The Corpse as a Warning: A Mini-Essay

     In Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur, Sir Beaumains, on his way to a rescue Dame Liones, encounters the bodies of fellow knights hung from the limbs of trees, their shields draped around their necks and their swords dangling from their heels. Unnerved by the sight, Sir Beaumains learns that the hapless souls were killed by the Red Knight in their efforts to save the damsel and their corpses were boldly displayed to warn others attempting the same feat.[1] The Red Knight’s actions are not a lone occurrence. Indeed, history is filled with instances of displayed corpses serving as a warning to others. During the eighteenth century, at the height of pirate activity, the corpses of executed swashbucklers were chained into iron cages, known as gibbets, and publicly displayed as forewarnings to other potential criminals.[2] The tight-fitting gibbet, which prevented family members from removing the body and burying it, was custom made for each criminal and period accounts recall how the measuring process for this device was often more dreaded than the execution itself.[3] In fact, the gibbets proved an intimidating sight – crows picked the flesh off the dead and the sun bleached their remains to a ghastly white.[4] A century later, the scene was repeated numerous times throughout the developing territories of the western United States and in the racially charged southern states: the former using the hung outlaws, like those of pirates, to sway lawlessness and the latter sadly utilizing the bodies of lynched individuals to reinforce segregation.[5] The most famous employment of the corpse as a warning occurred during the fifteenth century with the Romanian leader Vlad Ţepeş, who, according to recounts penned by Chalcondyles, impaled the bodies of defeated armies on wooden stakes and used them to terrify his enemies, including the Turks.[6] 

Works Referenced

Florescu, Radu and Raymond McNally. Dracula, Prince of Many Faces: His Life and His Times. New York: Hachette Book Group, 1989.

Litwack, Leon. “Hellhounds.” Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America. Ed. James Allen. Santa Fe, NM: Twin Palms Publishers, 2008. 8-37.

Malory, Thomas. Le Morte d’Arthur. 1485. New York: Barnes and Noble, 2015.

Rediker, Marcus. Villains of all Nations: Atlantic Pirates in the Golden Age. Boston: Beacon Press, 2004.

Tarlow, Sarah. The Golden and Ghoulish Age of the Gibbet in Britain. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017.
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[1] Malory, 218-220.
[2] Rediker, 164.
[3] Tarlow, 20-23.
[4] Rediker, 164.
[5] Litwack, 13-15.
[6] Florescu and McNally, 148.