Old Bailey

The Old Bailey is a court building - we would call it a courthouse - which is one of several buildings housing the Crown Court in central London. The Old Bailey deals with important criminal cases of the Greater London area (and sometimes exceptional cases from throughout England and Wales.)

A part of the present building stands on the site of the medieval Newgate Gaol, on Old Bailey Road. The road follows the line of London's fortified wall (bailey.)

My patio is walled. I wonder if just any wall can be called a bailey? But then I wonder about a lot of things that come to very little.

The court was rebuilt and reopened in 1674, following the Fire of London. Hangings in the street outside were a public spectacle until 1868. Typical of the genteel and reserved British, riotous crowds would gather to pelt the condemned with rotten fruit and vegetables and rocks as the unfortunate made his way to the gallows. In 1807, 28 people were crushed to death after a pie-sellers stall overturned. Gosh, those were the days, eh?

I wonder if it existed very long before the fire? If so, perhaps it was here where Guy Fawkes took his swan dive off the gallows, splattering his head like a ripe melon on the cobbles to rob the hangman. Boy, that sure showed him, wot? But no head left to pike. I don't remember if he was still quartered or if they all just went home after that. Ah, gentle Albion. (I recently learned of Albion from this rather unusual blog.)

Today, the Old Bailey has it's own website complete with searchable records of trial proceedings through the ages, currently available for your voyeuristic pleasure, 1674-1913, should you be one of the people who can read the English of that era which called walls baileys.

Breaking on the Wheel, Preparations for Halloween

With Bonfire Night looming (beckoning?) in the not-too-distant future, the thoughts naturally turn lovingly to executions past, both botched and well-done. Although Guy Fawkes wasn't broken on the wheel, he is nonetheless an annual reminder of the more exciting public sport of yesteryear.

I promise not to abuse this occasion to once again showcase my BritishSpeak-gained odd vocabulary which every year (and only once each year, it seems) allows me to say words like recusant and undercroft. Woops.

Guy (Gui if you prefer) was only intended to be strangle-hanged, drawn and quartered, and head-piked, but, as you all know, cheated the spectators by swan-diving off the scaffold head first onto the cobblestones. History doesn't tell us if they had a backup act waiting in the wings or not. I certainly hope so. They DID go ahead and pike his now-misshapen (one assumes) head, but it just wasn't the same. When scheduled entertainment doesn't go off as planned, it casts a pall over the audience from which it is really hard for the promoters of the event to recover.

I will certainly do another post on Guy Gui come November 5 (I think that's the date) but I promise not to use those words again. It does warm me bonfire-roasted cockles to feel the warmth of your admiration, though.

No, breaking on the wheel was more exciting than simply lifting a bloke up on his toes by his neck and watching the odd facial contortions. My mind goes back in time and I imagine myself getting a peasant day off and working my way up to the front row, admonishing my neighbors to shut their damn gobs so I can hear the gurgling and wheezings emitting from the toe-lifted unfortunate on the stage. As it were.

But - Oh! - to attend a Wheel Breaking!

The offender (could be a heretic, I suppose) was placed on his or her back and bound to a sturdy wagon wheel in a Da Vinci Vitruvian Man-like pose (one imagines) and, while the probably unwashed madding crowd presses in and the popcorn and little wheel souvenir venders hawk their wares, the wheel of fortune is spun and the lucky contestant in the black hood begins to break the slowly passing bones with a large hammer or iron bar.

Later refinements had the unfortunate man or woman bound, perhaps nailed - who knows? - to one of those X-shaped (St. Andrews) crosses which was then laid upon the sturdy horizontal wheel. This had the effect (in case you haven't guessed the purpose) of raising the body up a few inches so as to get a cleaner break of the limbs. Hideous screams were encouraged.

At about this point in my reverie, my mind is always interrupted by someone on the BBC being interviewed and disparaging the barbarity of Texas' inhumane overdose executions. Then my mind fades back from the BBC to the screams of the revolving wheel method used not terribly long ago in England. Or maybe France. Being a simple American, no thoughts of hypocrisy enter my mind. Only the twisted features of the wheel-man flicker from Da Vinci's man to, say, Roman Polanski's.

They say after a while, the legs and arms would get mushy enough (I always have a mental image of the sign down the street from my house advertising "boneless chicken" for some reason) to "weave" or "braid" them through the wheel spokes, thus giving enough support so that the whole thing, wheel-cross-pulverized living thing, can be hoisted up onto a pole where it will be left for passers by to admire and birds to peck away at. The moaning continues for days.

Unless.

Unless one gets a "favor" or "grace" from the church, for a small donation one assumes, in which case the hammer-wielder would strike the strikee in the chest or even head in a final blow which mercifully kills him/her. This was considered a charity and was not for just anyone who is wheeled. Incidentally, always on the lookout to make this blog as educational as possible when opportunities arise, I would share with you that this final blow was called the coup de grace (grace, get it?) and is where that phrase came from. This is true. This would have been in France, of course. In England, there were no anti-pecking endings that I could discover in my scholarly pursuit of truth.

Let me see. What else?

No, that's about all. Unless my friend Sobriquet (Soubriquet when in the UK) can add some variations from his vast store of .... ummmmm.... variations.

Carrying on

I am happy to report that I have discovered another opportunity to use the word recusant. You may recall I learned the word doing research for the unfortunate Guy Fawkes incident. I feel if one doesn't use new words, one quickly forgets them. Unfortunately, recusant isn't a word often used in my country, since people here could care less about someone's religion. Couldn't care less, I mean. Unless they are Muslim, I guess, but that is quite another story.

Recusant, I'm sure you remember, means Roman Catholic. Well, actually it means refusing to be Church of England, but Catholic is the main alternate choice that used to piss off Henry VIII, good queen Bess, James six-one (or is it one-six?), et al. Et tu. Et eggs.

"What did you have for breakfast, Tommy?"

"Teacher, I et six eggs for breakfast."

"Ate."

"Maybe it WAS eight I et."

Sigh.

It all started when I was doing research on the Order of the Garter. I think that part started when I Googled the Princess Royal by mistake, and I'm not sure the connection. I am even less sure how that led to another opportunity to use recusant. Wait... now I remember. That Parker-Bowes fellow was Anne's first boyfriend.

It's all rather circular: sir Humphrey de Trafford, millionaire multimillionaire racehorse owner, who came by his fortune through sacrifice and hard work and not through being connected to the right people, had a daughter who was the mother of the aforementioned Andrew Parker-Bowes, the guy who had the brief "relationship" with the Princess Royal whose brother quite liked one Camilla Rosemary Shand (whom I refuse to call Rosie) who later became the Dutchess of Cornwall (unless you are of the Scottish persuasion, then she's the Dutchess of Rothesay.) Well, Andrew didn't marry Anne, whom he was dating, and neither did her brother marry Camilla, whom he was more than infatuated with, so the sordid story goes. No, indeed. Andrew married Camilla right out from under him. In a manner of speaking. Then, though Andrew did marry Camilla, he, Andrew, took up with one Rosemary Pitman, descendent of the famous inventor of the Pitman system of shorthand writing, Andrew seemingly having a weakness for women named Rosemary, while the aforementioned brother of the Princess Royal never really let his affection for the Andrew-wife Camilla stay what you would call unrequited, if you get my drift. Now, if this slippery hole is still not quite deep enough for you, let me mention also that the aforementioned inventor of the famous shorthand system was a brother-in-law to an uncle of Diana, Princess of Wales. My GOD do these people have no shame!

And yet, I find I have drifted somewhat off the point in my righteous indignation. The de Traffords (racehorse guy, and so forth) are notable historical RECUSANTS. That means Andrew, who actually presumably TOUCHED the Princess Royal, was a gol-derned Catholic, same as Guy Fawkes. So was Camilla. JesusJosephandMary. And Diana? Who knows. She learned shorthand and took up with a Muslim, but she wasn't reCUsant by a long shot.

Just don't get me wound up about Camilla's ancestor, a mistress of Edward VII. Circular indeed. I know you won't.

Guy Fawkes Day (That's today)

Remember, remember the Fifth of November,

The Gunpowder Treason and Plot,

I know of no reason

Why Gunpowder Treason

Should ever be forgot.

Guy Fawkes, Guy Fawkes, t’was his intent

To blow up King and Parliament.

Three-score barrels of powder below

To prove old England’s overthrow;

By God’s providence he was catch’d

With a dark lantern and burning match.

Holloa boys, holloa boys, let the bells ring.

Holloa boys, holloa boys, God save the King!

I must tell you that on the day I started this blog a couple years back, all that I knew about Guy Fawkes was... um... nothing, actually.

Today, I know a little bit more about the holiday, though I still don't know why you would want to have a holiday for such a man. It is as if we in the U.S. were to have a Benedict Arnold Day, or, more to the point of bombing government buildings, a Bill Ayers Day. Now, if you were to have a "Burning Guy Fawkes in Effigy Day," that I would understand. I am going to use this space today to tell you what I've learned about Guy Fawkes.

First, a couple of really cool words I have added to my vocabulary:

1. Recusant

2. Undercroft

Recusant: a person who refuses to submit to an authority or to comply with a regulation. Primarily refers to historic Roman Catholics in England who refused to attend the Church of England.

Undercroft: a basement or cellar under a building, often bricked and with vaulted ceilings. Used for storage, of, say, gunpower or like that.

Guy Fawkes (1570-1606) was born in York. His father died when he was eight years old and his mother then married a recusant Catholic. Fawkes himself converted to Catholicism and emigrated to Spain. Where there were a LOT of Catholic folk.

As often happens with religion, Spain fought the 80 Years War with the Protestant Dutch just because, and Guy (called "Guido" by the Spanish) took part and became a fairly knowledgeable soldier. I don't know how long the war lasted. I'm guessing Guido was a demolition man, but I don't know that for sure. Somewhere along the way I'll bet he learned to speak Spanish. According to another unreliable source (Wikipedia being the first) it is said that when he was about to be drawn and quartered, he shouted, "Ole! Ole!" just before he jumped. Only this source had two upside down exclamation marks and mine doesn't.

Sometime after his military discharge, Guido, having fallen in with a bad crowd, thought it would be a good idea to return to England and kill King James I. As you do.

Security being not quite what it is today in our airports, the conspirators were able to rent some storage space in the undercroft under Parliament. "Hire," I mean. They have since installed motion detectors and retired security guards down there. But, back then, it didn't occur to anyone that renting out space under Parliament to people who frothed at the mouth was anything unusual.

Quickly, the protestant-hating renegades moved in a couple megatons of explosives and chose Guido F. to guard the stuff until D-Day.

Someone who either loved James or hated Guido sent an anonymous letter to the authorities, though, and in the early morning of 5 November, 1605, the coppers came arrestingly, and read the hapless G.F. his rights.

"You have the right to be tortured until you confess." And, before long, Guido broke. As you do.

Yes, Guido broke from the torture (no pun intended) and the hanging/quarter-drawing was scheduled for January next.

Well, getting more or less right to the point, on 31 January 1606, standing on the gallows and a-waitin' his hanging, no doubt freezing his treasonous arse in the January breeze, contemplating the agony that was awaiting him at the drawing and quartering party which was scheduled after the half-hanging (partial strangulation, actually) and came to the obvious conclusion: "Fuck this!" and jumped off the scaffold and broke his neck. By breaking his neck, he thus avoided hanging and... um... breaking his neck. He showed them.

But, truly - and there is no real reason not to throw in a tidbit of truth here - back then they didn't hang you like we think of hanging. No, when that many people show up for the show, they drug it out more. So instead of dropping you with a rope around your neck, they slowly RAISED you with a rope around your neck. When you turned purple enough, they took the rope off and brought you back to consciousness, then they had four horses yank your arms and legs off your torso. Then you just sort of lay there looking up at the sky, blinking rapidly, yearning for some pain killers. I assume. Piking your head was then optional. This was supposed to act as a deterrent for any would-be traitors in the viewing audience. It probably did.

Since Guy Fawkes was to be hanged and then drawn and quartered, of course the British celebrate this event with bonfires and fireworks. Go figure.

You'd think they'd hold horse-pulling contests or something.