Stuff You Should Know - Short Stuff: Hanged, Drawn and Quartered

Episode Date: July 14, 2021

The words "hanged, drawn and quartered" are an accurate description of the grizzly execution process. They're just not in the right order. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hey everybody, when you're staying at an Airbnb, you might be like me wondering, could my place be an Airbnb? And if it could, what could it earn? So I was pretty surprised to hear about Lauren in Nova Scotia who realized she could Airbnb her cozy backyard treehouse and the extra income helps cover her bills and pays for her travel. So yeah, you might not realize it, but you might have an Airbnb too. Find out what your place could be earning at airbnb.ca. Hey, and welcome to the short stuff, I'm Josh and there's Chuck and Dave C's here with us

in spirit. Disemboweling, being beheaded and having your innards burned in front of your very eyes. Yes, we're talking about old timey punishments and one of the reasons that you hear about things like being drawn and quartered and all this disgusting stuff taking place is that kings and nobility would do this stuff to really, I mean that was the intent was to try and say, hey, you don't want this to happen to you, don't do this kind of stuff. They weren't only sadists, they might have been that too, but it was really as a countermeasure to try and keep people from committing crimes.

Yeah, it was like basically saying like, this is what happens if you mess with me, the king, it just shows like not everybody can do that, even historically speaking, not everybody can order somebody to do that to another human being and get away with it and that's kind of what the monarch was showing, like this is what happens and so it was reserved for the worst possible crimes you can think of, which was the crime against the monarchy, like treason. Right. Yeah, and we're specifically talking about being hanged, drawn and quartered, which is

a real thing, but it's just not quite in that order, I don't know why we say it that way, it's kind of weird. Right, and they left out some pretty important parts too, but they were just, it's one of the lazierly, more lazily named, I almost made up a word, but I said no, no. It was one of the more lazily named punishments, but it started out in the 13th century, the 1200s, I think the first person was a pirate who we'll talk about by the last name of Maurice and then it went all the way up until the 19th century even, it wasn't until 1870 that it was taken off of the books where there was finally outlawed in England as a punishment

for crime. Yeah, I think we should read here the actual English law text. So here goes, that you be drawn on a hurdle to the place of execution where you shall be hanged by the neck, easy enough to understand, and being alive cut down, okay, your privy members shall be cut off, I think we know what that's all about. Private parts, like how would your bowels, and your bowels taken out and burned before you, your head severed from your body and your body divided into four quarters to be disposed of at the king's pleasure.

Which I mean, yeah, astoundingly, you can still kind of get what they're saying in a lot of ways, but we'll explain it just to be a little more graphic. So the first part is drawing, right, where you're put on like a sled, a board, something like that, and you're dragged behind a horse. And typically you're dragged in London from Newgate prison to the execution grounds in a place called Tibern, which now that I am aware of this, I want to go tour Tibern next time we're in London, I'll bet they have some pretty gruesome like guided tours, you know? Yeah, and when you say dragged on a sled, it's not like fun Santa sleigh style, or snow

day style. Or Indiana Jones style. No, probably even worse than that. I think the idea is that that part is also painful and humiliating, there are people along this little parade route, like throwing garbage at you. When you finally get there, you're in pretty rough shape, and then they hang you from a rope, but the intent is not to kill you. So they don't like pull the gallows, and you drop through the trapdoor and break your neck.

The point is to hang you to where you're choking, and you're asphyxiating, and you think you're going to die, but then they don't let that happen. Right, they're like, no, no, no, we're going to bring you back or cut you down before you can possibly die. So now we've got the drawn part, the hanged part. Now we get to, for my money, the worst part, where your genitalia is cut off. And by the way, we should say this, from what I could tell, this is specifically applied to men, and I think because of this part, out of propriety or a sense of propriety, women

were burned at the stake instead. So being hanged drawn and quartered was specific for men, but they would cut off your junk, and they would burn it in the fire in front of you. So by this time, I mean, you could possibly bleed to death from that. But you probably... But you're seeing this happen. Yeah, you were around long enough, I would guess, to watch your junk burn up in front of you.

Then after that, step two is they would cut you from the groin to the sternum and disembowel you, right? Yeah. I mean, who knows how long you live. I know we did an actual episode, one of our early ones, that before they were even like 10 minutes long, kind of like these, except not as good. How long you live when your head was cut off? No, that was a long episode.

I think it was like a good 40 minutes. Oh, I don't think it was nearly that long. I'll bet you $5, it was 40 minutes. I bet it wasn't over 30. Okay, $5. Here's a look at that. Okay. Where was I?

Oh, yeah. So we don't know how long you live when you are disemboweled like that, but I would imagine that you bleed out pretty quickly, but you still might see like your guts spill out. Which I mean, like we're really kind of like hitting that part right there, Chuck, that you're seeing this. And I think it's because if you just take half of a second and put yourself into the position of somebody who this is being done to, like seeing your body parts being tossed in a fire in front of you when you know they're supposed to be like in your body or attached

to your body still, the psychological impact of that has to just be, has to compound the pain exponentially too. That's a really mean thing to do on top of everything else. And also just to drive this home really quick too. There are a lot of people standing around, chanting for your death, yelling at you, maybe throwing garbage at you while this is going on too. So they're also your townsfolk are being mean to you too. That's right.

So let's take a break. We've covered drawn and hanged and what do you even call that last part disemboweled disemboweled and we'll cover scattered, smothered and covered right in there. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough or you're at the end of the road. Ah, okay. I see what you're doing.

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That was beautiful. Thank you. Nice work. So we're getting to the scattered, smothering, covered part. Go for a good chunked. And topped. I think that's the final. I think there's one more.

After topped even? Yeah. There's something with chilies. I think chili is topped. Oh, is it? I thought though. No, no, chili. There's also like jalapenos.

I think you can get on it. So scattered, smothered, covered, chunked, topped, and chilied? I guess. I don't think they call it that. Yeah. That's all the way. And by the way, for those of you who don't live near a waffle house, I think there may be 10 of you listening, these are ways that you can order your hash browns.

Yeah. How did you order them? Scattered, smothered, and covered, and then I would get chunked, but I don't need pork anymore because pigs are way too smart to eat. So no more chunked? No more chunked, which is unfortunate because pigs are also far and away the most delicious animal we have domesticated. Good for you for taking a stand anyway.

So scattered, which means that it's not in a hockey puck, smothered, which means it has sauteed onions in with it, and covered, where they put a slice of non-cheese cheese on it. Right. What about you? I'm ashamed to admit that I was a very boring person. I just liked my hash browns like plain. I would get a double order, and that was it. I would just get a double order of hash browns.

Wait a minute. I mean, would you put? I wouldn't get them scattered, some other door covered. Okay, I understand, but would you put ketchup on it or something? Salt and pepper. Would egg yolk mixed in there or anything? Sure, sure. Okay, all right.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, I'll mix it up with the eggs and whatever else is on the plate. You're not totally insane. No. I would like the driest order of hash browns you've ever made in just that. Oh, but it's the beauty of it. They're never dry, even without that stuff on them. Some parts can get, I've had some dry hash browns.

All right. I think we should move on. All right, so the last step in this process is the quartering, and this involves kind of what it sounds like. They would, I don't think we mentioned before, after you got disemboweled, they would cut the heart out, throw that in the fire. You're almost certainly dead after that. Your head comes off during this last process.

It just falls right off. And then it just is from the horror. And then finally, you are genuinely quartered as in your arms and legs are cut off. They boil those in some spices to make the flesh last as long as possible because your body parts are going on tour. That's right. So you're being sent, like parts of you are being sent to different like nearby areas that is under the king's control to basically say like, hey, this is what happens to traitors.

This is the leg of this guy who's drawn in quarter. You all know what hang drawn and quartered is, and look at this. This is the result of that. So don't try anything against the king. That's kind of what the point was. I didn't see anything about the torso because there would be some torso leftover, but it just seemed like they would cut their arms and legs off and that was the quartered part. But that also makes it confusing with another form of torture and sometimes capital punishment,

which was being quartered by horses, which is a totally different thing that England didn't even do. Yeah. Yeah. That was, you know, you've heard about when you have like each limb is tied to a different horse and then they got them in the different directions, but apparently didn't happen in England. Apparently might have probably happened in France under King Henry the fourth after an

assassination attempt. And then the first person to be hang drawn and quartered, you mentioned was the pirate Maurice because he spoke of the pompadism of love. That's right. That was back in 1241, right? That's right. And then of course, William Wallace, the Scottish rebel. He was drawn and quartered as depicted in the Mel Gibson snuff film Braveheart.

And then another very famous person who was sentenced to be hanged drawn and quartered was Guy Fawkes, the Catholic revolutionary who was trying to blow up parliament, but he escaped the worst of it because he was clever enough to jump down from the gallows head first and break his own neck. So he was already dead when they did the worst of the stuff to him as part of his punishment. Yeah. And eventually things might have turned when a naval clerk named David Tyree was drawn and quartered because he had a lot of press coverage.

The rest of this stuff is just, there's not a ton of detail, but the press really came out and wrote about what happened to Tyree and things seem to have kind of turned after that to a little bit more of a, I don't know if it was just like they figured that it was too cruel to be doing or if they just decided it's just all takes too much time and it's a little too much. We need to just sort of get on with it kind of thing. It's too extra. Sort of because there were five men convicted in the Cato Street conspiracy in 1820 and

they were sentenced to be hung to drawn and quartered, but they ended up just hanging them, putting them up there on the gallows and cutting their heads off and saying, can we just call it a day? Yeah. And this guy that the House of Works article interviewed, his name is Richard Clark. He runs the website, Capital Punishment UK. He says that part of the reason why this went out of fashion was because well-to-do Londoners started gentrifying areas around Newgate, the prison and Tyburn, the public execution

grounds and they're basically like, no, we don't really want you doing this in our backyard. It really tends to bring out the riffraff and the bloodthirsty and we kind of want them over there. So they just did away with it entirely in 1870. Yeah. And that was it. That was it for being hanged drawn and quartered. He took one small step forward toward progressing to its ideal form.

And that's it for short stuff, right? What? Does that mean we're out? Okay. Stuff you should know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app. Apple podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite shows.