The Big Book of Pain: Torture & Punishment Through History

by Mark P. Donnelly

  Around this same time, Jesuit Priest Friedrich von Spec said:

  Even when judges claim that a witch had confessed without torture … in reality they were tortured, but only in an iron press with sharp-edged channels over the shins, in which they are pressed like a cake, bringing blood and causing intolerable pain, and this is technically called without torture, deceiving those who do not understand the phrases of the inquisitors. Some inquisitors would even tell their victims the names of those they wished them to denounce; they would also inform them of what others had said about them, so they would know what details to confess. Once arrested, there was no hope for the accused witch, even if she survived the torture. It is assumed that a woman cannot endure two or three tortures unless she is a witch. If to endure in great torment, one grinds her teeth, compress her lips and holds her breath, they say she laughs. Some faint under torture and they call it sleep. If the devil causes a man to hallucinate, it did not necessarily mean that he was a heretic; while if accomplices confessed to impossibilities, this was not [in reality] an indictment even against one who otherwise confessed.

  Following the Salem witch trials of 1692 it began to dawn on governments on both sides of the Atlantic that there were deep-seated problems in the judicial system that would have to be addressed if western civilisation was not to devour itself. But change never comes easy. The last execution for witchcraft in England took place in 1716 when Mary Hicks and her ten-year-old daughter were hanged. The last witch burning in Scotland came eleven years later. By 1736 most British statutes against witchcraft had been repealed but the suspicions and fear lingered. Nearly a century later, in the early 1800s, there were still people in Great Britain being arrested on charges of having lynched or drowned old women suspected of witchcraft. The last recorded case of ‘swimming’ a suspected witch took place in England in 1825 when a mob of lunatics from Wickham Skeith, Suffolk, seized an itinerant peddler named Isaac Stebbing and threw him into the local mill pond to see if he would sink or float. Tragically for Stebbing, he refused to stay down long enough to drown and it was only thanks to the intervention of the local vicar that he was not lynched. A similarly tortuous course toward enlightenment and reform took place in every European country where the witch craze had once gripped the population with its unreasoning fear and associated horrors. How many individuals – most of whom were elderly women – perished at the hands of witch hunters could not be accurately estimated even if the records were complete, which they are not. Should the death toll include those who died under torture or passed away locked in some dungeon while they awaited interrogation? Best-guess estimates on the overall toll of judicial murder during the age of witch hunts range from as low as 200,000 to as high as 1 million. Considering the population of Europe as a whole during this period, the number of judicially imposed murders could run as high as one out of every 200 persons.

  REFORMS OF THE EIGHTEENTH AND NINETEENTH CENTURIES

  By 1700 the craze for hunting down witches had largely faded thanks to the dawning realisation that confessions extracted by torture, and the acceptance of hearsay evidence by courts, bore little resemblance to convictions achieved by objective judicial process. At the same time, torture was still a generally accepted form of punishment for a vast variety of crimes, despite the fact that there had been voices crying for the elimination of corporal punishment and mutilation for more than a century. Late in the sixteenth century, French statesman and essayist Michel de Montaigne wrote:

  … all that exceeds a simple death, appears to me perfect cruelty. I could hardly persuade myself, before I saw it with my eyes, that there could be found souls so cruel … who for the sole pleasure of murder would commit, hack, and lop off the limbs of others; sharpen their wits to invent unusual torments and new kinds of deaths … What right then, but that of power, can authorize the punishment of a citizen, so long as there remains any doubt of his guilt? Either he is guilty, or not guilty. If guilty, he should only suffer the punishment ordained by the laws, and torture becomes useless, as his confession is unnecessary. If he be not guilty, you torture the innocent; for in the eyes of the law, every man is innocent whose crime has not been proven.

  Similarly, in 1624, a Dutch thinker named Johannes Grevius insisted that no true Christian would ever contemplate the use of torture on anyone for any reason, be they a fellow Christian or a follower of another faith.

  Reform always comes hard and progress toward change is halting at best. The path toward the elimination of torture came as much through public rejection of the grisly spectacle of burning, branding and dismemberment as it did through judicial reform, but even public sympathy with the abstract concepts of what was fair and right was often at odds with the physical reality of life in a crime-ridden world.

  By 1700, London had become one of the fastest growing cities in the world. With a population of more than 600,000 it was the hub of a vast and expanding empire; housing foreign traders, migrant workers (many of whom were perpetually unemployed), swarms of soldiers who flooded into the city between foreign military engagements and gangs of idle rich kids with nothing better to do than find new ways of getting into trouble. It was, in short, much like any modern city with a serious crime problem. Among the worst offenders were street gangs like the Mohocks. The Mohocks were only one of more than a dozen gangs plaguing London in the first decades of the eighteenth century, but their habits were typical. Unlike most modern street gangs, the Mohocks and their contemporaries were not poor and directionless; they were rich and shiftless, relying on their parents’ money and social position to keep them out of prison. Their violence was appalling. Roaming the streets at night they alternated attacks on the unwary and helpless with violent bouts of drinking and brawling among themselves. Selecting their victims at random, gangs gouged out eyes, hacked off noses and ears and stabbed people to death with near impunity. Women were shoved head-first into tar barrels, which were then set on fire and rolled down the street. In one instance, a Mohock named Plunket went to his wig maker to collect his new peruque. When the proprietor refused to lower the agreed-upon price, Plunket picked up a razor and slashed the man’s throat.

  Combine the semi-organised violence of gangs like the Mohocks with the random violence of a city filled with unemployed workers and demobilised soldiers and any plea for reform will quickly be drowned out by public cries for order and safety at any cost. Hangings of convicted criminals drew the same cheering crowds that had formerly gathered to see witches executed and traitors hanged, drawn and quartered. During the hey-day of the Mohocks, England still imposed the death penalty for no less than thirty-two crimes including high treason, petty treason, piracy, murder, arson, burglary, house-breaking, assault, highway robbery, horse theft, stealing anything with a value greater than 1s and any form of robbery. In each case – except high-treason committed by a nobleman, where the punishment was beheading – the sentence was either transportation to the Colonies or death by hanging – and all hangings were public. Lesser crimes brought a term of incarceration in one of the growing number of prisons but although torture was no longer a routine part of punishment, imprisonment was hardly better than many of the old physical mutilations.

  For centuries, prisons and dungeons had been the breeding ground for a mysterious plague known as ‘gaol fever’. Probably a catch-all term for a vast variety of contagions spawned in the filthy, disease-ridden mass cells, since the 1500s gaol fever had occasionally broken out, taking the lives not only of uncounted numbers of inmates, but of guards, prison wardens and citizens at large. In 1577 it had swept Oxford and killed more than 300 people in forty-eight hours. Eleven years later it claimed 500 lives in Exeter. By the early 1700s, thanks largely to the increased numbers of prisons and burgeoning prison populations, gaol fever was still alive and well. Following the 1728 arrest of the wardens of London’s Marshalsea and Fleet prisons on charges of murdering and robbing their prisoners, a commission was established, under the direction of General James Ogleth
orpe, to investigate prison conditions and make recommendations for improvements that might help eliminate both rampant corruption and the constant threat of gaol fever. What Oglethorpe and his board found was shocking in the extreme.

  Eighteenth-century prisons, like some of their modern counterparts, were privately owned, profit-making ventures; but rather than billing the government for their services, it was the prisoners themselves who bore the cost of their incarceration. Inmates at London’s Newgate Prison were charged three guineas for admission, half a guinea per week for a bed and additional fees were charged for candles, eating utensils and food. In the case of the Marshalsea and Fleet prisons, prisoners were even charged for the manacles they wore and were routinely tortured in an effort to extract money from their families. If a prisoner could not pay his bill, he was simply kept inside until someone paid his way out or he died: whether they had been convicted of any crime, or their sentence had run its course, was irrelevant.

  Oglethorpe’s commission heard of prisoners fighting with each other, and the rats, for scraps of rotten food; of cells that had open sewers running through them and of prisoners who could not afford a bed being forced to sleep on the wet floors. One testimonial told of a man who had taken his dog to prison with him, to protect him from the rats: the rats had killed and eaten the dog. Another report concerning the horrible floggings routinely administered to prisoners said: ‘I saw a man walk across the yard with the blood that had run down from his lacerated flesh squishing out of his shoes at every step … and the ants were carrying away great pieces of human flesh that the lash had scattered on the ground’. Other tales were too horrible to detail and Oglethorpe’s report annotated them only as ‘indescribable nastiness’. The committee completed its report and handed it to Parliament who filed it away and conveniently forgot about it. Fortunately, there were concerned citizens, members of the judiciary and even of the government, who took a more enlightened, hands-on approach to legal reform.

  In 1748 – ten years after the Oglethorpe commission – a ten-year-old boy named William York was convicted of the stabbing to death of a young girl and sentenced to be hanged. The Home Secretary interceded on William’s behalf and sentenced him to prison for ten years on the condition that, upon his release, William would join the navy. At issue was not the crime (William had been duly convicted of that) but the effectiveness of capital punishment, particularly in the case of one so young, in preventing others from committing similar crimes. Four years after William York’s ordeal, Horace Walpole – a well-known political pundit, essayist and gossip – was attacked by a gang and shot in the face while strolling through Hyde Park. Writing of the event to a friend, he decried, ‘what a shambles this country is grown’. The same day Walpole wrote his letter, seventeen men were hanged at Tyburn but it did nothing to slow London’s crime rate. One of the many factors contributing to London’s soaring crime rate was the growing instance of organised crime and criminal gangs. Unlike the Mohocks, these were hardened criminals who banded together to increase the effectiveness and profitability of their activities.

  Only months before Walpole’s encounter, the problem of organised crime had been addressed by Henry Fielding (a London magistrate and author of the novel Tom Jones) when he wrote: ‘Officers of Justice have owned to me that they have passed by such criminals with warrants against them without daring to apprehend them; and indeed they could not be blamed for not exposing themselves to sure destruction’. Lambasting the system of punishment, as well as the impunity with which criminals operated, Fielding referred to England’s prison system as ‘prototypes of Hell’ where criminals could exchange information and form gangs. To fully appreciate Fielding’s statements it is necessary to understand that as late as 1751 neither London, nor anywhere else in England, had anything remotely resembling an organised police force. Local citizens patrolled the streets as an unpaid public service but it did little, if anything, to deter crime. It was a situation Henry Fielding and his brother John decided to do something about. In 1753 they convinced the government to fund an organisation that became known as the Bow Street Runners. With the Fielding brothers serving as commanding officers and magistrates, the Runners investigated reports of criminal activity, looked for clues, interviewed witnesses and, with a little luck, apprehended the guilty party. In retrospect this seems an obvious way to fight crime, but the Bow Street Runners were the first professional detective force in Great Britain’s long history.

  This example of a public pillory shows how popular this sort of spectacle could be.

  With the Fieldings leading the way toward reform, John Howard took up General Oglethorpe’s fallen banner in 1755 and again insisted that England could not possibly call itself a progressive nation until it reformed its prison system. Like Oglethorpe, Howard decried the complete wastage of human life imposed by a system that shackled men and women to a wall when they could be taught a trade, or given productive work to do. What Howard included in his report, that Oglethorpe had not, were numerical statistics. Of 4,375 inmates polled, half of them were found to be in prison because they were unable to pay their debts. Most hardened criminals – at least those who had not been hanged at Tyburn – had been transported to the colonies, flogged, pilloried, or branded. Howard concluded his report by stating that most of the people who were incarcerated were either debtors; were awaiting trial; had been imprisoned for misdemeanours or were simply too poor to buy their way out of jail. He also cited an earlier report which stated that more than 5,000 people died in British jails every year from starvation. It took John Howard nearly twenty years to get the government to listen, but in 1774 he finally convinced Parliament to investigate conditions in Britain’s prisons. As they had done when General Oglethorpe carried out his study more than forty-five years earlier, the new report was quietly shelved and ignored, despite the fact that more and more international voices were calling for the world to rethink the manner in which it dealt with society’s misfits.

  In 1764, Cesare Beccaria, an Italian lawyer from Milan, published a treatise entitled Crimes and Punishments. In his paper, Beccaria said the best way to fight crime was through prevention rather than punishment; that everyone was entitled to a speedy trial and that the use of torture, either to extract a confession or as a means of punishment, was futile. The work must have caught someone’s attention; it was translated into twenty-two languages and went through six Italian editions in only eighteen months. Five years later, an English magistrate expressed similar sentiments when he wrote: ‘it is scarcely to be credited that by the laws of England, there are above 160 different offences which subject the guilty parties to the death penalty’. Compare this to the thirty-two hanging offences in force only seventy years earlier, and the fact that the number of capital crimes would continue to rise until, by the end of the century, they would top-out at a staggering 220. Predictably, however, nobody seemed willing to take action on reforming the system; not even when King George III personally established a fifteen-member cabinet to review each and every death sentence passed in England – excepting those where the conviction had been for murder. Each case may have been carefully reviewed, but the numbers of hangings continued to increase as the list of capital offences grew. The best anyone seemed able to do was devise more efficient ways of hanging people. In 1760 a new ‘drop’ method was proposed. Rather than simply hauling the condemned into the air and allowing them to kick and thrash until they slowly strangled, the drop was supposed to ensure a speedy death by breaking the victim’s neck. The first man given an opportunity to try out this advanced technology was the Earl Ferrers, but the trap failed to open properly, the Earl was left to choke to death and business continued as usual at Tyburn’s hanging tree.

  This was the inevitable and unavoidable fate for those poor souls in Salem Massachusetts condemned as being guilty of witchcraft.

  Finally, in 1783, it was decided that public executions did more to excite a ghoulish populace than it did to eliminate crime. Henc
eforth, hangings would no longer be public affairs and on 7 November 1783 the last man was hanged at that cherished institution, the Tyburn Tree. While reformers may have taken some small comfort at this de-glorification of execution, even as respected a personage as Dr Samuel Johnson – compiler of the first English language dictionary and conversationalist extraordinaire – thought it signalled the end of civilisation. ‘The age is running mad for innovations’, he cried, ‘even Tyburn is not safe. Executions are intended to draw spectators. If they don’t, they don’t answer their purpose. The public is gratified by a procession; the criminal is supported by it.’ Eight years later, in 1791, gibbeting was outlawed as was the public flogging of females – women could still be whipped as punishment for some crimes, but the sentence could not be carried out in public.

  For all its flaws and failures, the eighteenth century had witnessed some laudable progress in the way criminals, and suspected criminals, were dealt with. New rules of procedure made hearsay evidence less acceptable, and torture to elicit a confession had been outlawed. Adding to this was the fact that defendants were prohibited from offering any evidence in court; if no statement from a defendant was admissible, then a confession extracted by torture had no value. By 1827 a law had been passed whereby a plea of ‘not guilty’ was automatically entered any time a suspect refused to plead either guilty or not guilty – it was a distinct improvement over ‘pressing’ a plea out of a suspect. Similarly, in the newly established United States of America, the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution guaranteed that no-one could give self-incriminating evidence.

  Although uncounted thousands of Englishmen and women were convicted of capital crimes during the 1700s, less than one out of three were actually hanged. Deportation to the American Colonies (or, after America’s Declaration of Independence in 1776, to Australia) was considered a more humane alternative to execution. Prisoners, however, did not always see it this way and on more than one occasion convicts insisted they would rather swing than be transported. There was certainly justification for their fears. Conditions onboard prison ships were comparable to the worst dungeons of the Middle Ages. Between 1750 and 1755 alone, the bodies of more than 2,000 dead prisoners were dumped into New York harbour, thousands more floated in other American harbours and who knows how many human carcasses had been tossed overboard at sea. The value placed on a deported criminal’s life is made clear by the fact that the British government offered anyone willing to help establish colonies in Australia a grant of 4,000 acres of land, forty cows and forty convict-slaves. Captain Arthur Phillip, first governor of New South Wales, Australia, wrote to the Crown asking: ‘if the convicts commit either murder or sodomy, may I sell them to the natives for meat?’ We do not know what answer he received.