In England, burning was a legal punishment inflicted on women found guilty of high treason, petty treason, and heresy. Over a period of several centuries, female convicts were publicly burnt at the stake, sometimes alive, for a range of activities including coining and mariticide.
While men guilty of heresy were also burned at the stake, those who committed high treason were instead hanged, drawn and quartered. The English jurist William Blackstone supposed that the difference in sentencing, although "full as terrible to the sensation as the other", could be explained by the desire not to publicly expose a woman's body. Public executions were well-attended affairs, and contemporary reports detail the cries of women on the pyre as they were burned alive. It later became commonplace for the executioner to strangle the convict, and for the body to be burned post-mortem.
In the latter half of the eighteenth century, changing attitudes to such public displays prompted Sir Benjamin Hammett MP to denounce the practice in Parliament. His bill, by no means the first such attempt to end the public burning of women, led to the Treason Act 1790, which abolished the sentence.
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