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# Why English women were burned while men were quartered for the same crimes
- URL: https://theparnassian.com/en/v-anglii-srednikh-vekov-i-novogo-vremeni-byli-surovye-zakony-i-sudebnaia-praktika-mnogo-kogo-ne-shchadila/
- Published: 2017-09-11T19:17:39.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-02T18:53:36.000Z
- Author: Alexandr Radayev
- Tags: London, Mores, Society

In medieval and early modern England the laws were harsh, and judicial practice spared a great many people. Right up to the end of the eighteenth century, and in some cases the middle of the nineteenth, men and women were sentenced to death for crimes that were serious, to be sure, but not quite unambiguously associated with capital punishment, such as murder, arson or shooting at people, and also for such trifles as felling timber without permission and hunting deer.

Moreover, for the very offence for which men were quartered, women were burned.

Because it was more decent: quartering leaves the body exposed, and it does not befit a woman to be naked in public. Many ladies begged to be quartered instead, sensing that burning was a far more agonising death. But the law is the law.

In the sixteenth century women were permitted, before burning, to hang a little bag of gunpowder round the neck to hasten the end: a bang, and that was that. And much later they were granted the right to be strangled before burning. This was practised until the end of the eighteenth century. In short, life was not easy for European women in former times.

Russian laws, by contrast, were far more humane.