The next stage of penalty is sometimes a public flogging. The prisoner is stripped to the waist and driven around the seigneury. At each crossroads his guards give so many blows over the shoulders with a knotted rope. We have seen how branding was ordered for one young miscreant to put on him an ineffaceable stigma; and not infrequently one can meet both men and women with a hand lopped off, or even an eye gouged out, as a merciful substitute for their true deserts upon the gallows. Old Baron Garnier once, when peculiarly incensed, ordered the "hot bowl"--namely, that a red-hot brazier should be passed before the eyes of his victim until sight was destroyed.
But if a villein has committed a great crime he were best dismissed from an overtroubled world. Dead men never bother the provost twice. All over France you will find a gallows almost as common a sight in the landscape as a castle, an abbey, or a village. Many a fine spreading tree by the roadway has a skeleton be-dangling from one of its limbs. It is a lucky family of peasants which has not had some member thereof hanged, and even then plenty of rogues will die in their beds. Considering the general wickedness abroad, it seems as if there were a perpetual race between the criminals and the hangmen, with the criminals well to the fore.[55]
There are almost as many forms of execution as there are of torture. Fearful criminals, gross blasphemers, and the like might be killed by quartering: first their flesh might be nipped off by red-hot pinchers and hot lead poured into their wounds; then death comes as a release by attaching a strong horse to each arm and leg and tearing the victim into four parts. Witches, wizards, and heretics are, of course, burned, because they thus share the element of their patron, the devil. Most malefactors, however, find beheading or hanging the ordinary ending.
Beheading is "honorable." It is the nobleman's expiation for misdeeds. The victim is not degraded and leaves no stigma upon his children. In England the headsman uses the ax, but in France he ordinarily swings a great two-handed sword. A skillful executioner does his business at one blow--a most merciful form of mortal exit.
Hanging, however, is "dishonorable." Nobles who have especially exasperated their judges are sometimes subjected to it. Henceforth people will cry, "Their father was a felon," to their disgraced children. When a villein is ordered to die, he is ordinarily hanged, unless some other method is specified. In the village near St. Aliquis the gallows is near the pillory. It is not so large as that huge gallows at Montfaucon, near Paris, which sees the end of so many of the city offenders, and where there is a great series of stone piers with wooden crosspieces, arranged in two stories, making twenty-four compartments in all. There are permanent ladders fixed for dragging up the criminals. When all the compartments are full and additional room is needed for more executions, some of the skeletons are thrown into a deep, hideous pit in the center of the structure. The less pretentious St. Aliquis gallows has only four compartments. The structure stands close to the road, that all may learn how energetic are the baron's provosts. Two compartments are now empty, however, and Sire Macaire is glad of a chance to fill them.