ExecutedToday.com

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

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

The United Kingdom came out on the winning side of World War II, but its hold on its globe-spanning territorial dominions was irrevocably weakened. As its own imperial offspring, the United States, took up the hegemon’s place, British colonies started breaking free — and those social and political sunderings frequently brought violence.

The next two days’ executions were true calendar neighbors, merely hours apart in 1942, as an empire at the end of its run fought for its survival.

• Feb. 12: Avraham Stern
• Feb. 13: Patrick Stanley Vaughan Heenan

Also On This Date

• 2003: Richard Edwin Fox, bogus job interviewer