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Updated: June 4, 2025
His unburied corpse, reduced to the condition of a mummy, was brought out of its lurking-place, thrust into a coffin, dragged on a hurdle to the Golgotha outside the Hague, on the road to Ryswyk, and there hung on a gibbet in company of the bodies of other malefactors swinging there in chains.
"Quasimodo then raised his eye to the gypsy, whose body he saw, depending from the gibbet, shudder afar under her white robe with the last tremblings of death-agony; then he lowered it to the archdeacon, stretched out at the foot of the tower and no longer having human form; and he said with a sob that made his deep chest heave: 'Oh! all that I have loved!"
This seems to have been the fashion in France also, for in 1331 a woman named Duplas was scourged and buried alive at Abbeville, and in 1460 Perotte Mauger, a receiver of stolen goods, was inhumed by order of the Provost of Paris in front of the public gibbet.
The modest man of science smiles at his admirers, and remarks, "What is that invention of mine? Nothing whatever. Man cannot create a force; he can but direct it; and science consists in learning from nature." The mechanician was standing bolt upright, planted on both feet, like some victim dropped straight from the gibbet, when Raphael broke in upon him.
A rope was readily found, but a gibbet was not forthcoming; a byer's pole served at the need. Within a little while after the forcing of the Tolbooth gate, Porteous was hanged and dead, and his wild judges were striking at his lifeless body with their weapons. It is said, and we may well believe it, that Porteous died, when he found that he had to die, bravely enough, as became a soldier.
Repeating after the Clerk of Court, he gabbled over the words of the sentence, which condemned Euphemia Deans to be conducted back to the Tolbooth of Edinburgh, and detained there until Wednesday the day of ; and upon that day, betwixt the hours of two and four o'clock afternoon, to be conveyed to the common place of execution, and there hanged by the neck upon a gibbet.
The sight coming on me suddenly, like an illustration of my fears, I could scarce be done with examining it and drinking in discomfort. And as I thus turned and turned about the gibbet, what should I strike on, but a weird old wife, that sat behind a leg of it, and nodded, and talked aloud to herself with becks and courtesies. "Who are these two, mother?" I asked, and pointed to the corpses.
Over against the line of trees on the opposite side of the wheat field still loomed the gibbet from which Sancho Mendez and Dominic had stepped blindfolded into another and darker world.
"Lift a finger against either of these young persons, and I will reveal all. Yes," he continued, menacingly, "I will disclose such dreadful things against you, that you will assuredly be adjudged to a gibbet higher than the highest tower of this proud fane." "I defy you, wretch!" retorted Judith. "You can prove nothing against me." "Defy me? ha!" cried Solomon Eagle, with a terrible laugh.
And yet a last resource remained, one as rational as infallible: to overthrow the stake. Of course, not one dreams of doing so. For the last time let us change our artifices. The top of the gibbet consists of a little fork, with the prongs widely opened and measuring barely two-fifths of an inch in length.
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