PAST CRIMESin 1373; she had kidnapped and disguised the young daughter of a London
grocer, John Oxwyke, to use as a foil for begging. Alice was only sentenced to
stand at the thewe for an hour as the child was returned unharmed!
Brandings and public whippings were carried out, particularly in towns,
and imprisonment was beginning to be used as a punishment, rather than just
as a holding measure. Archaeologists working at Lincoln castle have found
what they believe to be an underground prison there. Robbed out walls
suggest cells that existed before the newer prison was built in the eighteenth
century. Small lockups existed for shortterm prison sentences, particularly in
market towns. The area under the stairs to the upper hall in the Titchfield
Market Hall, rebuilt at the Weald and Downland Museum, was probably used
as a lockup, and in 2013 a fourteenthcentury prison was discovered in
Middle Row, Faversham, Kent, during the laying of a new water main. It was
a circular structure, about 15 to 20m in diameter, whose entrance was possibly
via a trapdoor in the ceiling. There is a record of just such a structure in the
town known as the Whitehouse gaol and cage, a‘deep hole or cage with heavy
oaken planks across the top’. Later, two rooms were built over the top, and
this structure combined the functions of guildhall and gaol.
The ultimate penalty, of course, was death, usually by hanging. Gallows
were erected in many places, usually somewhere prominent, by roadsides, or
at the edges of towns. The gallows was intended to be a visible deterrent to
crime. The actual structures rarely survive, but their presence is often
preserved in place names, such as Gallows Gate, near Torquay in Devon,
Gally Hills in Surrey and Doncaster, Yorkshire or Gallows Hill in Wiltshire
and Lancaster. Medieval hanging was a slow death–the‘long drop’gallows,
causing the neck to break, was yet to be invented; instead people were left to
dangle while they asphyxiated, a process that could take a very long time.
A number of excavations and studies of gallows sites have been undertaken
in Europe. Some of these were at places which held more ancient remains,
such as prehistoric barrow mounds, and are surrounded by the graves of the
executed criminals. These burials were typically carelessly carried out, with
bodies in odd positions, and often with their hands or legs still bound.
Sometimes, the postholes of the gallows trees have also been found. At
Alkersleben in eastern Germany, some seventy bodies have been found at a
site on a hill overlooking the road to Nuremberg. One individual had been
strangled with an iron chain. Details of the bodies and the way they were
buried are shedding light on medieval execution procedures. Some bones were
found in a mixedup jumble, evidence that the bodies had been gibbeted for
long enough for the skeleton to fall apart. Records tell us that at Augsburg, up