16th c. gibbet, skeletons found in Grenoble

The remains of a 16th century gibbet and dozens of skeletons of the executed have been discovered in Grenoble, France.

The site, an esplanade at the Porte de la Roche entrance to Grenoble, was built on reclaimed marshland on the bank of the Isère river. For centuries the area was used for its natural resources (sand, timber), and for celebrations, games, fairs, military encampments, even though it was still flooding with regularity until the early 19th century.

It was excavated by INRAP archaeologists before redevelopment, revealing a quadrangular masonry structure that contained ten pit burials inside and outside of its northern wall. Most of the pits held the skeletal remains of multiple individuals — between two and eight people — with occasional single burials. From what can be determined by bone count, there are at least 32 people buried, most of them men, a few women, placed in contact with each other in various positions and orientations.

Researchers were able to conclusively identify the structure by comparing the masonry foundations with a timber frame plan from 1546 of the Grenoble Port de la Roche gibbet. The measurements corresponded exactly.

The construction records allow us to follow the stages of the building project between 1544 and 1547 and to reconstruct the architecture of the gallows. On a masonry foundation measuring 8.2 meters on each side, eight stone pillars rose, surmounted by capitals that supported a timber frame made of pieces of wood placed 5 meters high. The gallows was built on a slight elevation of the alluvial terrace to protect it from flooding. Its eastern side was further protected by a drainage ditch, perhaps also intended to delimit its space. Its eight pillars give it a significant originality, as this number was correlated with the judicial hierarchy of the kingdom: from two to six pillars for seigneurial courts, up to the 16 pillars of the royal gallows of Montfaucon in Paris.

This is not where the condemned were executed. This gibbet was where the bodies of the executed were displayed for varying lengths of time. The shameful exposure of the dead was part of the sentence, mostly reserved for people convicted of crimes against the king. In 16th century France, that was often Huguenots.

When this gibbet was constructed, tensions between Protestant and Catholics had spiked and the official government position drastically shifted from toleration of Protestantism to persecution. The Edict of Fontainebleau, issued by King Francis I in 1540, was the first of a series of punitive codes targeting Hugenots. It declared Protestantism treasonous and is adherents subject to torture, confiscation of property and execution. His successor Henry II went even further with the Edict of Châteaubriant of 1551, calling for draconian punishment of all “heretics,” and in 1557, the Edict of Compiègne established the death penalty for all convicted heretics. The persecution and religious conflicts exploded into civil war in 1562 that would continue until the end of the century.

Exposing the dead body of somebody convicted of heresy or treason was part of the punishment. The humiliation of it, the violation of deeply-felt religious beliefs regarding the resurrection of the flesh, extended the judicial sentence beyond the execution itself. Burial on-site without proper rituals in unconsecrated ground had eternal consequences.

Burying a condemned person in this way was a means of prolonging the sentence pronounced during their lifetime into death: the individuals found during the excavations were therefore deliberately denied burial. Their bodies, sometimes dismembered, were subjected to shameful treatment: deposited or thrown into simple pits, sometimes layered, sometimes rearranged without any observable care or funerary gestures. Circumstances seem to have guided the burials. Thus, in the large central pit, a deposit of superimposed bodies preceded that of body parts and disconnected skeletal remains. Elsewhere, several condemned individuals may have been taken down and buried simultaneously in the same pit.

The gallows at Port de la Roche were built at a time when the repression of the Reformation was intensifying in the Kingdom. It may have remained in use until the early 17th century , when pacification policies were implemented and Grenoble expanded under the leadership of Lesdiguières, a former Protestant leader and the king’s new lieutenant general in the Dauphiné. The discovery of this gallows and the understanding of the practices it engendered provide a new case study for a rapidly growing field of research on these places of justice—markers of jurisdiction, symbols of security, instruments of social degradation—and more generally for reflections on what it could, or still can, mean to be condemned to a shameful death.

* This article was originally published here