Places of justice and awe: the topography of gibbets and gallows in medieval and early modern north-western and Central Europe

Abstract

Well into the eighteenth century, the European landscape featured gibbets and gallows as tokens of local judicial authority. Despite divergent geography and social structure, the location of gallows is remarkably consistent. The importance of visibility and positioning along major traffic routes and boundaries is well known and therefore rarely considered worthy of further analysis. Historians often uncritically reproduce the motives given by contemporary authorities for harsh punishments and the erection of gallows at the border of their jurisdiction. Written sources tend to mask the political, social and religious aims of executing and displaying criminals at peripheral, yet visible and accessible locations. Through a comparative study of gallows topography in the Netherlands, Lower Austria and Shetland, this paper seeks to disclose the highly diverse and paradox concepts that lie behind the seemingly uniform location of gallows throughout medieval and early modern Europe.

Keywords:

• Execution
• gallows
• liminality

Acknowledgements

The research for this paper was carried out under a grant from the Austrian Federal Ministry of Science and Research. The study of the gallows hills of Shetland was supported by ‘The Assembly Project: meeting places in Northern Europe ad 400–1500’. I would like to thank Brian Smith of the Shetland Museum and Archives for sharing his knowledge on Shetland’s gallows sites and Katharina Rebay-Salisbury for sharing her draft article on the reception of monumental burial mounds in Austria. Furthermore, I am grateful to Hans Briaire and Harald Hartmann for allowing me to use their photos, to Lauran Toorians for providing relevant literature and documents on gallows in the province of Noord-Brabant (the Netherlands) and to Stefan Eichert for his information on early medieval burials in Austria. Finally, I would like to thank the three more or less anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments.

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Notes on contributors

Joris Coolen

Joris Coolen was born and raised in the Netherlands and studied prehistoric archaeology at the University of Vienna in Austria. His main interests are landscape archaeology, prospection methods, field survey and GIS-applications in archaeology. He participated in ‘The Assembly Project: Meeting Places in Northern Europe ad 400–1500’, for which he carried out fieldwork in Shetland and Iceland, as well as in the project ‘Harbours in the North Atlantic (800–1300 ad)’. He is currently studying for a PhD as an associate fellow of the Initiative College for Archaeological Prospection at the University of Vienna, focusing on the reconstruction of prehistoric land-use by integrated field surveying.