Female Executions: Martyrs, Murderesses and Madwomen Read Online Free

out the sentence the woman had met with an accident and had broken her neck. On hearing that an offender he had sentenced had not, for whatever reason, received the punishment handed down by the Court, the Lord started to rebuke the constable but desisted when the officer hastily pointed out that despite her accident he had not failed in his duties, adding, ‘Every morning I rubbed her neck with neatsfoot oil, and then I whipped her as ordered!’
    Bateman, Mary (England)
    Starting her working life as a housemaid, Mary Bateman became ambitious and left her job to become a fortune-teller in Leeds, waxing prosperous on the fees and valuables she extorted from her more gullible clients and by providing young women with nostrums with which to bring about abortions. Obsessed by greed, the 41-year-old ‘Yorkshire Witch’ sold some ‘magical’ potions to a Mrs Perigo as a health cure, but they had the opposite effect and brought about the woman’s death.
    At her trial Mary Bateman was found guilty of murder, but when she was sentenced to be hanged, she ‘pleaded her belly’, i.e., claimed that she was pregnant. On hearing her say that, many women in the public gallery tried to leave the courtroom in order to avoid being inducted as a jury of matrons who would have to examine the prisoner and ascertain the truth or otherwise of her claim – much rested on such a verdict, for the law of the day stated that ‘if the claimant be four and a half months advanced in that state, she shall not be executed until after giving birth’. But the judge ordered that the courtroom doors be locked, Mary then being escorted to another room where twelve women eventually pronounced that her claim was unfounded (although obviously she could have been in the earlier stages of pregnancy).
    Her well-attended execution took place at York on 20 March 1809, many of the credulous spectators believing that she would employ her supernatural powers to vanish into thin air when the noose tightened; however, when it did, she didn’t! Meanwhile, 23 miles away in Leeds, 2,500 residents had paid three pence each in admission charges to view the corpse on its return to the town; the crowds, entertained by jugglers and balladeers, supplied with food and drink by itinerant purveyors of pies and ale, waited more or less patiently.
    At midnight the hearse finally arrived, the queues then lining up to file past the cadaver, after which it was taken to Leeds General Hospital for dissection. Not only did that medical institution benefit surgically by the invasive examination of her anatomy, but also financially, its coffers being enhanced by the proceeds from those who had viewed her external torso. As was customary, following dissection her corpse was skinned and after being scraped and tanned, was sold in small pieces as souvenirs to ghoulish-minded collectors.

In 1949 a case was brought in a London Court against a horse’s owner and its trainer, alleging their negligence in that, on the horse leaving the unsaddling enclosure, it kicked the plaintiff on the head, she thereby sustaining a fractured skull. Some legal argument then arose regarding the correct way in which a horse should be led in order to prevent such an incident. The matter was resolved by the counsel for the defence who proceeded to borrow the stuffed head of a horse from a London shop, which dealt in harnesses, outside which the head was usually displayed.
Then followed the strange and doubtless unprecedented sight within the hallowed precincts of the court, of the counsel and the usher parading the stuffed head around the chamber, one carrying the head, the other controlling the steed as they demonstrated to the jury the manner in which it should have been done. This evidence, straight from the horse’s mouth, proved conclusive, the case being settled in favour of the plaintiff.
    Becherin, Ursula (Germany)
    On 17 July 1582 Ursula Becherin of Hessdorf, an arsonist, burnt down a stall belonging