Why when being executed by hanging were women hung whist seated in a chair?
It was very common for both men and women to be executed while seated on a horse or in a cart. Particularly in a cart, a number of executions can be performed at once, with everyone’s noose over the scaffold at the same time and then being yanked out as the carts moved. This was not usually enough to kill someone right away like dropping someone from a height in a noose does, so friends of the executed sometimes would pull on a condemned person’s legs to strangle them faster. See an account of such a hanging in link one, below (skip down if you’re not interested in other background material).
