Among the nations of antiquity, drowning was a very common mode of execution. Four-and-a-half centuries before the birth of Christ, the Britons inflicted death by drowning in a quagmire. In Anglo-Saxon times women found guilty of theft were drowned. For a long period in the Middle Ages, the barons and others who had the power of administering laws in their respective districts possessed a drowning pit and a gallows.

Drowning was a punishment of King Richard of the Lion Heart, who ordained by a decree that it should be the doom of any soldier of his army who killed a fellow-crusader during the passage to the Holy Land.

The owner of Baynard's Castle, London, in the reign of John, had the power of trying criminals, and his descendants long afterwards claimed the privilege, the most valued of which was the right of drowning, in the Thames, traitors taken within the limits of his territory.[21]

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Bearing on this subject the annals of Sandwich supply some important information. It is recorded, that in the year 1313, "a presentment was made before the itinerant Justices at Canterbury, that the prior of Christ Church had, for nine years, obstructed the high road leading from Dover Castle to Sandwich by the sea-shore by a water-mill, and the diversion of a stream called the Gestlyng, where felons condemned to death within the hundred should be drowned, but could not be executed that way for want of water. Further, that he raised a certain gutter four feet, and the water that passed that way to the gutter ran to the place where the convicts were drowned, and from whence their bodies were floated to the river, and that after the gutter was raised the drowned bodies could not be carried into the river by the stream, as they used to be, for want of water."[22]

Drowning was not infrequently awarded as a matter of leniency, and as a commutation of what were considered more severe forms of death. We have an instance of such a case in Scotland in 1556, when a man who had been found guilty of theft and sacrilege was ordered to be put to death[97] by drowning "by the Queen's special grace." At Edinburgh, in 1611, a man was drowned for stealing a lamb; and in 1623 eleven gipsey women were condemned to be drowned at Edinburgh in the Nor' Loch. On the 11th May, 1685, Margaret M'Lachlan, aged sixty-three years, and Margaret Wilson, a girl of eighteen years, were drowned in the waters of Blednoch, for denying that James VII. of Scotland was entitled to rule the Church according to his pleasure. Six years prior to this, namely, on the 25th August, 1679, a woman called Janet Grant was tried for theft, in the baronial court of Sir Robert Gordon, of Gordonston, held at Drainie, and pleaded guilty. She was sentenced to be drowned next day in the Loch of Spynie.

In France, drowning was a capital punishment as late as 1793, but in Scotland we do not trace it later than 1685, and in England it was discontinued about the commencement of the seventeenth century.

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