Burning of women in England

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.

By the end of the thirteenth century, several offences against either one's lord, or one's king, were treasonable.High treason, defined as transgressions against the sovereign, was first codified during King Edward III's reign by the Treason Act 1351. It clarified exactly what crimes constituted treason, following earlier, somewhat "over zealous" interpretations of England's legal codes. For instance, high treason could be committed by anyone found to be compassing the king's death or counterfeiting his coin. High treason remained distinct though, from what became known as petty treason: the killing of a lawful superior, such as a husband by his wife. Though twelfth century contemporary authors made few attempts to differentiate between high treason and petty treason, enhanced punishments may indicate that the latter was treated more seriously than an ordinary felony.

...
Wikipedia