As the most egregious offence an individual could commit , viewed as seriously as though the accused had personally attacked the monarch , high treason demanded the ultimate punishment . But whereas men guilty of this crime was hanged , drawn and quartered , women was drawn and burned . In his Commentaries on the Laws of England the 18th @-@ century English jurist William Blackstone noted that the sentence , " to be drawn to the gallows , and there to be burned alive " , was " full as terrible to the sensation as the other " . Blackstone wrote that women was burned rather than quartered as " the decency due to the sex forbid the exposing and publicly mangling their bodies " . However , an observation by historian Jules Michelet , that " the first flame to rise consumed the clothes , revealing poor trembling nakedness " , may , in the opinion of historian Vic Gatrell , suggest that this solution is " misconceived " . In The Hanging Tree , Gatrell conclude that the occasional live burial of women in Europe gave tacit acknowledgement to the possibility that a struggling , kicking female hanging from a noose could " elicit obscene fantasies " from watching males .