(Thanks to Meaghan Good of the Charley Project for the guest post. -ed.)
At some unspecified day in November 1284, in Edward I’s England, Alice Bowe or Alice at the Bowe (not the garden designer of the same name) was burned at the stake for murder, and seven of the men who took part in her same crime were hanged.
Alice and sixteen others had lynched a guy who’d attacked their friend.
Alfred Marks’s 1908 book Tyburn Tree: Its History and Annals, available for free here, tells the story:
In the year 1284, the 13th of Edward I., Laurence Ducket, goldsmith, having grievously wounded one Ralph Crepin in Westcheape, fled into Bow church, to the which, in the night time, entered certain evil persons, friends unto the said Ralph, and slew the said Laurence, lying in the steeple, and then hanged him up, placing him so by the window as if he had hanged himself, and so was it found by inquisition: for the which fact Laurence Ducket, being drawn by the feet, was buried in a ditch without the City: but shortly after, by relation of a boy, who lay with the said Laurence at the time of his death, and had hid himself there for fear, the truth of the matter was disclosed.
Wherefore a certain woman, Alice atte Bowe, the mistress of Crepin, a clerk, the chief causer of the said mischief, and with her sixteen men, were imprisoned, and later, Alice was burnt, and seven were drawn and hanged, to wit, Reginald de Lanfar, Robert Pinnot, Paul de Stybbenheth, Thomas Corouner, John de Tholosane, Thomas Russel, and Robert Scott. Ralph Crepin, Jordan Godchep, Gilbert le Clerk and Geoffrey le Clerk were attainted of the felony and remained prisoners in the Tower.
The church was placed under an interdict by the archbishop: the doors and windows stopped up with thorns. But the body of Laurence was taken from the place where it lay, and given burial by the clergy in the churchyard. After a while, the bishop of Rochester, by command of the archbishop, removed the interdict.
On this day..
- 1881: Percy Lefroy Mapleton, police sketch milestone
- 1937: Vincenzo Baccala
- 1343: A dozen Breton nobles
- 1740: Edward Shuel, for a Catholic-Protestant marriage
- 1986: The Moiwana Massacre
- 1793: Antoine Barnave, constitutional monarchist
- 1938: Branislaw Tarashkyevich, Belarusian linguist
- 1330: Roger Mortimer, usurper
- 1957: Adolfas Ramanauskas-Vanagas
- 1781: The slaves of the Zong, for the insurance
- 1517: Torben Oxe
- 1941: Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya
- Themed Set: Women Against Fascism