Episode Details
Back to EpisodesHistory’s Strangest Questions: Was a Lord of the Realm Hanged for a Comma?
Description
In 1911, the British Crown knighted Roger Casement for exposing colonial atrocities in the Congo and the Amazon. Five years later, the same government hanged him for treason. Ever since, people have said he was "hanged on a comma", that a single mark of punctuation in a 565-year-old medieval statute sent a knight of the British Empire to the gallows.
It's one of the most famous stories in legal history. And it's not quite true. In this short, Keith Hockton untangles the myth from what really happened: the humanitarian who became an Irish rebel, the unpunctuated 1351 law argued over word by word, the "Black Diaries" that drained away all sympathy, and the question that still splits opinion, traitor, or martyr?
For books written and published by Keith Hocton