. The owner of Baynard's Castle,
London, in the reign of John, had powers of trying criminals, and his
descendants long afterwards claimed the privileges, the most valued of
which was the right of drowning in the Thames traitors taken within
their jurisdiction. Drowning was the punishment ordained by Richard
Coeur de Lion for any soldier of his army who killed a fellow-crusader
during the passage to the Holy Land. Drowning was usually reserved for
women as being the least brutal form of death-penalty, but occasionally
a male criminal was so executed as a matter of favour. Thus in Scotland
in 1526 a man convicted of theft and sacrilege was ordered to be drowned
"by the queen's special grace." In 1611 a man was drowned at Edinburgh
for stealing a lamb, and in 1623 eleven gipsy women suffered there. By
that date the penalty was obsolete in England. It survived in Scotland
till 1685 (the year of the drowning of the Wigtoun martyrs). The last
execution by drowning in Switzerland was in 1652, in Austria 1776, in
Iceland 1777; while in France during the Revolution the penalty was
revived in the terrible _Noyades_ carried out by the terrorist Jean
Baptiste Carrier at Nantes. It was abolished in Russia at the beginning
of the 18th century.

DROYSEN, JOHANN GUSTAV (1808-1884), German historian, was born on the
6th of July 1808 at Treptow in Pomerania. His father, Johann Christoph
Droysen, was an army chaplain, in which capacity he was present at the
celebrated siege of Kolberg in 1806-7. As a child young Droysen
witnessed some of the military operations during the War of Liberation,
for his father was pastor at Greifenhagen, in the immediate
neighbourhood of Stettin, which was held by the French during the
greater part of 1813. The impressions of these early years laid the
foundation of the ardent attachment to Prussia which distinguished him,
like so many other historians of his generation. He was educated at the
gymnasium of Stettin and at the university of Berlin; in 1829 he became
a master at the Graue Kloster (or Grey Friars), one of the oldest
schools in Berlin; besides his work there he gave lectures at the
university, from 1833 as _privat-dozent_, and from 1835 as professor,
without a salary. During these years he was occupied with classical
antiquity; he published a translation of Aeschylus and a paraphrase of
Aristophanes, but the work by which he made himself known as a historian
was his _Geschichte Alexanders de