beheading, a mode of executing capital punishment by which the head is severed from the body. The ancient Greeks and Romans regarded it as a most honorable form of death. Before execution the criminal was tied to a stake and whipped with rods. In early times an ax was used, but later a sword, which was considered a more honorable instrument of death, was used for Roman citizens. Ritual decapitation known as seppuku was practiced in Japan from the 15th through the 19th century. One symbolic consequence of the French Revolution was the extension of the privilege of beheading to criminals of ordinary birth, by means of the guillotine.
According to tradition, beheading by sword was introduced to England by William the Conqueror in the 11th century. Death by the sword, in which the victim stood or knelt upright (because a block would have impeded the downward stroke of the weapon), was usually reserved for offenders of high rank, as it was considered to be the equivalent of being killed in battle. Simon, Lord Lovat, was the last person to be so executed in England, in 1747.
Beheading, usually by ax, was the customary method of executing traitors in England. The victim was drawn (dragged by a horse to the place of execution), hanged (not to the death), disemboweled, beheaded, and then quartered, sometimes by tying each of the four limbs to a different horse and spurring them in different directions. In 1820 the Cato Street Conspirators, led by Arthur Thistlewood, became the last persons to be beheaded by ax in England. Having plotted to murder members of the government, they were found guilty of high treason and hanged, and their corpses were then decapitated.
Although beheading was one means of executing political prisoners in Nazi Germany, the practice is now rare in European countries, most having abolished capital punishment. However, it is still practiced occasionally in some Asian and Middle Eastern countries.
Beginning with the murder of Daniel Pearl, an American journalist kidnapped in Pakistan in 2002, Islamic militant groups such as al-Qaeda embraced beheading as a propaganda tool, distributing gruesome videos of such executions to media outlets and on the Internet. ISIL, a Sunni insurgent group in Iraq and Syria, staged mass beheadings of Syrian and Iraqi captives beginning in 2014 and also used the threat of beheading to extract ransom payments from some Western governments. Several British and American hostages were beheaded by ISIL.