July 14, 2021 • 13 mins
The words "hanged, drawn and quartered" are an accurate description of the grizzly execution process. They're just not in the right order.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:04):
Hey, and welcome to the short Stuff. I'm Josh, and
there's Chuck and Dave's He's here with us in spirit.
I can feel and I can feel his presence wrapped
around us in a big hug um. And that means,
of course that this is short stuff, very loving, harmonious
episode about disemboweling, being beheaded, um, and having your innards
(00:25):
burnt in front of your very eyes. Yes, we're talking
about the old timey punishments and one of the reasons
that you hear about things like being drawn and quartered
and you know, all this disgusting taking stuff taking places
that kings and nobility would do the stuff to. Really,
(00:47):
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 sat us, they
might have been that too, but it was really as
a countermeasure to try to keep people from committing crimes. Uh. Yeah,
it was like basically saying like this is this is
(01:07):
what happens if you mess with me the king. It
just shows like not everybody can do that, even its
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
(01:28):
crime against the monarchy, like treason, you know. 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. And they 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 it's one of the lazi early more lazily named
(01:51):
I was made up a word, but I said no, No,
it was one of the more lazily named punishments. But um.
It started out in the thirteen century. I think the
first person was a pirate who will talk about by
the last name of Maurice Um and and then um.
It went all the way up until the nineteenth century.
(02:14):
Even it wasn't until eighteen seventy that it was taken
off of the books where it was finally outlawed in
England as a punishment for crime. Yeah, I think it's
we should read here the actual English law text. So
here goes, uh, that you be drawn on a hurdle
to the place of execution, where you shall be hanged
(02:34):
by the neck easy enough to understand, uh, and being
alive cut down. Okay, your privy members shall be cut off.
I think we know what that's all about. Private parts,
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,
(02:58):
which I mean it is. Yeah, that's owningly, you can
still kind of get what they're saying in a lot
of ways, but well 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 aboard something
like that, and you're dragged behind a horse. Um, And
typically you're dragged in London from Newgate Prison to the
(03:20):
execution grounds in a place called Tyburn, which, now that
I am aware of this, I want to go tour
Tyburn 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, um, it's not
like fun Santa Slay style right style or Indiana Jones style. No,
(03:43):
probably even worse than that. I think the idea is
that that part is also painful and humiliating their 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
(04:05):
break your neck. You're The point is to hang you
to where you're choking and you're asphyxiating and you think
you're gonna die. But then they don't let that happen, right,
They're like, no, no, no, we're gonna 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
(04:27):
your genitalia is cut off. And by the way, we
should say this from what I could tell, this specifically
applied to men um, and I think because of this
part um, out of propriety or a sense of propriety,
women were burned at the stake instead so being hang,
drawn and corded with specific for men um. But they
would cut off your junk, and um, they would burn
(04:50):
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 yeah, you were around long enough,
I would guess to just to watch your junk burn
up in front of you. Then after that, step two
is they would cut you from the growing to the
stern um and disembowel you. Right, yeah, I mean, who
(05:10):
knows how long you live? I know we did an
actual episode one of our early ones that before they
were even like ten minutes long, kind of like these,
except not as good. Uh, how long you live when
your head was got off? Now, that was a long episode.
I think it was like a good forty minutes. Oh,
I don't think it was nearly that long. I'll bet
you five dollars it was forty minutes. I bet it
(05:31):
wasn't over thirty Okay, five dollars, look it up? Okay, okay,
Uh 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, like you're seeing this,
(05:52):
and I think it's because if if you just take
half of a second and put yourself into the position
of somebody, who's who's who 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 psych the psychological impact of that has to just
(06:12):
be has to compound the pain exponentially too. It's a
really mean thing to do on top of everything else.
And also just just just to just to drive this
home really quick to 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,
(06:32):
So they're also your townsfolk are being mean to you too.
That's right. So let's take a break and we've covered
drawn and hanged and uh, what do you even call
that last part disemboweled disemboweled, and we'll cover scattered, smothered,
(06:53):
and covered. Right, that was beautiful, Thank you, nice work.
(07:23):
So we're getting to the scattered, smothering, covered part. Don't
forget chunked, the talks. I think that's the final there's
I think there's one more. I think after topped. Even Yeah,
there's something with Chili's. I think chili is topped. Oh
is it? I thought, though, no, no chili. There's also
like Hall opens. I think you can get on it. Oh,
(07:44):
so scattered, smothered, covered, chunked, topped, and chili I guess
I don't think they call it that, but something. 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 ton of you listening. These are
ways that you can order your hash browns. Yeah, yeah,
how did you order him? Scattered, smothered, and covered? And
(08:04):
then I would get chunked. But I don't need pork
anymore because pigs are way too smart to to eat
No more chunk, which is unfortunate because pigs are also
far in away the most delicious animal we have domesticated.
But yeah for you for taking the stand anyway. So, scattered,
which means that it's not in a hockey puck, smothered
which means it has sautet onions in with it, and
(08:27):
covered where they put a slice of non cheese cheese
on it, right, what about you? I'm ashame to admit
that I was a very boring person. I disliked my
hash Browns plane. I would get a double order, okay,
and that was it. I would just get a double
order a hash brown I mean you, okay, I understand,
(08:47):
But would you put like ketchup on it or something?
M hm, salt and pepper? Huh? Would it like egg
yolk in mixed in there or anything? Okay? All right? Yeah, okay, yeah,
I mean I'll mix it up with the eggs and
cover else is on the plane. You know, like totally insane?
Were you just I would like the driest order of
hash Browns you've ever made. That's the beauty of it.
(09:07):
They're never dry even without that stuff on him some parts.
I've had some dry hash Browns. All right, I think
we should move on. Alright. So the last step in
this process is the quartering, and uh, this involves you
know kind of what it sounds like. They would I
don't think we mentioned before. After you got disemboweed, they
(09:28):
would cut the heart out, throw that in the fire.
You're almost certainly dead after that. Um, your head comes
off during this last process off from the horror, and
then um, finally you're genuinely quartered, as in your arms
and legs are cut off. They boil those and some
(09:49):
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 traders. This is the leg of this guy
(10:09):
who was drawn in quarter. You all know what hang
drawn in quarter does, and look at this. This is
the result of that. So don't try anything against the king.
That's kind of what what the point was. I didn't
see anything about the torso, because there would be some
torso left over, but it just seemed like they would
cut their arms and lays. Was the quarter the quarter part,
But the that that also makes it confusing with another
(10:31):
form of torture and sometimes capital punishment, which was being
quartered right 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 yeah
them in the different directions, but apparently didn't happen in England,
apparently might have probably happened in France under King Henry
(10:55):
the Fourth after an asassination attempt. Uh. And then the
first person to be hang drawn in quarter do you
mentioned was the pirate Maury's because he spoke at the
Pampatus of Love. That's right, that was back in twelve
forty one, right, that's right. And then of course William Wallace,
(11:17):
the Scottish rebel, he was drawn and quartered as depicted
in the Mel Gibson's snuff film Braveheart Um. And then
another very famous person who was sentenced to be drawn, hang,
drawn and quartered was Guy Fawx, the Catholic revolutionary who
was trying to blow up Parliament, but he escaped the
(11:37):
worst of it because he was clever enough to jump
down from the gallows head first and break his own neck,
so he 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
(11:59):
is just there's not a ton of detail. But the
press really came out and wrote about what happened to Tyree,
and things seemed 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
(12:19):
little too much. We needed to sort of get on
with it. Kind of too extra sort of because uh
that there were five men convicted in the Cato Street conspiracy. Uh,
and they were sinance to be hanged, drawn and quartered,
but they ended up just hanging them, putting them up
there on the gallows and cutting their heads off and
(12:39):
saying can we just call it a day? Yeah. And
this guy that the House staff works article UM interviewed.
His name is Richard Clark. He runs the website Capital
Punishment uk UM. He says that part of the reason
why this went out of fashion was because, you know,
well to do Londoners started um gentrifying areas around New
Game Prison and Tyburn the public execution grounds, and they're
(13:03):
basically like, no, we don't really want you doing this
in our backyard. It really tends to bring out the
riff raff and the blood thirsty, and we kind of
want them over there. So they just did away with
it entirely in eighteen seventy. Yeah, that was it. That
was it for being hang drawn and quartered. Humanity took
one small step forward toward progressing to its ideal form.
(13:26):
And that's it for short stuff, right, what does that mean?
We're out? Okay? Stuff you should know is a production
of iHeart Radio. For more podcasts my heart Radio, visit
the i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you
listen to your favorite shows.
Hey, and welcome to the short Stuff. I'm Josh, and
there's Chuck and Dave's He's here with us in spirit.
I can feel and I can feel his presence wrapped
around us in a big hug um. And that means,
of course that this is short stuff, very loving, harmonious
episode about disemboweling, being beheaded, um, and having your innards
(00:25):
burnt in front of your very eyes. Yes, we're talking
about the old timey punishments and one of the reasons
that you hear about things like being drawn and quartered
and you know, all this disgusting taking stuff taking places
that kings and nobility would do the stuff to. Really,
(00:47):
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 sat us, they
might have been that too, but it was really as
a countermeasure to try to keep people from committing crimes. Uh. Yeah,
it was like basically saying like this is this is
(01:07):
what happens if you mess with me the king. It
just shows like not everybody can do that, even its
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
(01:28):
crime against the monarchy, like treason, you know. 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. And they 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 it's one of the lazi early more lazily named
(01:51):
I was made up a word, but I said no, No,
it was one of the more lazily named punishments. But um.
It started out in the thirteen century. I think the
first person was a pirate who will talk about by
the last name of Maurice Um and and then um.
It went all the way up until the nineteenth century.
(02:14):
Even it wasn't until eighteen seventy that it was taken
off of the books where it was finally outlawed in
England as a punishment for crime. Yeah, I think it's
we should read here the actual English law text. So
here goes, uh, that you be drawn on a hurdle
to the place of execution, where you shall be hanged
(02:34):
by the neck easy enough to understand, uh, and being
alive cut down. Okay, your privy members shall be cut off.
I think we know what that's all about. Private parts,
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,
(02:58):
which I mean it is. Yeah, that's owningly, you can
still kind of get what they're saying in a lot
of ways, but well 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 aboard something
like that, and you're dragged behind a horse. Um, And
typically you're dragged in London from Newgate Prison to the
(03:20):
execution grounds in a place called Tyburn, which, now that
I am aware of this, I want to go tour
Tyburn 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, um, it's not
like fun Santa Slay style right style or Indiana Jones style. No,
(03:43):
probably even worse than that. I think the idea is
that that part is also painful and humiliating their 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
(04:05):
break your neck. You're The point is to hang you
to where you're choking and you're asphyxiating and you think
you're gonna die. But then they don't let that happen, right,
They're like, no, no, no, we're gonna 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
(04:27):
your genitalia is cut off. And by the way, we
should say this from what I could tell, this specifically
applied to men um, and I think because of this
part um, out of propriety or a sense of propriety,
women were burned at the stake instead so being hang,
drawn and corded with specific for men um. But they
would cut off your junk, and um, they would burn
(04:50):
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 yeah, you were around long enough,
I would guess to just to watch your junk burn
up in front of you. Then after that, step two
is they would cut you from the growing to the
stern um and disembowel you. Right, yeah, I mean, who
(05:10):
knows how long you live? I know we did an
actual episode one of our early ones that before they
were even like ten minutes long, kind of like these,
except not as good. Uh, how long you live when
your head was got off? Now, that was a long episode.
I think it was like a good forty minutes. Oh,
I don't think it was nearly that long. I'll bet
you five dollars it was forty minutes. I bet it
(05:31):
wasn't over thirty Okay, five dollars, look it up? Okay, okay,
Uh 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, like you're seeing this,
(05:52):
and I think it's because if if you just take
half of a second and put yourself into the position
of somebody, who's who's who 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 psych the psychological impact of that has to just
(06:12):
be has to compound the pain exponentially too. It's a
really mean thing to do on top of everything else.
And also just just just to just to drive this
home really quick to 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,
(06:32):
So they're also your townsfolk are being mean to you too.
That's right. So let's take a break and we've covered
drawn and hanged and uh, what do you even call
that last part disemboweled disemboweled, and we'll cover scattered, smothered,
(06:53):
and covered. Right, that was beautiful, Thank you, nice work.
(07:23):
So we're getting to the scattered, smothering, covered part. Don't
forget chunked, the talks. I think that's the final there's
I think there's one more. I think after topped. Even Yeah,
there's something with Chili's. I think chili is topped. Oh
is it? I thought, though, no, no chili. There's also
like Hall opens. I think you can get on it. Oh,
(07:44):
so scattered, smothered, covered, chunked, topped, and chili I guess
I don't think they call it that, but something. 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 ton of you listening. These are
ways that you can order your hash browns. Yeah, yeah,
how did you order him? Scattered, smothered, and covered? And
(08:04):
then I would get chunked. But I don't need pork
anymore because pigs are way too smart to to eat
No more chunk, which is unfortunate because pigs are also
far in away the most delicious animal we have domesticated.
But yeah for you for taking the stand anyway. So, scattered,
which means that it's not in a hockey puck, smothered
which means it has sautet onions in with it, and
(08:27):
covered where they put a slice of non cheese cheese
on it, right, what about you? I'm ashame to admit
that I was a very boring person. I disliked my
hash Browns plane. I would get a double order, okay,
and that was it. I would just get a double
order a hash brown I mean you, okay, I understand,
(08:47):
But would you put like ketchup on it or something?
M hm, salt and pepper? Huh? Would it like egg
yolk in mixed in there or anything? Okay? All right? Yeah, okay, yeah,
I mean I'll mix it up with the eggs and
cover else is on the plane. You know, like totally insane?
Were you just I would like the driest order of
hash Browns you've ever made. That's the beauty of it.
(09:07):
They're never dry even without that stuff on him some parts.
I've had some dry hash Browns. All right, I think
we should move on. Alright. So the last step in
this process is the quartering, and uh, this involves you
know kind of what it sounds like. They would I
don't think we mentioned before. After you got disemboweed, they
(09:28):
would cut the heart out, throw that in the fire.
You're almost certainly dead after that. Um, your head comes
off during this last process off from the horror, and
then um, finally you're genuinely quartered, as in your arms
and legs are cut off. They boil those and some
(09:49):
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 traders. This is the leg of this guy
(10:09):
who was drawn in quarter. You all know what hang
drawn in quarter does, and look at this. This is
the result of that. So don't try anything against the king.
That's kind of what what the point was. I didn't
see anything about the torso, because there would be some
torso left over, but it just seemed like they would
cut their arms and lays. Was the quarter the quarter part,
But the that that also makes it confusing with another
(10:31):
form of torture and sometimes capital punishment, which was being
quartered right 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 yeah
them in the different directions, but apparently didn't happen in England,
apparently might have probably happened in France under King Henry
(10:55):
the Fourth after an asassination attempt. Uh. And then the
first person to be hang drawn in quarter do you
mentioned was the pirate Maury's because he spoke at the
Pampatus of Love. That's right, that was back in twelve
forty one, right, that's right. And then of course William Wallace,
(11:17):
the Scottish rebel, he was drawn and quartered as depicted
in the Mel Gibson's snuff film Braveheart Um. And then
another very famous person who was sentenced to be drawn, hang,
drawn and quartered was Guy Fawx, the Catholic revolutionary who
was trying to blow up Parliament, but he escaped the
(11:37):
worst of it because he was clever enough to jump
down from the gallows head first and break his own neck,
so he 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
(11:59):
is just there's not a ton of detail. But the
press really came out and wrote about what happened to Tyree,
and things seemed 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
(12:19):
little too much. We needed to sort of get on
with it. Kind of too extra sort of because uh
that there were five men convicted in the Cato Street conspiracy. Uh,
and they were sinance to be hanged, drawn and quartered,
but they ended up just hanging them, putting them up
there on the gallows and cutting their heads off and
(12:39):
saying can we just call it a day? Yeah. And
this guy that the House staff works article UM interviewed.
His name is Richard Clark. He runs the website Capital
Punishment uk UM. He says that part of the reason
why this went out of fashion was because, you know,
well to do Londoners started um gentrifying areas around New
Game Prison and Tyburn the public execution grounds, and they're
(13:03):
basically like, no, we don't really want you doing this
in our backyard. It really tends to bring out the
riff raff and the blood thirsty, and we kind of
want them over there. So they just did away with
it entirely in eighteen seventy. Yeah, that was it. That
was it for being hang drawn and quartered. Humanity took
one small step forward toward progressing to its ideal form.
(13:26):
And that's it for short stuff, right, what does that mean?
We're out? Okay? Stuff you should know is a production
of iHeart Radio. For more podcasts my heart Radio, visit
the i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you
listen to your favorite shows.
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