THE HANGMAN'S HYMN
Paul Doherty
Medieval Magic and Mysticism
> witchcraft
> sinister cults and covens
> human sacrifice
> witches that are hanged but not burnt - and survive
Medieval Outsiders
> hangmen
> an anchorite
> the "unhanged" - people who appear to have been hanged but are later resuscitated by the hangman
In this, the fifth book of Doherty's Canterbury Tales series, the pilgrims witness a threefold hanging on the road to Canterbury, and following this the Carpenter tells his tale.
When the tale opens, a young man, an unemployed carpenter, is offered a position as an assistant hangman in Gloucester, and accepts. He soon gets used to the role - it is very well paid, which makes up for a lot. Then it is discovered that girls (mostly slatterns and whores) are being abducted and killed in the course of ritual sacrifices in the Forest of Dean. Eventually three women, a mother and her two daughters, are arrested and condemned - part of a coven of six. Two others, both men, are traced, but not the sixth, the dominus.
We come, here, to an excellent example of the overlap between fiction and fantasy (as opposed to between fact and fiction!) in HF (Historical Fiction). Is it what seems fanciful - fantastic - to us that matters? Even if it would seem - seems within the context of the story - quite normal to the people of the time? In the course of this story, three witches are hanged - really hanged, not just the hangman making money.
Simon ran ahead. The clearing was dark, still dripping with rain, but on the execution tree, the makeshift gibbet, all that remained were three empty nooses hanging down from the branch beneath which the chains had been neatly piled. Of Agnes and her daughters there was no sign. Simon felt uneasy. It was so cold here. He was about to go back and inform the rest when he saw the red marks daubed on the great white crag of rock. Simon hastened across. He spelt out the letters and the chilling warning they carried.
'We should have burned their corpses, and that was my mistake,' says one of Simon's colleagues, Flyhead, later. 'Fire in this world and the next, cleanses and purifies.'
To us it seems absurd; then, it was what everybody believed.
Another very professional medieval thriller from the master himself.
JM
