Eight years after the “Anatomy Murderers” Burke and Hare were
apprehended in Edinburgh, Scotland, two boys discovered sixteen tiny
dolls, each nested into a miniature coffin hidden away in a rocky niche
on the north-eastern slopes of Arthur’s Seat, Edinburgh in June 1836.
At first, theories on the dolls significance ranged from
witchcraft to child’s toys, but eventually it began to seem that the
sixteen tiny figures were most likely effigies for the sixteen murder
victims of Burke and Hare made by Burke himself.
From January through October 1828, William Burke and William
Hare had lured in and murdered their lodgers in a scheme to provide
fresh bodies to the local anatomy school for money. They killed a total
of sixteen people: twelve women, three men and one child. Dr. Robert
Knox, a brilliant and well known local anatomy lecturer purchased the
bodies, and most likely knew what was going on but was not arrested for
the murders due to insufficient evidence.
The crimes were exposed when another lodger discovered the body
of a previous tenant, and reported it to the police. Burke and Hare were
apprehended along with Burke’s mistress, Helen McDougal, and Hare’s
wife, Margaret. Despite finding the body of the last lodger in Knox’s
classroom, ready for dissection, the evidence was not truly damning
until Hare gave a full confession.
William and Margaret Hare turned King’s witnesses, that is,
witnesses for the prosecution, in return for immunity. Burke and
McDougal were tried for the murders. McDougal was acquitted while Burke
was convicted and sentenced to death. He was executed on January 28,
1829 by hanging.
His body was handed over for dissection, and his skeleton and a book bound from his skin (pictured above) remain in the collection of the Royal College of Surgeons, Edinburgh.
The miniature dolls and coffins were in the hands of a
private collector until 1901, when eight of them were handed over to the
National Museums Scotland. Although it is generally agreed that the
mysterious little dolls are associated with the crimes of Burke &
Hare, no one is certain who among the killers created them. DNA studies
conducted in 2005, using DNA extracted from Burke’s skeleton, attempted
to prove that he had created them to assuage his guilty conscience, but
the tests proved inconclusive.
Quartering was the third part of an execution method
known as hanging, drawing and quartering, and most commonly applied to
those convicted of high treason in England. First the condemned was half hanged,
usually from a gibbet. However, the neck was not broken, but they were
left hanging so as to almost choke. it was important that the condemned
was left alive at this point for the following stage of execution.
Next, they were taken down and laid out, and had their abdomen cut open and their entrails pulled out in front of them. The entrails were often burnt at this point. Somewhere about now the condemned usually died. Finally,
the corpse was cut into four parts, and those parts sent to different
points of the kingdom to be displayed over city gates.
Usually one
portion was sent their county of origin. Note, because high treason was a
conviction imposed by Act of Attainder, it almost inevitably applied
only to nobles. Commoners involved in rebellion would normally be cut
down on the spot of battle, or summarily executed shortly after
capture. Also, note that there were some creative variations on the
theme.
When Hugh Le Despenser the Younger was executed, he was
hanged from a ladder. This enabled the executioners to perform an
additional humiliation. His genitals were cut from him and stuffed in
his mouth. Queen Isabella reportedly insisted on this because he was
also convicted of sodomising the king.
Behind the Hallstatt Catholic Church in Austria, near the
12th-century St. Micheal’s Chapel, in a small and lovingly cared for
cemetery is the Hallstatt Beinhaus (bone house), also known as the
Charnel House. A small building, it is tightly stacked with over 1200
skulls. Because Hallstatt finds itself in such a lovely location, it
also finds itself in very short supply of burial grounds. In the 1700s, the Church began digging up corpses to make way
for the newly dead. The bodies which had been buried for only 10 to 15
years were then stacked inside the charnel house. Once the skeletons
were exhumed and properly bleached in the sun, the family members would
stack the bones next to their nearest kin.
In 1720, a tradition began of painting the skulls with symbolic
decorations as well as dates of birth and death so that the dead would
be remembered, even if they no longer had a grave. Of the 1,200 skulls,
some 610 of them were lovingly painted, with an assortment of symbols,
laurels for valor, roses for love, and so on. The ones from the 1700s
are painted with thick dark garlands, while the newer ones from the
1800s on, bear brighter floral styles.
