Word: gibbets
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International law has prohibited some practices of the past. It would sadly be considered bad form today to leave the bodies of pirate captains hanging in chains from a gibbet at the Mogadishu dock until the maggots ate out their eyes--as was done in the Caribbean long ago. But we might as well be honest: if we are to combat the scourge of modern piracy, then force must be used against force. When Tripoli demanded tribute from the U.S. in return for not capturing Americans at sea, Thomas Jefferson noted, "The style of the demand admitted but one answer...
...wife, the long suffering and sickly Elizabeth Proctor (HLS student Zoe L. Segal-Reichlin) stands by as her husband is dragged away to the gibbet while she is saved for another six months because of her pregnancy. Segal-Reichlin’s Goodie Proctor seems sickly and sniveling as she well must be, yet her facial expression varies only slightly in degree of victimized self-pity. She is immobile when Reverend Hale (HLS student Taylor L. Dasher) pleads with her to get her husband to confess and sheds but a few tears for his impending fate...
...year is 1798, and in County Mayo, on Ireland's impoverished west coast, an army of the French Revolution has landed to rouse the embittered Irish against their English overlords. Elsewhere in the country, in gibbet-strewn Wexford and in bloodstained Ulster, rebellions have already been crushed. Any remaining hope hinges on the rising in Mayo, and there, in the euphoria of the French landing, the cause catches fire. In centuries hence, the Irish will sing of the glorious Men of the West and the humiliation of the British at Castlebar. This is all history...
...time of carnival and willow pruning on the dark, hard-budded land. He shows the earth veiled in blue boundlessness at haying time. Then in the fall comes the sacrifice of her apples, her grapes and human fruits as well. The herd plods home. A body dangles from a gibbet on a hill. Reality was his subject, and truth his object. Yet these paintings are not finickily meticulous, as are those of Burgundian miniaturists. Rather, they are painted with a panache and freedom that, centuries later, the Impressionists were to rediscover...
...gallows and the gibbet were almost as commonplace as the village church, and "hanging days" were occasions for revelry. In London at the "Tyburn tree" (the present location of Marble Arch), crowds of 100,000 or more assembled to watch the festivities. Distinguished visitors to the ceremonies at Newgate prison were often invited to remain for breakfast. "And if there were no more than six or seven hanged," according to one chronicler, the guests "would return grumbling and disappointed ... After breakfast was over, the whole party adjourned to see the 'cutting down...