The Boy-Bishop's Glovemaker Read Free

away freely from his wealth, he could go to Heaven – but woe-betide the grasping lord who gave little. At a time when the people largely believed in the reality of Heaven and the life to come, this was a powerful incentive.
    Everyone had to pay tithes to the local parish church. From the total, one third was redistributed to the local poor and needy. The Church taught that surplus – any profit over and above what was actually needed for the family – should be given away. This was not charity, it was
justice
. In the flawed world which had been formed from Original Sin and the Fall of Man, there was no fair allocation of the nation’s resources. Wealth was inequitably shared out and it was the duty of men to balance the availability of necessities. True charity was giving up
more
than one’s surplus and depriving oneself. That was real Christian love and mercy.
    All poor relief was in the hands of the clergy, who looked after widows, orphans, lepers and cripples with more concern to the means of the individuals than a specific disability. Thus a widowed woman who had plenty of money would not receive much, while a crippled man with no means of earning a living would be helped a great deal.
    Religious organisations gave away food, money, clothing, and shelter. They maintained leper hospitals, homes for the injured and even looked after the aged in their retirement. Some may think they did a better job serving the needy than we do today.
    I have often been asked what happened to convicted felons once they had been found guilty. Some have questioned my descriptions of hangings.
    The worst excesses of judicial brutality had not yet occurred in Britain. Refined tortures were the invention of future generations, especially the Tudors. Under the Plantagenets there was only one punishment – hanging – although drawing and quartering were used occasionally for treason and peculiarly heinous crimes, and lords could be honoured by beheading instead.
    This may not sound much of a concession, but these hangings took place in the days prior to scientific (-ish) executions: the victim would be turned off a ladder or a cart, or sometimes simply lifted off his or her feet by a rope. Invariably they died slowly, throttled as all air was cut off. Friends and relatives would pull on the victim’s legs or thump the chest to try to end the suffering, because the process could take anything from five minutes to three-quarters of an hour, according to Reverend Samuel Haughton, a Victorian polymath who tried to use scientific principles to end villains’ lives more efficiently. Later, the British developed the ‘long drop’ method of execution which broke the neck and killed almost instantaneously, but the medieval age was not so inventive.
    So it’s easy to understand that a lord would prefer to have his head removed, rather than ‘dance the Tyburn jig’. A good, strong arm with a battle-axe could take off a head with one quick sweep. Sadly, life – or death, in this case – isn’t always that easy and executioners were often incompetent. Take the example of Jack Ketch. During his attempt to execute Lord William Russell in 1683, it took him four blows of his axe to remove the head; the Duke of Monmouth in 1685 had to endure five attempts, before Ketch resorted to his knife.
    Of course, many people who were accused and convicted of crimes never made it to the gallows. All too often the poor devils died in gaol. Naturally the English have always had a sense of fair play, and if a gaoler caused the death of his inmates by too harsh a regime, he could be arrested as a homicide himself. Every death in prison resulted in an inquest, we are assured. So, for example, when we look at a two-month period in Wallingford Gaol in 1316, during which time twenty-eight people died as a result of cold, disease, hunger, thirst or
peine fort et dure
– literally ‘severe and hard punishment’ (
OED
), which meant, among other things, a starvation