page_title: Premature burial
section_title: Execution
hierarchical_section_title: Premature burial / Types / Intentional / Execution
caption_attribution_description: Nederlands: Anneken van den Hove levend begraven te Vilvoorde in 1597. Etsprent van Jan Luyken (Noordelijke Nederlanden, ca. 1683 - 1685) Uit: Theatre des martyrs, depuis la mort de J. Christ jusqu'à present (Leiden, ca. 1715) Hove zu Brussel levendich in die erde vergraben, Ao. 1597
context_page_description: Premature burial, also known as live burial, burial alive, or vivisepulture, means to be buried while still alive.
  Animals or humans may be buried alive accidentally on the mistaken assumption that they are dead, or intentionally as a form of torture, murder, or execution. It may also occur with consent of the victim as a part of a stunt, with the intention to escape.
  Fear of being buried alive is reported to be among the most common phobias.
context_section_description: The burning of books and burying of scholars (simplified Chinese: 焚书坑儒; traditional Chinese: 焚書坑儒; pinyin: fénshū kēngrú) was a supposed suppression of intellectual thought carried out by Qin Shi Huang, the first emperor of a unified China. Books and texts deemed to be subversive were burned and 460 Confucian scholars were reportedly buried alive in 212 BC. Modern scholars doubt these events – Sima Qian, author of the account of these events in the Records of the Grand Historian, was an official of the Han dynasty, which could be expected to portray the previous rulers unfavorably.
  Tacitus, in his work Germania, records that German tribes practised two forms of capital punishment; the first where the victim was hanged from a tree, and another where the victim was tied to a wicker frame, pushed face down into the mud and buried. The first was used to make an example of traitors; the second was used for punishment of dishonorable or shameful vices, such as cowardice. According to Tacitus, the Ancient Germans thought that crime should be exposed, whereas infamy should be buried out of sight.
  Fleta, a mediaeval commentary on English common law, specified live burial as the punishment for sodomy, bestiality and those who had dealings with Jews or Jewesses.
  In Ancient Persia, Herodotus in his book Histories records that burying people alive was a Persian custom, which they practised in order to be blessed by gods.
  They [Xerxes and his troops] marched into the Nine Ways of the Edonian to the bridges, and found the banks of the Strymon united by a bridge, but being informed that this place was called by the name of the Nine Ways, they buried alive so many in it so many sons and daughter of inhabitants. It is a Persian custom to bury people alive for I have heard that Amestris, wife of Xerxes, having grown old, caused fourteen children of the best families in Persia to be buried alive, to show her gratitude to the god who is said to be beneath the earth.
  In ancient Rome, a Vestal Virgin convicted of violating her vows of celibacy was "buried alive" by being sealed in a cave with a small amount of bread and water, ostensibly so that the goddess Vesta could save her were she truly innocent, essentially making it into a trial by ordeal. This practice was, strictly speaking, immurement (i.e., being walled up and left to die) rather than premature burial. According to Christian tradition, a number of saints were martyred this way, including Saint Castulus and Saint Vitalis of Milan.
  In Denmark, in the Ribe city statute, which was promulgated in 1269, a female thief was to be buried alive, and in the law by Queen Margaret I, adulterous women were to be punished with premature burial, men with beheading.
  Within the Holy Roman Empire a variety of offenses, including rape, infanticide, and theft, could be punished with live burial. For example, the Schwabenspiegel, a law code from the 13th century, specified that the rape of a virgin should be punished by live burial (whereas the rapist of a non-virgin was to be beheaded). Female murderers of their own employers also risked being buried alive. In Augsburg in 1505, for example, a 12-year-old boy and a 13-year-old girl were found guilty of killing their master in conspiracy with the cook. The boy was beheaded, and the girl and the cook were buried alive beneath the gallows. The jurist Eduard Henke observed that in the Middle Ages, live burial of women guilty of infanticide was a "very frequent" punishment in city statutes and Landrechten. For example, he notes those in Hesse, Bohemia, and Tyrol. The Berlinisches Stadtbuch records that between 1412 and 1447, 10 women were buried alive there, and as late as in 1583, the archbishop of Bremen promulgated (alongside the somewhat milder 1532 Constitutio Criminalis Carolina punishment of drowning) live burial as an alternate execution method for punishing mothers found guilty of infanticide.
  As noted by Elias Pufendorf, a woman buried alive would afterward be impaled through the heart. This combined punishment of live burial and impalement was pra
caption: Jan Luyken's drawing of the Anabaptist nl:Anna Utenhoven being buried alive at Vilvoorde in 1597. In the drawing, her head is still above the ground and the priest is exhorting her to recant her faith, while the executioner stands ready to completely cover her up upon her refusal.
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