Category Archives: Themed Sets

Themed Set: The Ballad

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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.

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Themed Set: Selections from the Newgate Calendar

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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.

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Themed Set: The Church confronts its competition

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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.

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Themed Set: The “Ex” Stands for “Extrajudicial”

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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.

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Themed Set: Belles Epoque

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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.

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Themed Set: Semiramis

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As a gauzy figure of Orientalist fantasy, the half-legendary (at least) Bronze Age queen Semiramis is hard to top.

Supposedly a Babylonian ruler, the exploits of Semiramis — erotic, politic, possibly magic — have been worthy of otherly projection from Dante on down.

Herodotus (to whom she was already archaic) has her a pan-Asian ruler; the guy whose proclivities gave us the term “masochism” wrote a novel about her (but good luck finding it in English). Of course, Queen S. was divinely descended and radiantly beautiful; in the general legend, she becomes queen when her husband King Ninus is killed (or in some versions, when she kills him), rules competently (or aggressively, or simply lustfully), then maybe gets killed by her son. This bare scaffolding will enact many a play. And the costumes!

Thanks, Rossini.

Check out some versions of her myth here, here and the hostile Armenian version here. Rumor has it her tomb is quite the find, too.

In Boccaccio’s Famous Women, she’s a girl who knows how to have a good time, but invents the chastity belt to keep her female courtiers in line, or possibly to reduce competition. (More about this volume here (pdf), though this review doesn’t have a lot to say about our heroine.)

In the dour outlook of a particular brand of fundamentalist Protestant, Semiramis can also be a sort of proto-pagan, a former harlot (natch) who invented goddess-worship. (A seminal text in this theory is this 19th century pamphlet by Rev. Alexander Hislop.)

Does it say anywhere that she built Babylon? Eh. It does now!


Semiramis Building Babylon, by Edgar Degas (1861)

So what does Semiramis have to do with the ultimate sanction? Not much … but thanks for reading.

She breaks the monotony a little bit — and what do you know? She makes two blink-and-you’ll-miss-her cameos for totally unrelated (to each other or, really, to Semiramis) executions this weekend.

Update: And the Hanging Gardens of Babylon are sometimes attributed to her as the Hanging Gardens of Semiramis. So what if that’s almost certainly wrong … doesn’t the name just take you right there?

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Themed Set: Counterrevolution

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As the Enlightenment gave way to the West’s great revolutionary age in the late 18th and early 19th century, the crowned heads of Europe weren’t just sitting around — and with good reason. Regimes don’t get to be ancien without knowing how to deal with troublemakers.

For the next three days, Executed Today presents the mailed fist in three lands, and the agitators it smashed.

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Themed Set: Judging Abortion

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Abortion and the death penalty have never struck the Headsman as especially similar matters, but they’re interconnected as “life” issues for many.

Whether or not one conceives them as part of a seamless garment, the judgments one makes about abortion are as juridically charged as they are emotionally charged: if abortion is murder, one might punish it by death.

The next two dates’ executions reflect the seemingly intractable ethical and practical uncertainties entailed by extending the concept of “life” into the womb … and the different parties to whom the fatal result of the severest moral calculus might be charged.

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Themed Set: At the End of the Rope

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Every entry on this blog is, of course, an ending of a sort.

But some endings are more final than others.

For centuries in the British Empire and its descendant countries, the hanging — and especially the public hanging — were the very image of the death penalty; its most characteristic venue at the corner of Hyde Park is still marked with a stone.

For many reasons, that model changed in the 19th and 20th centuries: gradually and unevenly, hangings moved behind prison walls or were replaced with (purportedly) more humane methods, even as capital punishment itself came under pressure.

For the remainder of the week, Executed Today remembers a few milestones in the changing landscape of hanging under English-inspired jurisprudence in the mid-20th century.

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Themed Set: Thermidor

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Paris, 1794

It is Thermidor — Month of Heat — by that queer artifact of the times, the Revolutionary calendar, and in the blistering summer the guillotine rots its own scaffold.

It is the climax of that emblematic moment of the French Revolution, often wrongly standing to casual observation as synonymous with the entire revolution. Jarring indeed how brief the span of those pregnant, dangerous days, that upon the storming of the Bastille the guillotine had not yet been erected and from that traditional birthdate of the Revolution were eclipsed successively the Bourbon monarchy, the Constitutionalist Assembly, the Girondin liberals, Marat, Danton … culminating in the bloody hegemony of Robespierre and the fatal test between the Jacobins and their enemies.

By the spring and summer of 1794, Paris is delivered fully to Robespierre. “Terror,” he says, “is only justice prompt, severe and inflexible; it is then an emanation of virtue; it is less a distinct principle than a natural consequence of the general principle of democracy, applied to the most pressing wants of the country.” A blip on the screen chronologically, this period seems endless to those who survive it, and it reverberates endlessly to those who succeed it.

In this Revolution-era cartoon, legendary Parisian headsman Sanson, having run out of victims, guillotines himself.

For the next week, join Executed Today in 1794’s Month of Heat as day by day the Terror rages at its apex, inscrutably suffering citizens to live or die — until of a sudden it succumbs to its own rot.

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