The Big Book of Pain: Torture & Punishment Through History

by Mark P. Donnelly

  There are two basic versions of this almost legendary instrument: (1) the typically Spanish one in which the screw draws back the iron collar, killing the victim by asphyxiation alone; and (2) the Catalonian one, in which an iron point penetrates and crushes the cervical vertebrae whilst at the same time forcing the entire neck forward and crushing the trachea against the fixed collar, thus killing by both asphyxiation and slow destruction of the spinal cord. The agony can be prolonged according to the executioner’s whim.

  In this image of an auto-de-fe courtesy of the Spanish Inquisition, we see an entire row of heretics being burned in the background, while the foreground shows us (from left to right): a man being slowly roasted over a fire (for what purpose we can only guess); an impaling (presumably the variation in sentence being linked to the variation in ‘crime’) and a comparatively merciful beheading by the sword.

  Here we see another mass burning. This woodcut depicts the burning of twenty-three Jews convicted of the murder of Christian children for the Passover rites – a charge trumped up against Jewish communities all over Europe and always ‘proved’ with the methods that were applied to witchcraft and heresy trials. Once the Torturers elicited the confession they required, that confession was used as ‘proof’ for the condemnation of others.

  TORTURE IN THE AGE OF REASON

  The period between 1600 and 1700 is often called the Age of Reason. This may be an appropriate enough term when referring to the scientific advancements of the period, but in the field of juris prudence and corporal punishment things remained pretty much business as usual. When Queen Elizabeth I died in 1603 she was succeeded on the throne of England by her second cousin, King James VI of Scotland. Having already spent eighteen years on the Scottish throne, the thirty-nine-year-old monarch had no intention of changing the way he did things, and the accepted ways of doing things in Scotland were even harsher than they had been in England under the Tudors.

  Of all the things James was afraid of, and there seem to have been an over-abundance of them, one of his most deep-seated fears was of witchcraft. In 1590, while still on the throne of Scotland, he had ordered the arrest of one Dr Fian (alias John Cunningham), along with forty accomplices, on charges of sorcery and trying to kill King James by bewitching him to death. There is no doubt that Cunningham was a dangerous and foolish man; he openly styled himself as a magician and was long suspected of dealing in poisons, so James’ subordinates had ample reason to believe that if, indeed, there was a plot against the king, Cunningham was probably involved. In an effort to extract details of Cunningham’s evil doings the royal torturers ripped off his fingernails and drove needles into the bleeding flesh of his finger tips.

  When that failed to elicit a confession, the good doctor was subjected to the ‘boots’, a device in which his lower legs were so horribly crushed that blood and bone marrow oozed from the edges of the iron shoe. Still, the stalwart Cunningham refused to confess but his denial failed to save him. He was strangled and his body burnt at the stake. The following year, 1591, another Scottish ‘witch’ had her fingers locked in a clamp-like device called the ‘pilliwinckes’ while her head was lashed with ropes and jerked violently back and forth. Finally being identified as a witch by a ‘witch’s mark’ on her throat (probably a mole, wart or birth-mark, commonly known to witch hunters everywhere as a stigmata sagarum), she confessed and was executed.

  Here we have an illustration of the inquisitorial process at work. The victim is enduring the torture of the brodequin. A wooden framework encases his legs from the knees to the ankles while wedges are hammered in with a large mallet until all of the bones in his knees, lower leg and ankles have been broken. This would be deliberately slow and painful, but also intentionally non-lethal and not too shocking, sudden or overwhelming to cause the victim to faint. He is being continually questioned about his supposed ‘crimes’ and the scribe is dutifully recording his responses.

  Obviously these tortures were not only in accordance with accepted practices of witch hunting, but also in line with King James’ own thoughts on the subject, all duly recorded and expounded upon in a book entitled Daemonology. Just how hell-bent on rooting out witches in Scotland James was, was best expressed by a contemporary Edinburgh jurist when he said: ‘An old wife circumstantially accused of witchcraft at a Galloway kirk-session [church service] has as little chance of mercy as a Jew before the Spanish Inquisition’.

  Naturally, when James came to the throne of England, neatly tucked away among his baggage were all his fears and superstitions against those who made pacts with the Devil, and he quickly enacted laws making it a capital offence to ‘feed or reward any [evil] spirit, or any part of it, skin or bone’. At James’ behest a special act was passed against ‘Conjuration, Witchcraft and dealing with evil and wicked spirits’.

  An example of the pilliwinckes or finger pillory in the church of Ashby-de-la-Zouche in Leicestershire, England. Such devices were instilled in great estates everywhere probably as a punishment for thieving servants, but those which were in churches might also be employed to publicly shame penitents before the congregation.

  There were other high crimes and misdemeanours rampant in England as well as witchcraft and James had to deal with these as well; some of the punishments he decreed were bizarrely tailored to suit the particular crime. A first-time arrest for drunkenness was met with a simple fine of 5s, but subsequent arrests on the same charge would condemn the inebriate to wear a ‘Drunkard’s Cloak’ – a beer keg with one end knocked out and a hole cut in the other large enough for the miscreant’s head to fit through. The man was then condemned to wear this humiliating costume in public for a proscribed period of time. Considering that a cask large enough to fit over a man would weigh as much as the man himself, it would have been a terrible experience. The Drunkard’s Cloak must have become a standard punishment because there are records of it still in use as late as 1690.

  In other instances of making the punishment fit the crime, a Jew convicted of being a heretic was sentenced to prison where he was kept on a diet of pork; and false witnesses and perjurers were forced to wear a tongue-shaped piece of red cloth sewn to their clothes.

  More serious were the punishments and tortures meted out to those suspected of treason. In 1604, during King James’ second year on the throne, Guy Fawkes and a gang of Catholic plotters were discovered to have buried more than two dozen kegs of gunpowder under the houses of Parliament. James ordered that Fawkes was to be questioned rigorously and: ‘If he will not otherwise confess, the gentlest tortures are to be first used on him, and so on, step by step, to the most severe, and so God speed the good work’. What ‘gentle’ tortures were applied to Fawkes is unknown, but before being tried and executed along with his companions he was racked mercilessly. While hanging, drawing and quartering had gone out after the Babington plot during Elizabeth’s reign, Fawkes and his companions’ carcasses were publicly hacked to pieces after they had been hanged.

  A species of pillory inflicted for the most part on chronic drunkards, who were exposed to public ridicule in this fashion. The ‘drunkard’s cloak’ could take one of two primary forms: those closed on the bottom, with the victim immersed in faeces and urine, or merely putrid water; or else open, so that the victim could walk and be led about the town with the enormous and very painful weight on his shoulders.

  The victim of this device would be ‘prolonged’ by force of the winch, and various sources testify to cases of thirty centimeters or twelve inches, an inconceivable length that comes of the dislocation and extrusion of every joint in the arms and legs, of the dismemberment of the spinal column, and of course of the ripping and detachment of the muscles of the limbs, thorax and abdomen – effects that are, needless to say, fatal.

  Hanging, that long-established and wildly popular form of public entertainment, was given greater standardisation under King James. No longer would hangings in London take place wherever seemed convenient at the moment. Henceforth they would all t
ake place at Tyburn – located near the spot where London’s Marble Arch now stands. If you are going to host a public spectacle it is nice if people know where to find the show; and hangings at Tyburn were nothing less. Bleachers were built to accommodate the crowds and seat prices varied according to how close to the victim you wanted to sit and how important a personage the condemned happened to be. Along the route from the prison to Tyburn, the cart bearing the condemned first stopped at a church where a priest begged the condemned to repent. Next stop was the Hospital of St Giles-in-the-fields where a last mug of ale was offered to the soon-to-be departed. Sometimes, if a simple hanging was deemed to be too good for the villain, he was wrapped in chains, or locked in the human-shaped, iron cage known as a gibbet, and allowed to swing in the breeze until he died of exposure and thirst. Occasionally a sympathetic passer-by would put a bullet through his head and end his suffering but just as often they were used for target practice.

  Until the end of the eighteenth century, European urban and suburban panoramas abounded in iron and wooden cages attached to the outsides of town halls and ducal palaces, to halls of justice, to cathedrals and to city walls. The naked or nearly naked victims were locked into the cages and hung up. They perished of hunger and thirst, a fate seconded in winter by storm and cold, in summer by heatstroke and sunburn; often they had been tortured and mutilated, to make more edifying examples. The putrefying cadavers were generally left in place until the bones fell apart.

  Charles I succeeded his father, James, in 1625, bringing with him new ideas. Some of these, like the king’s insistence on ruling without having to consult Parliament, were annoyingly old-fashioned, but his thoughts on crime and punishment were both enlightened and liberal. Branding was greatly diminished, as were a number of other forms of corporal mutilation. Torturing a prisoner to obtain a confession was outlawed – although it was never legal under the terms of Magna Charta – and almost immediately hangings at Tyburn dropped from 150 or so per year to around ninety. Unfortunately for Charles, Parliament was no more impressed with liberal laws than they were with the king ruling behind their collective back. Both the judiciary and Parliament were now packed with reactionary, fundamentalist Puritans who had no intention of liberalising anything. In 1634, a Quaker Member of Parliament, William Prynne (Quakers being far too liberal to suit the Puritans) was sentenced to life in prison for his faith. A part of his sentence was to be pilloried, to have both ears cut off and branded with the letters S.L., for ‘seditious libeler’. Another Quaker, Anne Auckland, was sentenced to eight months’ imprisonment in an underground sewer and James Parnell was imprisoned in a hole in a wall 12ft above the ground. Torture to obtain a confession may have been outlawed by King Charles, but torture as punishment remained standard operating procedure under the Puritans.

  An instrument of public ridicule, the gambler’s rosary was reserved in some places for smokers and gamblers who, thus ornamented, were exposed in the market square, subject to the usual consequences – at the very least embarrassing – but frequently painful, sometimes serious, and even fatal. Similar ‘necklaces’ made of heavy wooden or stone ‘bottles’, or equally onerous ‘balance weights’ or huge ‘coins’ were hung around the necks of, respectively, drunkards and dishonest shopkeepers. Poachers were known to be decked out with chains to which the cadavers of their ill-got prey were strung and left until they putrefied and fell apart (particularly effective in the summertime) – but only after having the first and second finger of their right hand cut off so that they could no longer draw an arrow (or later pull a trigger on a musket).

  In the early 1640s, Parliamentary forces seized control of the government and declared open war on the king. Even while Civil War raged across England, Parliament took time to enact draconian laws against anything that seemed to contravene the strict Puritan moral code. Sex outside the marriage bed became a crime, and adultery was declared a felony. By 1648 anyone convicted of being a theatrical actor could be publicly flogged and anyone caught attending a play could be fined. Cock-fighting was also outlawed; not because it was cruel, but because it was ‘commonly accompanied by [betting], drinking and swearing’. Soon, anyone caught having fun of any kind could expect to be stocked, pilloried and/or whipped to within an inch of their lives.

  Swearing, blaspheming, playing cards or dice, doing business on Sunday, failure to attend church or even ‘vainly or profanely walking on the Lord’s Day’ were all liable to a heavy fine and public punishment. When a non-Puritan fanatic named James Naylor insisted he was God and that it was permissible for an unmarried couple to have sex so long as they went to the same church, he was sentenced to the following punishment: first he was pilloried in Palace Yard, then whipped through the streets of London all the way to the Old Corn Exchange. Two days later he was again pilloried at the Corn Exchange before having a hole bored through his tongue and being branded with a ‘B’ for blasphemer. He was then carted to the town of Bristol where he was again flogged and placed in solitary confinement, at Bridewell Prison, for an unspecified period of time.

  Parliament began the next year of judicial progress – 1649 – by beheading King Charles and setting up a new government under Oliver Cromwell who, in order to better torture everyone in England, promptly closed the taverns. Like all dictators before and since, Cromwell and the Puritans needed a bogeyman to keep the people frightened into obedience. They already had Catholics and closet-monarchists, but they needed something more general – a blanket fear that would keep every man and woman in England shaking in their boots. The perceived threat of witches serving as agents of the devil seemed to fit the demand admirably.

  Witchcraft had always been feared as an enemy of Christianity but it had not been until 1484 that Pope Innocent VIII had made the persecution of witches a doctrine of the faith. The same year that he allowed Spain to set up its own Office of the Inquisition he issued a Papal Bull on witchcraft. In it, he said:

  It has indeed lately come to our ears, not without afflicting us with bitter sorrow, that … many persons of both sexes, unmindful of their own salvation and straying from the Catholic faith, have abandoned themselves to devils, incubi and succubi [male and female demon spirits] … and at the instigation of the enemy of mankind they do stink from committing and perpetrating the foulest abominations and filthiest excesses to the deadly peril of their own souls, whereby they outrage the Divine Majesty and are cause of scandal and danger to very many. … In virtue of Our Apostolic authority We decree and enjoin that … Inquisitors be empowered to proceed to the just correction, imprisonment and punishment of any persons … designated in Our letters.

  Frightening as this Papal Bull is, there was ample religious authority to back it up. In Exodus 22:18 it says: ‘Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live’ and no less a respected figure than St Thomas Aquinas had preached against the evils and dangers of witchcraft.

  To help win the fight against the satanic legions, Pope Innocent appointed two German Dominican monks, Heinrich Kraemer and Johann Sprenger, to carry out enquiries in northern Germany where witchcraft seemed to be particularly rampant. Kraemer and Sprenger were uniquely qualified to fulfil their new assignment; they were cunning enough to twist both secular and Canon Law to whatever end they desired, they were dyed-in-the-wool fanatics and they hated women vehemently. During the course of their investigations, Kraemer and Sprenger compiled a book that would serve as the guide for all witch hunters to follow – the Malleus Maleficarum, or ‘Hammer of Witches’. Actually its full title reads: ‘MALLEUS MALEFICARUM, Maleficas, & earum hæresim, ut phramea potentissima conterens.’ This translates as: ‘The Hammer of Witches which destroyeth Witches and their heresy like a most powerful spear.’

  This woodcut depicts three women convicted of witchcraft being burned alive while the devil flies into or out of one of their mouths. As horrific as this scene would have been to witness, we must remember that this method of execution was seen by contemporaries as merciful in the sense that the torment
s of the flames endured here on earth were thought to help with the victim’s chances of eternal salvation. Note also the ‘witches sabbath’ on the right and the comparatively merciful beheading in the background.

  In addition to guiding witch hunters through the process of enquiry and torture, the Malleus identified precisely how witchcraft worked. ‘All witchcraft comes through carnal lust which is insatiable in women, wherefore for the sake of fulfilling their lusts they consort with devils’. According to Kraemer and Sprenger, the Devil appeared to women in any form they might find sexually pleasing and thereby seduced them into becoming his servants.

  The authors of the Malleus, as well as other writers, quickly expanded on their concept of just how dangerous witches could be:

  they raise hailstorms and hurtful tempests and lightning; cause sterility in men and animals; offer to devils, or otherwise kill, those children whom they do not devour. [They] make horses go mad under their riders; they can transport themselves from place to place through the air … they can affect Judges and magistrates so that they cannot hurt them; they cause themselves and others to keep silent under torture …

  Naturally, to be capable of so much evil the witches had to be organised and thus the concept of the witches’ Sabbat – or unholy conclave – developed. According to a tract dating from forty years prior to Pope Innocent’s Bull, witches gathered together at the Sabbats, swearing before Satan that they would kill as many children under the age of three as possible. After sealing the deal by kissing the Devil’s ass, they engaged in the ultimate outrage – a feast of succulent roast baby.