Drowning

Drowning was long a customary mode of capital punishment. Tacitus, writing about the end of the 1st century, tells us that the Germans hanged their greater criminals, but that meaner and more infamous offenders were plunged under hurdles into bogs and fens. Drowning was also a Roman punishment. The Lex Cornelia decreed that parricides should be sewn up in a sack with a dog, cock, viper, and ape, and thrown into the sea. The Anglo-Saxon codes ordered women convicted of theft to be drowned. The punishment was in such common use throughout the middle ages that grants of capital jurisdiction ran cum fossa et furca (i.e. 'with pit and gallows'). The pit, ditch, or well was for drowning women; but the punishment was occasionally inflicted on men. In Scotland, in 1556, a man convicted of theft and sacrilege was sentenced to be drowned, 'by the queen's special grace.' So lately as 1611 a man was drowned at Edinburgh for stealing a lamb; in 1623 eleven Gypsy women were sentenced to be drowned in the Nor' Loch there. By that time the punishment of drowning had become obsolete in England. It survived in Scotland until 1685 (the year of the drowning of the Wigtown martyrs), and in France was employed so late as 1793 at Nantes in the infamous noyades of Carrier (q.v.). The offending wives of the Turkish sultans were wont to be sewn up in a sack and cast into the Bosporus.