rious crimes burning alive
was formerly very wide-spread. It was common among the Romans, being given
in the XII. Tables as the special penalty for arson. Under the Gothic codes
adulterers were so punished, and throughout the middle ages it was the
civil penalty for certain heinous crimes, _e.g._ poisoning, heresy,
witchcraft, arson, bestiality and sodomy, and so continued in some cases,
nominally at least, till the beginning of the 19th century. In England,
under the common law, women condemned for high treason or petty treason
(murder of husband, murder of master or mistress, certain offences against
the coin, &c.) were burned, this being considered more "decent" than
hanging and exposure on a gibbet. In practice the convict was strangled
before being burnt. The last woman burnt in England suffered in 1789, the
punishment being abolished in 1790.

Burning was not included among the penalties for heresy under the Roman
imperial codes; but the burning of heretics by orthodox mobs had long been
sanctioned by custom before the edicts of the emperor Frederick II. (1222,
1223) made it the civil-law punishment for heresy. His example was followed
in France by Louis IX. in the Establishments of 1270. In England, where the
civil law was never recognized, the common law took no cognizance of
ecclesiastical offences, and the church courts had no power to condemn to
death. There were, indeed, in the 12th and 13th centuries isolated
instances of the burning of heretics. William of Newburgh describes the
burning of certain foreign sectaries in 1169, and early in the 13th century
a deacon was burnt by order of the council of Oxford (Foxe ii. 374; cf.
Bracton, _de Corona_, ii. 300), but by what legal sanction is not obvious.
The right of the crown to issue writs _de haeretico comburendo_, claimed
for it by later jurists, was based on that issued by Henry IV. in 1400 for
the burning of William Sawtre; but Sir James Stephen (_Hist. Crim. Law_)
points out that this was issued "with the assent of the lords temporal,"
which seems to prove that the crown had no right under the common law to
issue such writs. The burning of heretics was actually made legal in
England by the statute _de haeretico comburendo_ (1400), passed ten days
after the issue of the above writ. This was repealed in 1533, but the Six
Articles Act of 1539 revived burning as a penalty [v.04 p.0855] for denying
transubstantiation. Under Queen Mary the acts of Henry IV. and He