 As the most <unk> 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 were hanged , drawn and quartered , women were drawn and burned . In his <unk> on the Laws of England the 18th @-@ century English <unk> William Blackstone noted that the sentence , " to be drawn to the <unk> , and there to be burned alive " , was " full as terrible to the sensation as the other " . Blackstone wrote that women were burned rather than quartered as " the decency due to the sex forbids the exposing and publicly <unk> their bodies " . However , an observation by historian Jules <unk> , 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 " <unk> " . In The <unk> Tree , Gatrell concludes that the occasional live burial of women in Europe gave tacit acknowledgement to the possibility that a struggling , kicking female hanging from a <unk> could " elicit obscene fantasies " from watching males . 
