r a slow fire. Some
burglars, in the same year, had their hands cut off, their arms pulled
out with red-hot pincers, and were finally beheaded and cut in pieces.
The next year some wretched coiners were boiled alive. Infanticides
were burnt. Other crimes were punished by searing the tongue with
red-hot iron, or by breaking the prisoner alive upon the wheel, and
leaving him to die without food or water. A parricide was condemned to
this, with still more hideous tortures added, in 1557. In 1524 a
criminal nearly escaped his sentence altogether because his jailor's
daughter fell in love with him, and asked the Court to be allowed to
marry him. The question of sanctuary came up very often, as may be
imagined, and only by very slow degrees were the privileges of the
holy places taken from them.

Though many of these punishments hardly seem to recognise the humanity
of the victim, the privilege of confession to a priest had been
allowed to prisoners condemned to death ever since 1397, at the
instance of a famous preacher named Jean Houard, in years when even
more barbarous tortures were still practised, though the strength of
sanctuaries was, as some compensation, at its height. Judicial ideas,
however, took a long time to become civilised; for in 1408 a pig was
solemnly hanged for having killed a little child. The invention of
printing[62] no doubt did some good in this direction, and by 1490 the
first printer in Rouen, Martin Morin, was established in the Rue St.
Lo, close by the spot where the lawcourts soon appeared. Lest you
should think that the Palais de Justice of sixteenth century Rouen was
even worse than the terrible chapters in Rabelais would lead his
readers to imagine, I must tell you here the story of an advocate of
Rouen that may in part make up for the gruesome pages which precede
it.

[Footnote 62: Mr Gosse records in his "Modern English Literature" that
it was a citizen of Rouen (Andrew Miller by name) who introduced
printing into Scotland in 1507.]

The Parliament of Normandy, as the Echiquier was called in 1558, had
assembled in the Palais de Justice on the morning of the 26th of
August, to discuss a case which involved the interpretation, if not
the actual integrity, of the famous code known as the "Grand Coutumier
de Normandie"; and representatives of every court had been summoned to
the hearing. A certain burgess of Rouen, Guillaume Laurent by name,
convicted of murder, had had his hand cut off bef