draconian

Updated: May 9, 2025

The fall need not necessarily have been fatal, especially to one insensible and opposing no resistance, but even supposing that death had not resulted, in those Draconian days, the intent to murder was equally subject with its full accomplishment to capital punishment.

Charlotte Mary Yonge - A Reputed Changeling : Or Three Seventh Years Two Centuries Ago

Here in the Netherlands the heretics, in consequence of the Draconian severity of the regulations which he himself had issued, had been hung and burned by hundreds, and hitherto he had gained nothing but the hatred of the nation which he preferred to all others. His bodily health was destroyed, his mind had lost its buoyancy, and he was now fifty years old.

Georg Ebers - Barbara Blomberg — Volume 09