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No medieval* battle in Christendom is better-known to the present-day hoi polloi than the Battle of Agincourt, that signal upset victory when young King Henry V and his invading English yeoman archers stunned a seemingly unbeatable force of French knights by outsmarting them like Belichik versus Martz.

This battle’s interpretive palimpsest — is it a parable of nascent capitalism? of national character? of technology? — has been much-bandied in the centuries since (and must weigh against England’s subsequent reversals in the Hundred Years’ War). This site’s interest is more parochial: the presence among the casualties of those who died by execution.

• Oct. 24: Bardolph, on the eve of battle
• Oct. 25: French prisoners of war, during the battle

* If you want to call the early 15th century “medieval.” We stake no periodization claim.

Also On This Date

• 1945: Vidkun Quisling, who made his name as a traitor

These pages have noticed many women to fall under the executioner’s shadow.

We have noticed too how remarkably women’s crimes and women criminals and women’s sentences are “gendered”.

In matters of patriarchy, familial behavior, sexual incontinence and resistance … it’s unsurprising to find women marked as such.

Yet even in run-of-the-mill criminal scenarios — what would be run-of-the-mill for a man — female offenders stand to attract the prurient gaze, from breathless media to academic masturbation.

When we last paused to consider the mystique of the executed woman, we focused on political criminals whose deaths were a matter of state. (Though as we have seen, even in a political purge gender can be a weapon.)

Join Executed Today this time to consider a few women of less exalted criminality … and our own response to seeing them as scaffold-fodder.

• Oct. 8: Rachel Wall, pirate
• Oct. 9: Aileen Wournos, serial killer
• Oct. 10: Susan Newell, the last woman hanged in Scotland
• Oct. 11: Margaret Waters, baby farmer
• Oct. 12: Pauline McCoy

Also On This Date

• 1997: Ricky Lee Green

With this post, we unveil a new metadata category, the Daily Double — related executions on actual consecutive dates in the same year. (We’re also retroactively defining an old Themed Set post into this category.)

The Turkish Republic, so violently born, has endured a tumultuous past half-century or so. In keeping with the Cold War Zeitgeist, it also enjoyed its share of coups.

The first such struck in May of 1960, toppling the elected (but by then deeply unpopular with young military officers) government of Adnan Menderes. Menderes had been Prime Minister for a decade, but he and two of his ministers would check out with the distinction of being the last politicians executed in Turkey.

• Sep. 16: Fatin Rustu Zorlu and Hasan Polatkan

• Sep. 17: Adnan Menderes

• 1560: Arnaud du Tilh, alias Martin Guerre

Desperate, violent social upheaval seems to go with Russia like black bread with pickled herring.

“How can you make a revolution without executions?” Lenin once asked.

As he knew — very well he knew — that also happens to be a preferred tool of counterrevolution.

And for every successful revolution, there are dozens of abortive attempts — failed coups d’etat — empty plots that never get off the drawing board — to harvest the heads of a new order’s would-be engineers.

Russia/the USSR had flesh-rending struggles for power in the early 20th century. These are a few casualties whose revolutions didn’t take … and who, given the opportunity, would have hewed to Lenin’s own maxim with respect to the opponents who chanced to get the better of them.

• Aug. 28: Bronislav Kaminski
• Aug. 29: Zinaida Konoplyannikov
• Aug. 30: Grigory Semenov

(This “themed set” is actually a rewrite from the original — product of discovering a little too late a bad date in the database. This discovery did actually solve some editorial complications, but obviously would have been less embarrassing had it been effected before pressing “submit”. Oh, well. Blawg.

Although the text below is no longer operative, it is included for transparency, historical completeness, and because we are loathe to abandon any Lebowski reference no matter how ill-founded.)

Themed Set: They Were Russian Nazis, Dude?

Are we gonna split hairs here?

Even genocide isn’t completely black and white. Although wielded by a distinctly anti-Slavic power, fascism found collaborators among the peoples who figured to be enslaved, murdered, and exiled.

And no surprise, in the scheme of things.

The lines of battle, both literal and rhetorical, always conceal a million complex interactions between peoples meeting — for it is still a manner of meeting, through gunsights.

Whether driven by ideology or merely driven to the wall by the Hobson’s choice between collaboration and resistance in a war between two of history’s cruelest state edifices, some set of people will always be driven in a conflict to side-choosing that others find treacherous.

Maybe you. Maybe me. And maybe Executed Today’s next three.

Also On This Date

• 1807: James McLean, twice

Our tour through the world’s condemned has made the company of many a woman, but our hobby is a noticeably gendered one: whether as common criminals, fallen royals, political prisoners, war criminals, or any other subset of the execution-prone, women who face the headsmen map differently in the public conscience than men.

If the distinctions are none other than those that structure every social transactions, the dramatic tableau of the scaffold raises the stakes, sharpens the gendering, be she whore or madonna, black widow or holy maid.

Often, condemned women excite more sympathy, even romantic longing; occasionally, a crime’s inversion of femininity redoubles their opprobrium. A few criminal categories — abortion, witchcraft — are, for lack of a better term, female-gendered by default.

Though this series hardly marks the last women for these pages, three very notable cases in very different situations offer a vantage point not only on female and male through history, but on one’s own response to the spectacle of the executed woman.

• July 15: Princess Misha

• July 16: Anne Askew
• July 17: Charlotte Corday

Also On This Date

• 1685: James Scott, Duke of Monmouth

The ballad and the scaffold go together like Jack and Ketch.

Narrative popular poetry, the ballad lyricizes precisely the sort of public spectacle and collective drama that brings the crowds to Tyburn. And with identifiable sub-genres like the murder ballad and the outlaw ballad, it only stands to reason that there’d be hanging ballads too.

It’s such a perfect marriage that balladeers hardly feel constrained to wait on flesh-and-blood hangings for inspiration but readily memorialize (frequently in the first-person voice of the doomed) a fictional, idealized crime where all the pathos and tragedy can be arranged just so.

Of course, it’s also the artist’s prerogative to just fictionalize real-life source material.

“Sam Hall,” for instance, was adapted in the mid-19th century from a ballad about the 1707 hanging of Jack Hall — finding in common between these two very different times “the social need to believe that it was possible to face death with such insouciance.”

If not all such rise to the literary level of, say, “The Ballad of the Hanged Man,” ballads’ demonstrable popular appeal has made them the metrical vehicle of choice for the crime du jour. Naturally, when the ballad opera conquered the stage, its first subject was the gallows-bound criminal underworld.

Whether commemorating doomed revolutionaries or doomed criminals, the ballad remains a part of our collective memory-shaping to give we who remain behind purchase on the timelessness of those launched into eternity.

Join Executed Today as we explore a few ballad-worthy events in the rich history of the death penalty.

• July 5: Jean Livingston, Lady Waristoun

• July 6: Francois Benjamin Courvoisier
• July 7: Charles Thomas Wooldridge
• July 8: William John Marchant
• July 9: Rane Jonsen

Also On This Date

• 1947: Ding Mocun, not as hot a lay in real life

The popular crime chronicle The Newgate Calendar is a rich broth these pages dare indulge but sparingly.

Well, not too sparingly.

Though far less concerned with journalistic precision than with sermonizing — and, in their totality, largely repetitive templates of lurid voyeurism and moralistic hypocrisy — the stories can make colorful reads on their own.

Here is a harvest of halter-bound harlots, highwaymen, and housebreakers — another age’s criminal element, now long forgotten. (Only one of this series’ entrants would be recognizable today to one Englishman or -woman in a thousand.)

But the exploits of these petty criminals, scrabbling in a small corner of a world being violently reshaped by conquest, extermination and slavery — and the occasional catastrophic economic bubble — have a familiar feel. Ever is it thus.

Little Villains must submit to Fate,
That great Ones may enjoy the World in State.

And given a little latitude for time and place, even the particulars ring true.

This vichyssois of underclass bawd, middle-class anxiety, clerical flimflammery, popular legend, human foible and yellow journalism hustle could as well have been ripped from any evening’s cable news outrage du jour or any supermarket tabloid’s shrieking banner. The annals of Newgate compellingly meet this blog’s search for the scaffold’s part in the timeless human tragicomedy.

• Apr. 1: Jack Withrington

• Apr. 2: John Donellan
• Apr. 3: Nicholas Horner
• Apr. 4: Theodore Gardelle
• Apr. 5: Arundel Cooke and John Woodburne
• Apr. 6: William Page
• Apr. 7: Dick Turpin
• Apr. 8: Ann Beddingfield and Richard Ringe
• Apr. 9: Charles Drew

Also On This Date

• 325: Licinius, Constantine's last obstacle

This blog takes a broad view of martyrdom, but for martyrs of the classically pious cast, nobody fills the cemeteries like Holy Mother Church.

Heck, Rome has been using this blog’s concept since way before Movable Type. No, I mean way before movable type.

Say what you will about the official martyrology and those that populate it — like all martyrs, they have something to tell us about their world and ours.

CC image of a Notre Dame gargoyle from Brian Jeffery Beggerly

Join Executed Today over the next four days as we listen to some martyrs’ stories of the violently negotiated boundaries — geographical, temporal, political, and spiritual — of Church authority and identity as against the communities that disputed it.

• Mar. 8: St. Philemon the Actor
• Mar. 9: St. Bruno of Querfurt
• Mar. 10: St. John Ogilvie
• Mar. 11: St. Eulogius of Cordoba

Also On This Date

• 1845: An Italian highwayman, as witnessed by Dickens

Somewhere in the foggy marches that stretch between a ceremonial Tyburn hanging and the many guises of lethal collective violence in the workaday world dwells the editorial discretion of Executed Today, keeping a lonely vigil at a forgotten customs-post.

What, after all, is an execution?

This site has dallied before, and will dally again, with those border cases — summary executions and borderline executions.

Joined thematically as near-executions, these next three days are of themselves as different from one another as three different killings can be … suggesting the topical breadth spanned by the ultimate sanction.

• Nov. 19: Marshall Ratliff lynched for the Santa Claus bank robbery

• Nov. 20: Aper, by the Emperor Diocletian
• Nov. 21: Partisans by the Sonderbataillon Dirlewanger

Also On This Date

• 2002: Craig Neil Ogan, drug war informant
• 1915: Joe Hill

In three wars that would define modern Europe, three women of different character and class met executions that would resonate with the exigencies of their changing times … and the lasting commonalities of social places structured by gender.

• Oct. 15: Mata Hari

• Oct. 16: Marie Antoinette
• Oct. 17: Anne de Chantraine

Also On This Date

• 1896: Rainandriamampandry and Prince Ratsimamanga
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