Each event would have featured in relevant histories: of the independence of Scotland or of events leading to Oliver Cromwell’s republican commonwealth. But did the trials—indictment read to Wallace before he was so cruelly deconstructed; some 30 witnesses for Charles—add much to the overall history of the two conflicts themselves? Perhaps not. Happening between these two beheadings was another of significance. Sir Peter von Hagenbach beheaded in Breisach in 1474 for atrocities committed when serving the Duke of Burgundy is famously, if controversially, relied on as the sentence imposed by the first international war crimes trial.1 Von Hagenbach was tried by 28 judges from regional cities for murder and rape, crimes counted by some as early forms of ‘crimes against humanity’. Von Hagenbach was tortured into confession and six witnesses were called against him. The trial and beheading led to revenge by the Duke of Burgundy, von Hagenbach’s master; but the trial record is not itself often, or ever, relied on for an account of anything except the particular acts of von Hagenbach himself.