Waterlog

[truepenny]

TIME: 43 min.
DISTANCE: 5.7 mi.
TOTAL DISTANCE: 269.8
DISTRACTION: The Dead Zone, "Here There Be Monsters"
SHIRE RECKONING: Still somewhere between Weathertop and the River Hoarwell.

---

This episode made me homesick for The X-Files, most especially "Die Hand die verletzt." I was also, of course, yelling at the TV: "They never burned witches in New England!" But that's just me.

Comments

[aedifica]

Of course they never burned witches in New England. Someone was saying they did?

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Not exactly. But our hero, having been arrested in a tiny town in Massachusetts under a local ordinance against witchcraft, was nearly burned at the stake by an angry mob. The implied assumptions were pretty clear.

[batwrangler.livejournal.com]

Apparently hanging isn't dramatic enough and pressing-under-a-millstone is too obscure. :)

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Technically, Giles Corey wasn't pressed to death for being a witch. He was pressed to death for refusing to plead either guilty or not guilty to the charge of being a witch.

::is an unreconstructed pedant::

[batwrangler.livejournal.com]

I know, but it could be nicely menacing option for script-writers (and presumably our hero was also not confessioning to being a witch).

[malinaldarose.livejournal.com]

That one makes me crazy, especially since it's not exactly an obscure fact.

[nathreee.livejournal.com]

It's a hollywood cliché. Firefly also had an episode where someone was accused of witchcraft and therefore had to be burned at the stake, and yes this setting felt like New England too. I guess hanging is somehow not for witches, even though it used to be the most common way to put people to death.

[bookzombie.livejournal.com]

And in fact they didn't burn witches in England either - that was pretty much reserved for heretics - if memory serves they hanged them instead.

(Edited to correct grammar bad enough to make me weep...)

[marfisa.livejournal.com]

So did they actually burn alleged witches in Scotland or Germany or something? Or has everyone been getting formal executions of witches confused with the autos-da-fe so memorably engaged in by the Spanish Inquisition? Those were mostly for heretics and lapsed Jewish converts, but I wouldn't be surprised if witchcraft charges also got tacked on to a few of the victims.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Norman Cohn's book, Europe's Inner Demons, makes it clear that "witchcraft" (like "sodomy" in Elizabethan England) was a rather flexible charge. But, yes, witches in continental Europe were burned.

And that has pretty much exhausted my knowledge on the subject. *g*