Severed Heads and Sunken Statues
At some point in every conversation about my postgraduate research on seventeenth-century political culture, I am forced to admit that a massive chunk of it looks at criminal executions and the public display of severed body parts. Eyebrows raise. I receive a wonderful mix of reacting stares, usually falling somewhere between bemusement and disgust. And then I have to explain why.
Although they seem far removed from what most people think history is (treaties, battles, kings and the like), public executions have a lot to say about how societies demarcated boundaries of legal and moral acceptability, and also how its members exchanged ideas about who could exercise its power. It is easy to assume that they simply represented authoritative power and were designed to serve as a brutal warning to other would-be criminals and transgressors of the state. However, work by scholars like Paul Friedland and Katherine Royer has shown how executions were conducted using cultural codes that communicated sophisticated messages. Criminals, especially traitors, were executed as symbols of their crimes; political objects whose destruction carried a constellation of carefully curated arguments about justice and legitimacy.
The same case can be made for all of the other (mostly pretty gross!) practises that accompanied these early modern executions: severed hands, heads on spikes, and the destruction of effigies as a means of execution in absentia. In April 1600, an Edinburgh court officer named Archibald Cornwall was charged with treason for nailing a cheaply printed portrait of King James VI onto gallows erected on the High Street, near to the mercat cross. He later claimed to have been only advertising the image for sale, along with other property confiscated from defaulting debtors as was customary at the time. However, the jury at his trial judged him guilty of treason for depicting James as a condemned criminal, making a political statement about the monarch’s claims to reign above the law. Cornwall was sentenced to be hanged at the same gallows and remain on show there for twenty-four hours wearing a placard that detailed his offences. His head was then posthumously displayed on the roof Edinburgh tolbooth, which stood just yards from the scene of his crime.
The episode shows an ideological struggle for control of Edinburgh’s gallows and the authority they represented. It was a debate played out in metaphors through symbolic effigies, bodies, and heads, and it was ultimately won by the crown who then commanded that the gallows be burned down and replaced so they could never be associated with contrary claims again.
Early modern executions were attended by large audiences in a way that jars starkly with present day sympathies. TV dramas and movies, like The Tudors (2007-2010) and Carry On Don’t Lose Your Head (1967), have made frequent use of cheering and jeering execution crowds as a visual shortcut to the brutality of the past. Quite accurately though, they have also depicted crowds supporting the condemned, won over to sympathy by their final words or sharing their resistance to rulers’ claimed authority. Execution conventions enabled the state to communicate with its subjects, but they also informed popular responses and challenges to this authority, as the jury’s interpretation of Cornwall’s actions at Edinburgh mercat cross make clear.
What is most fascinating, however, is that although this entire cultural language of public executions now seems so disturbingly alien, it remains lodged not only within our historical imagination but continues to inform how we ourselves articulate claims about parallel issues of space and authority. What is the difference between Archibald Cornwall hanging a picture of the king from the gallows in April 1600 and the effigy of Dominic Cummings seen dangling from a motorway bridge in May 2020? As I wrote this post, a long-resented statue of Bristol slave trader Edward Colston was dragged to the dock by protesters and pushed into water.
So, to bring this discussion back to its key point: why do I think they should be studied? Public executions provide a window onto historic societies at a point they seem most different to ours today. Yet, paradoxically, they are also a part of the pre-modern past that remains part of our present political culture, providing powerful rhetorical tools and fuelling current discourse. As weird as it initially sounds, understanding why a man’s head ended up on Edinburgh tolbooth in April 1600 not only provides information about how that past society functioned but also just might teach us something about ourselves.
Written by Laura Doak, GTA for LEADS