This is a weird one. Is it possible for a rebel to be hanged twice on the same day, die - and then get better? Well, obviously not. But ...
King Edward I of England (1239-1307), who gigged under the name Edward Longshanks because he was over six feet tall, annexed Wales during the 1270s and 80s. One of his principle allies was a Welsh prince named Rhys ap Maredudd, but the two fell out over the division of the spoils and Rhys launched a rebellion against Longshanks in 1287. One of Rhys's followers was a man from Gower named William Cragh, and he's the fella who survived death.
Cragh was born in the early 1260s, and other than that vague date little is known for sure about him. He was probably on the rebel side during Rhys's uprising - but not definitely. Some historians have speculated that he may have been fighting for King Edward, while others suggest he was arrested for thievery, not rebellion.
Arrested is what he was, at any rate, along with thirteen others, as the rebellion collapsed. Intriguingly, twelve of his fellow prisoners were released, while Cragh was found guilty of killing thirteen men during the troubles. He was sentenced to death, and the sentence was carried out on the 27th November 1290.
For the rest of the story, we move to London in 1307 and an official inquiry convened in the name of the Pope. The papers from this investigation still exist in the Vatican library. The Church was in the process of canonising Thomas de Cantilupe, once Bishop of Hereford, who had died in 1282. In order to name Thomas as a saint it was necessary to prove that he had committed miracles after his death; it was widely believed that Thomas's speciality in this field was bringing the dead back to life. The resurrection of Cragh was the best-known example.
Nine witnesses appeared before the inquiry - one of them being the hanged man himself.
His own memories of the day of his death were, understandably, incomplete; he had, after all, spent much of it dead, and therefore not in a position to take notes. But from questioning him and the other witnesses, the papal commissioners were able, to their satisfaction, to piece together the sequence of events, as follows.
The chap being hanged alongside Cragh was evidently somewhat big-boned, and the gallows collapsed, the two victims falling to the ground. They appeared to be dead, but just to make certain they were both re-hanged. The second hanging seemed to have done the trick for sure, and the bodies were left dangling there for the rest of the day.
At this point, there's another mystery. The man who'd ordered the hangings was the Lord of Gower, and for reasons which nobody now knows, his wife, Lady Mary, had interceded on Cragh's behalf with a plea of mercy. As well as petitioning her husband, she had prayed to the late bishop, Thomas.
Now that Cragh was dead, she asked that his body be given over to her care, and it was carried to a nearby house. Those who saw the corpse there told the commissioners that it was unquestionably dead - it exhibited all the grisly signs which were usually looked for in those days in confirming death by hanging.
Lady Mary wasn't giving up, though. She prayed to Thomas to "ask God to restore life to William," and had Cragh measured so that a wax taper of his exact height could be burned in offering at Thomas's shrine. And while that was going on, the dead man began to make small movements, first of his tongue and then of one foot. Within a few days, he had recovered entirely, and was able to visit Hereford Cathedral to give thanks to the late bishop.
Hanging was not then the exact science it became in later centuries, and it was not unknown for people to survive the procedure. The extreme nature of this case, though - a man hanged twice, left to swing for hours, and then declared utterly dead by everyone who examined him - ensured that Cragh's tale became more famous than most.
Thomas of Hereford got his sainthood, in 1320, a job he has held ever since, though Cragh's revival is not considered an official miracle. The Bish was by all accounts a decent bloke, who did a lot of good work (before his death, I mean.) The Lord of Gower died a couple of months after the hanging. His widow inherited his estates, becoming a powerful person in her own right, living until 1326.
Which just leaves William Cragh (also known as William ap Rhys, William Crach, and William the Scabby) himself. Clearly he was still alive seventeen years after his hanging, at the time of the inquiry, but after that he vanishes from the records. I imagine he's dead by now, anyway - though you can never be sure, can you?
*
Sources:
www.medievalswansea.ac.uk/en/the-story/the-twice-hanged-william-cragh/index.html
www.britannica.com/biography/Edward-I-king-of-England
www.herefordcathedral.org/news/who-was-the-hanged-man-of-medieval-swansea
www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v26/n15/maurice-keen/why-did-lady-mary-care-about-william-cragh
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-south-west-wales-27927320