Hanged, drawn and quartered was a execution method used mainly in late medieval and early modern Britain and Ireland for men convicted of high treason. The condemned were tied to a wooden hurdle and dragged behind a horse to the gallows, hanged until nearly dead, then disembowelled, beheaded and cut into quarters. The parts were often displayed on places like London Bridge as a warning. It became statutory punishment for treason in England in 1352 under Edward III, though similar rituals are recorded earlier. The sentence was reserved for crimes seen as the most serious attack on the monarch's authority, and it was applied to many Catholic priests in Elizabethan England. Reforms in the 19th century softened it, and England abolished it in 1870.

In 1909 D. W. Griffith made a 14-minute film about a speculator who corners the wheat market and doubles the price of bread. A farmer sows his field while a 'Wheat King' gambles in the Chicago wheat pit; bakers raise the loaf from five cents to ten and the poor line up for bread. Griffith cut back and forth between the farm, the feast and the breadline, a technique called parallel editing, so audiences saw both ends of the economy at once. The film drew on Frank Norris's stories and on a real scheme: months earlier Chicago financier James Patten had cornered wheat, sent bread prices up and made about $5 million, roughly $185 million today.