Oct. 3, 1283: As Bad Deaths Go, It's Hard to Top This

1283: Dafydd ap Gruffydd, the last native prince of Wales in a free if turbulent Wales, becomes the first person known to be executed by being hanged, then drawn and quartered.

While the human capacity for cruelty is limitless, it's hard to top the medievals for their sheer inventiveness when it came to executing a criminal -- especially for the crime of high treason.

Captured after attacking Hawarden Castle at Easter during the ultimately unsuccessful Welsh struggle to remain independent of Plantagenet England, Dafydd was imprisoned by an outraged King Edward I, the man given credit for dreaming up Dafydd's grisly fate. The death warrant stipulated Dafydd's demise should be slow and agonizing, and the monarch did not disappoint.

On Oct. 3, the appointed day, Dafydd was dragged through the streets of Shrewsbury behind a horse. After that, he was hanged, revived and disemboweled. His entrails were thrown into the fire as he watched, symbolic penance for "his sacrilege in committing his crimes in the week of Christ's passion." Then he was beheaded and his body cut into quarters "for plotting the king's death."

There would be later refinements to this particular form of capital punishment, including the severing of the condemned man's "privy parts" as a prelude to the final disemboweling. The full drawing-and-quartering sentence was carried out until the 18th century in Britain and was not officially abolished as a method of execution until as late as 1870.

Thankfully, we have in the meantime advanced to technologically advanced methods, like the guillotine, the electric chair, the gas chamber and lethal injection.