Execution

So the execution of Prince Dafydd at Shrewsbury in 1283. I'm having to rush since today is the anniversary, but that's my fault for attempting to pack his career into just three days.

Anyway. This is a grim subject but the precise method of Dafydd's death is not clear. The version repeated in some modern accounts is that he was hanged, drawn and quartered i.e. taken to the gallows, hanged, cut down while still alive, eviscerated, and only then beheaded and quartered. Slow torture.

This is not readily apparent from medieval accounts of the execution. As usual they don't tally. The Chronicle of Bury St Edmunds says that Dafydd:

...was convicted of treason, lese-majesté and sacrilege, and condemned to be drawn, hanged, beheaded, burned and quartered.

 The Annals of Worcester says:

He was dragged through the chanting citizens of Shrewsbury by horses, then hanged, afterwards beheaded. 

The Annales Cambriae says:

On 3 September following he was hanged and drawn at Shrewsbury and divided into four parts with head cut off. Etc.

The key word is 'drawn': was Dafydd 'drawn' to the gallows or 'drawn' as in being cut apart while still alive? On balance, it appears he was hanged, cut down while still alive, beheaded and then drawn. This was nasty enough, of course, but not quite the prolonged torture of living disembowelment sometimes described. 

There's something horrible and degrading about picking over the accounts of a grisly medieval execution, but we should probably try and get it right. Dafydd was not the first victim of the English judiciary to suffer in this way: an assassin who tried to kill Henry III was torn apart by horses a few decades earlier. He was, however, the first nobleman to be executed for what was effectively high treason, even though the actual conviction was for cumulative offences and 'high treason' was not yet on the statute book.