Byron Rogers

A tale of suspense

This account of a public execution in Wales is a delightful book. Beautifully designed, it is by that rare bird, an academic who not only can write but also seems to have had in mind what the French historian meant, if I remember the quote, when he mourned, ‘My book is long because I have neither the time nor the wit to make it short.’ Professor Bartlett’s 168 pages are thus more readable than most thrillers. But its most extraordinary feature is something no one ever thought to encounter until some kind of time travel was invented: in The Hanged Man men and women long dead (and, in one case, resurrected) walk and talk across 800 years.

The historian Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie said that if you wanted to know what life in the Middle Ages was really like you had only to look in the vast and largely unresearched archives of the Vatican, in particular its reports into heresy and into candidacies for sainthood. Here, caught in the spotlight of Papal commissions and the Inquisition, rich and poor (the latter named for once) under interrogation are quoted in the language of something approaching the standards of a modern court report. This was a time when heresy and sanctity mattered.

Such reports formed the basis for Ladurie’s Montaillou, his account of the Albigensian heresy which became a best-seller. And it is a similar report that forms the basis of The Hanged Man, a book that also deserves to become a bestseller, for because of it, as Professor Bartlett observes, we get as close to the spoken words of the past as at any time before the tape-recorder. This in the late 13th century.

William ap Rhys, called Cragh or Crach, which is Welsh for the Scabby (the Welsh had no compunction about using such nicknames, the great Glyndwr having a pet soothsayer called Crach Ffinant), was hanged in Swansea in the winter of, probably, 1290.

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