The Death Penalty in Late-Medieval Catalonia by Sabaté Flocel;

Author:Sabaté, Flocel;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2019-03-15T00:00:00+00:00

When the offender reached the place of execution, accompanied by the corresponding uproar and very often by the music of the trumpeters (trompadors), the sentence was read aloud, as were important proclamations, also announced with musical instruments.77 The town crier read the death sentence. Later, the ordinary court, or the municipal one in places with strong municipal control, paid these people, generally one shilling for the town crier and another for the musicians.78 In large places, such as Barcelona or Perpignan, the musician—“he who plays the trumpet”,79 that is, the “trumpet of said court”—, often fulfilled both functions, and this was a permanent post given the growing number of executions.80 Thus, on the 26th of June 1369, in the court in Barcelona, “gave Pere Bagà for playing the trumpet and for crying the said sentence, I shilling”.81 The standard payment was one shilling per proclamation.82 The jurisdictional court only paid for one proclamation. The first call announcing that an execution was to be held was sometimes municipal, leaving the proclamation with the reading of the sentence to the jurisdictional court. It was more usual for these to be combined in the first pronouncement, announcing that “justícies” would be done.83

After the proclamation of the sentence, the prisoner would be placed on the gallows. In the fifteenth century, especially in large places like Barcelona, religious confession at that point became another ingredient of the punitive liturgy. The contemporary concern for a good death,84 the consolidated function of the final confession85 and the preoccupation for redemption that religion had taken on,86 explain why after reaching the place of execution, the prisoner’s confession was heard and he received absolution. Coincidentally, in 1397 Jean Gerson, returning to his concern for penitence,87 asked Charles VI for prisoners to have an obligatory confession before losing their lives, a petition which was immediately accepted in France.88 As Adriano Prosperi emphasises, confession was an indicator of the intersection between crime and sin and, with that, a sometimes tense interference between the civil and ecclesiastical spheres, because this was where the real and definitive confession of how the events being punished had happened would be heard.89 Later, in the sixteenth century, the presence of objects of Christian devotion was mentioned, as in Llançà in 1541 in an account by a witness about what had happened some time before: “and he remembered how he saw them carrying the Crucifix in his hand with the rope in the neck while they were brought to be hang”.90 After confessing, the prisoner had to be hung, for which a ladder for him to climb was required. There were thus three initial steps before the end: reaching the place, confessing and climbing the ladder. This was described for a sentence in Barcelona in 1451: “he went to the Rambla, place designated to be hung and there was confessed and taken up the ladder”.91

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