And a very important event for that person.”
Sometimes this led to a special interaction between convicted and public. In Ghent, a convicted person asked the public “that they would like to about his aerme soul over her knees [geknield] a paternoster [Onzevader] Ende Ave Maria [Weesgegroetje] lesen, that Welcke Tvlock has done with a compassien walking [heeft]”.
Of course De Beul also had to adhere to the rules. “If the executioner did not do his job well, worked awkwardly, caused too much pain, it was strongly responded. Then the audience could sometimes attack the execution. Was the audience so powerful? “There was not much surveillance present. Police was not there at the time, isn’t it. There were few ways of enforcement.”
For a part of the audience it might have been a sensation? Well no, Casteels does not see that in the chronicles. Now almost all chroniclers belonged to the urban middle class or even the urban administration, so they certainly did not form a cross -section of society. “But precisely because they were so interested in the urban government, the urban administration and the monitoring of the order, there is also a lot of attention for the public in their descriptions. They constantly record how the public responds.”
Later in that century, when more and more people were sentenced to death because of heresy, the ‘script’ of the (ideal) public execution no longer worked. The people who were executed because of their religious beliefs, for example, denied the existence of purgatory, or they thought that as a person you could not have an influence on your salvation at all. So what they did was: do not repent and proclaim their abnormal faith from the scaffold. “The audience was a Catholic and initially looked at it with great surprise, and full of incomprehension. They could not understand that people knowingly and know their own souls of their own, by behaving like that. The writers often find it ridiculous. What those people believed sounded absurd to them.”
Sympathize with heretics
Later in that period there were more and more people in the audience who sympathized with the convicted ‘heretics’. “From 1550 you can see that there are also actions from the public. That spectators are also going to behave in ways that break through that entire script. That starts with singing psalms on new ‘Protestant’ melodies. There were also more violent forms of intervention: that the executioner and the guards were presented with it, a number of times.”
Casteels: “What you expected from an execution was that the urban government could steer it in the right direction. If that was constantly disturbed, that government lost its credibility.” The resistance from the public could be the start of an uprising against the local authorities. In addition, the Protestants made martyrs from the anniversary. “Then it is counterproductive, then the propaganda for the counterparty becomes. In the end all of this led to no longer being performed those heretic executions. It was thought: it is no longer efficient, it is no longer working, the heresy is no less through. That was around 1564.”
But then, in 1566, suddenly the iconoclasm and everything changes: in the following years there are an incredible number of public executions. The iconoclasm was experienced by many as extremely frightening. A sense of crisis and chaos arose. The religious images were not only desecrated to show that they had no wonderful forces, but also beheaded, burned and hung. “The images were executed as it were. For some, that was a way to take revenge. They had seen their brothers and sisters executed in the years before.”
Casteels: “In principle, executions were not strictly guarded. Because of all this religious unrest, that was increasingly necessary. So the militia was used. But those were civilian militias, which were not always very suitable for that. Moreover, the men of the militia and the Orderers knew each other. You may only get more chaos. “
Nobility
That is why the nobility was sometimes called upon. He had his own soldiers. “That was slightly more intimidated. Whether they went closing the market square, so that not so much audience could be added. Or the executions were performed very early in the morning. Then there were fewer people who came there. Condemned heretics were sometimes muzzled. They were given a tongue screw through their tongue or their mouth, so that the audience could no longer speak.”
With that you also deny that person the possibility of repentance? “Yes, and then you completely miss your goal. Because the audience still assumed that idea of: repentance, compassion, being good Christians. That was actually the intention of that entire event. So if you took the possibility of speaking like that, yes, what was you doing? That is something that chroniclers often ask.”
Not long after, the number of executions decreases sharply, because it simply no longer worked in this way. Casteels says that at the end of September, by her hand, a book on this subject appears that, unlike her dissertation, is written for a wide audience: The chronicles of death (Lannoo publishing house).
What was it like to be busy with such an intensely horrible subject for years? “I had to remind myself a few times: okay, it’s a long time ago, but this is about people. I tried to look at it with the right respect. But I also noticed that it got something funny in conversations with acquaintances and so quickly. behind. ”