h
imposed upon friendship so horrible a task.

In 1827, an Act was passed which directs the court to enter a plea of
"not guilty," when a prisoner refuses to plead. It is surprising that
the inhuman practice of pressing to death should have lingered so long.
In this chapter we have only given particulars of a few of the many
cases which have come under our notice in the legal byways of old
England.

Drowning.

Among the nations of antiquity, drowning was a very common mode of
execution. Four-and-a-half centuries before the birth of Christ, the
Britons inflicted death by drowning in a quagmire. In Anglo-Saxon times
women found guilty of theft were drowned. For a long period in the
Middle Ages, the barons and others who had the power of administering
laws in their respective districts possessed a drowning pit and a
gallows.

Drowning was a punishment of King Richard of the Lion Heart, who
ordained by a decree that it should be the doom of any soldier of his
army who killed a fellow-crusader during the passage to the Holy Land.

The owner of Baynard's Castle, London, in the reign of John, had the
power of trying criminals, and his descendants long afterwards claimed
the privilege, the most valued of which was the right of drowning, in
the Thames, traitors taken within the limits of his territory.[21]

Bearing on this subject the annals of Sandwich supply some important
information. It is recorded, that in the year 1313, "a presentment was
made before the itinerant Justices at Canterbury, that the prior of
Christ Church had, for nine years, obstructed the high road leading from
Dover Castle to Sandwich by the sea-shore by a water-mill, and the
diversion of a stream called the Gestlyng, where felons condemned to
death within the hundred should be drowned, but could not be executed
that way for want of water. Further, that he raised a certain gutter
four feet, and the water that passed that way to the gutter ran to the
place where the convicts were drowned, and from whence their bodies were
floated to the river, and that after the gutter was raised the drowned
bodies could not be carried into the river by the stream, as they used
to be, for want of water."[22]

Drowning was not infrequently awarded as a matter of leniency, and as a
commutation of what were considered more severe forms of death. We have
an instance of such a case in Scotland in 1556, when a man who had been
found guilty of theft and sacrilege