tried by ordeal, and after this followed the execution, by hanging, or beheading, or breaking on the wheel, or burying alive (the spot being marked by a pole), or burning at the stake, &c. All such executions took place, in early times, in the Central Square, in front of the town hall (demolished in 1820). But at the close of the eighteenth century a gibbet was erected outside the town walls, where now Pedzichów Street runs, and from that time this was the place for executions. The condemned prisoner spent his last hours, before he was led there, either in the tower chapel of the town hall, or in what was called the delinquents' chapel (captivorum), now St. Anthony's, in St. Mary's Church. The Brotherhood of Our Lord's Passion—attached to the Franciscan Church—had the privilege of delivering a condemned person from death on Maundy-Thursday, which was done in a solemn procession.
For lesser transgressions, such punishments were appointed as mutilation of limbs, banishment from the town, whipping in public at the pillory, producing in a cage, dragging round the market-place, chaining to the wall of St. Mary's Church by the iron collar still to be seen there at the southern entrance: this last-named punishment was usually inflicted for offences against morality or against the ecclesiastical laws.
As late as 1794 the suburb of Kazimierz, which being then an independent town, had a municipal administration analogous to that of Cracow, took stock, among other things, of an execution cart with iron collars, three handcuffs of iron, two pairs of manacles for hands and feet, an "iron fiddle (as it was called) for neck and hands, a whip of thongs, and a scourge. Before the town hall of Kazimierz (illustration 9) there stood a pillory, built of ashlars, with four chains for feet and neck.
The sentence of imprisonment for life, or, as the formula runs, for "a hundred years and a day," was but rarely pronounced, because even such small transgressions as stealing a suit of clothes, or the like, were punishable by death. For vagabonds, or such criminals as had never been convicted of crime before, or those who managed to obtain the intercession of high officials or
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