Short Stuff: Hanged, Drawn and Quartered

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, 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 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

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 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. 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 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,

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 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, 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 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 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

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 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 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, 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 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, 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,

and covered. Right, that was beautiful, Thank you, nice work. 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, 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

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 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, 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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

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 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 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. 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.