Democratic Sentinel, Volume 11, Number 20, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 17 June 1887 — KILLING WOMEN. [ARTICLE]

KILLING WOMEN.

The Anglo-Saxons drowned women guilty of theft The criminal was thrown from the cliff or submerged. In the tenth century a woman was drowned at London bridge.” Women were punished by drowning in Scotland. In 1599 Gris sell Mathon was condemned by the High Court of Edinburgh “to be taken to the north lock and there drowned till she be dead. ” In ancient German history we read of female criminals being impaled in the mud, and in comparatively recent J ears the remains of several bodies aving been found to prove the truth of this assertion. In early England a cook once poisoned fourteen persons. The authorities did not believe they had a punishment sufficiently severe for her case, so a law was passed making her crime punishable by being boiled to death. According to the Danish laws women were buried alive for theft, a method of punishment not unknown in France. In 1331 Marote Dupias was scourged and subjected to this death at Abbeyvilla; in 1460 a woman named Perotte Mauger, a notorious thief and receiver of stolen goods was, by order of the Provost of Paris, buried alive in front of the gibbet of that city. A memorable instance of drowning occurred at Bavaria, October 14, 1436. Agnes Bernaurian, wife of the Duke Albert the Pious, was dropped off the bridge of the city of Strasburg into the Danube, by order of her father. She appears not to have been put into a sack, and her limbs not to have been securely bound, for she rose to the surface of the water and swam to the shore, crying “help,” “help,” but the executioner put a long pole into her hair and kept her down. In the early days of England men were too humane to execute women, but they drowned them. During the reign of Henry 111., however, a woman was hanged, but as she did not die after being on the gibbet a day, they cut her down and she was granted a pardon. Adulterous women and sorceresses were drowned or smothered in mud. Stones were fastened to their necks to prevent their swimming, or they were sewed up in sacks. Sometimes they were drowned in company with a cat, a dog and a snake.