The Sergant of the Woodyard brought the chopping block and cords with which the prisoner’s hand was to be bound into place. The Master Cook handed the knife to the Sergeant of the Larder who would cut off the offending hand. The Sergeant of Poultry cut off the head of a chicken whose body would be shoved over the stump (apparently to prevent infection), the Yeoman of the Scullery tended the fire where the Sergeant Farrier heated his searing irons. Once the hand had been cut off, the Chief Surgeon took the searing iron from the Sergeant Ferrier and cauterised the wound, the Sergeant of Poultry shoved the dead bird over the stump and the Chief Surgeon bandaged the whole affair. The Sergeant of the Pantry then offered the victim bread while the Sergeant of the Cellar poured him a nice cup of wine. As late as the reign of Good Queen Bess (Elizabeth I, reigned 1558–1603), sheep rustlers had both hands amputated. The practice of corporal amputation was finally outlawed in England in 1820.
Various axes used for dismemberment.
* * *
THE BARREL
* * *
There is nothing overly fantastical about this devilish contraption. It simply takes the form of a common cask or barrel with long spikes driven into it. The fundamentally simple idea here was that the victim would be placed within the barrel and then rolled down a hill or thrown into the sea. Take for example the martyrdom of Atilius Regulus. It was the year 256 BC; after the great naval victory of Ecnomos, for the Roman consul Marcus Atilius Regulus there seemed to be no further obstacles to the capture of Carthage. Unfortunately the Battle of Tunis was a disaster for the Roman legions and the consul was captured by the Punic Army. After languishing as a prisoner of the Carthaginians for five years, it was decided that he could return to his homeland to negotiate a peace between Rome and Carthage, dependent upon a promise to return as a prisoner if the negotiations failed. Despite the convictions of the Carthaginians, who felt sure of the collaboration of a man destroyed by years of slavery who would plead their cause, in a famous session of the Senate, Atilius Regulus urged the Romans to fight strenuously against the enemy and reject peace. Having achieved his objective, he did not ignore his word to the enemy and, despite the pleading of the Roman people, returned to Africa where he awaited their cruel vengeance.
Spiked barrel.
Execution of Atilius Regulus.
Tradition has it that the full fury of the Carthaginians fell upon the heroic military leader. He was confined in complete darkness for at least a week whilst awaiting execution, then his eyelids were cut off as he was exposed to the baking north African sun; finally he was placed naked in a barrel with iron spikes on the inside, sealed up, and then thrown from a cliff into the raging surf of the sea below.
* * *
BEHEADING
* * *
Hacking off an enemy’s head is as old as the axe, but the custom of judicial beheading was probably established by William the Conqueror when he seized control of England in 1066. Since William executed his Anglo-Saxon subjects on a massive scale, he decided he needed a different – and presumably more noble – way to execute his Norman followers who fell afoul of royal law. Hence, the block and axe. From 1066 until it was abolished in the mid-1700s, meeting the headsman was the death of choice for naughty British and European nobility. The English and Germans used the axe and the French used a sword, but the results were pretty much the same, though it is reported that a nice sharp sword was a lot swifter and less messy than the often botched job done with the axe. Even James II’s notorious headsman, Jack Ketch, was known to take three of four chops to get the job done. There were, of course, an endless string of innovators who attempted to make the process more efficient. Around 1300 the Germans invented a beheading machine. Precisely what it looked like is unknown, but it must have been successful as it was quickly imitated by the Italians, the Irish and the English. The English device, constructed around the middle of the fourteenth century in Halifax, North Yorkshire, was known as the Halifax Gibbet, although it was not in any way like the gibbet described elsewhere in this chapter. According to historical records, the Halifax Gibbet was still in use more than a century later when the idea was carried to Scotland. The most famous beheading machine in history is unquestionably the guillotine.
Beheading.
Adopted by the French in 1785, the towering crossbeams and swiftly descending blade became a national fetish symbol throughout the period of the French Revolution and the ensuing Reign of Terror. The last guillotine disappeared in 1946 when France closed down its notorious prison colony known as ‘Devil’s Island’.
Headsman’s axe and block.
* * *
BLOOD EAGLE
* * *
The blood eagle was a uniquely decorative form of butchery supposedly practiced by the Vikings as a means of demonstrating to their victims that they meant business. The victim in question, usually a chieftain or other local authority figure, was stripped to the waist and bent forward before his ribs were hacked free of his backbone. The executioner would then pull out the victim’s lungs, careful not to rip them loose. The results, at least until the victim died a few excruciating hours later, gave the appearance of a pair of flapping, bloody wings – hence the name of the torture.
Thirty-four pirates beheaded in twenty-seven minutes.
* * *
DEATH BY ONE THOUSAND CUTS
* * *
See Ling Che, below, in this section.
* * *
FLAYING
* * *
The idea of tearing the skin from a living human being may be as old as cruelty itself, but it first occurs in the records of medieval Europe around 1100 AD. How late this grim practice was still imposed is unknown, but records show that as late as 1366 the Count de Rouci was skinned alive for having betrayed Lyon, France to the English. Generally, the victim was tied, upside-down, to a square frame, in a spread-eagle position. The executioner would then ring his ankles with a sharp knife and make an incision down the inner surface of each leg, again ringing the genitals, and continue the slit down the victim’s stomach and chest. Beginning at the ankles, the skin was then stripped away from the victim much like a hunter skins an animal after shooting it. If the pain of having one’s skin ripped from the body, and exposing the sensitive inner flesh and muscle to the air, were not horrific enough, by the time the peeling process reached the stomach the intestines were likely to tumble out and fall over the victim’s face. Once nearly devoid of skin, the victim would be left exposed until they died of shock and blood loss.
Executioner’s beheading sword.
* * *
HANGING, DRAWING AND QUARTERING
* * *
Hanging, drawing and quartering, that uniquely medieval sounding torture, was probably devised in 1241 by England’s King Henry III. The best description of the process would seem to be in the words read out when a judge imposed this particularly gruesome execution on someone who had been convicted of treason. He announced to the court that the condemned was:
to be taken from the prison and laid upon a sledge or hurdle, and drawn to the gallows or place of execution, and then hanged by the neck until he be half-dead, and then cut down; and his entrails [are] to be cut from his body and burned by the executioner; then his head is to be struck off, his body divided into quarters and afterwards his head and quarters to be set up in some open places as directed.
Early guillotine.
Not mentioned in the official wording are several details worth noting. After being hanged the victim was awakened as much as possible by having water thrown onto his face; otherwise he might miss what was to come. Next, before he was disembowelled, his private parts were cut off and tossed into the waiting fire – this was to show that traitors would not be allowed to reproduce (even if he thought he would have time or opportunity prior to his decapitation). The disembowelling (technically the ‘drawing’ part of the sentence as the bowels were said to be ‘drawn out from the body’) if done by an experienced executioner, could be accompli
shed without the victim losing consciousness. Then, while the poor wretch was still screaming, the executioner would reach inside the trunk of his body, rip out his heart, hold it up before the cheering, jeering crowd and cry out: ‘Behold, the heart of a traitor!’ The records indicate any number of hanging, drawing and quarterings where the victim remained conscious, screaming and praying right up until the point where either their heart was pulled out or their head was struck off. The various cuts of carcass mentioned in the official sentence – the head and four quarters of the body – were then parboiled with bay leaves and cumin seed as preservatives and given a liberal coating of tar before being affixed on a pike and used to decorate town gates and bridges throughout the kingdom. Records show that these well-preserved cuts of corpse could last for decades before the elements and the crows reduced them to mere bones. The last recorded hanging, drawing and quartering in England took place on 20 September 1586 when seven of fourteen men convicted of plotting the murder of Queen Elizabeth were dispatched in this manner.
Heretic’s fork.
* * *
HERETIC’S FORK
* * *
This creatively painful device was designed to make the life of an accused heretic even more miserable than it already was. The instrument itself looked like a leather dog collar with the business end of two table forks attached to it at right angles. When the collar was latched around the victim’s neck, the forks were situated so that one jabbed him beneath the chin and the other rested in the hollow at the bottom of the throat where it joins the collar bone. If the prisoner attempted to lower or even move their head, the tines of the fork bit deep into the flesh, impaling the tongue and digging into the throat. The tines were not long enough and not situated at such a position that they would kill, but were undoubtedly amazingly painful.
Heretic’s fork.
Impaling.
* * *
IMPALING
* * *
Impalement takes no special skill. The only equipment necessary is a victim and a pole stout enough to support his body. In practice, the usual means of impaling was to place the victim on the ground, or a convenient table, and ram the pole as far up his rectum as possible without ripping his head off. The pole and its writhing decoration was then set into a hole in the ground where it could be seen by all and sundry. If the executioner managed to miss the heart, the victim could remain alive, shrieking in agony, for several hours. History’s most famous practitioner of this macabre art form was undoubtedly Prince Vlad II of Walachia (reigned intermittently 1448–76), known properly as Vlad Dracula (that is Vlad, son of the dragon, in honour of his father, Vlad Sr, upon whom the Order of the Dragon had been bestowed) or, more frequently, Vlad Tepes, meaning Vlad the Imapler. Although there have been others who impaled their enemies, Vlad took it to extremes, decorating the no-go zone around his castle with the carcasses of thousands of Turkish enemies. Needless to say, the Turks subsequently left Vlad and his territories off their list of places to visit.
Iron Maiden.
* * *
IRON MAIDEN
* * *
That uniquely Germanic invention, the Iron Maiden, originated in the town of Nuremberg at some point in the high-middle ages; probably in the 1400s. The item in question – known in German as the Eiserne Madchen – looked very much like an Egyptian mummy case, its outer surface carved with the likeness of a woman. The inner surface of both the door and case were set with 4–6in-long spikes. When a victim was pushed into the case and the door was closed they would inevitably and unavoidably be pierced from all directions at once. The purpose however, was not always to kill instantly. The spikes were carefully measured so that they would not pierce to the heart. Presumably, now and again someone would open the case and see if the victim had reconsidered his situation; consent presumably leading to extraction and at least the possibility of survival. The Iron Maiden was never a mass-produced, commercially available item and consequently each model differed slightly. Some were meant to kill instantly and some had long spikes conveniently located so as to pierce the eyes and enter the brain. Although the Maiden is most associated with medieval Germany, it is hardly surprising that it was adopted by the Spanish and Italians. Equally unsurprising is that someone thought of a similar device long before the Middle Ages. The earliest known version of such a device comes down to us from ancient Sparta where the local dictator, Nabis, commissioned an iron statue of his wife, Apega. The statue was so designed that its spring-loaded arms could be opened to expose a nasty set of spikes. When Nabis felt an interview was getting nowhere, he would have his victim shoved into his wife’s arms, which would then snap shut, crushing the man against the spikes. Presumably, as the spikes would have been located at about chest height, extraction and survival were not options.
Iron Maiden.
Impalling of infants.
* * *
LING CHE
* * *
Translating roughly as Death by One Thousand Cuts, the Chinese Ling Che may well be the most lingering and painful death imaginable. According to tradition, the victim was tied to a table while the executioner appeared with a cloth-covered basket filled with knives, each knife bearing a symbol denoting a particular portion of the body. Reaching under the cloth he would extract a knife at random and slice off the specified body part. Fingers, calf muscles, breasts, thigh muscles, nose, eye lids, it was all in the luck of the draw. Given the right random set of circumstances the torture could go on for hours on end. Inevitably, one knife was marked with the symbol for the heart. When this item appeared the victim’s suffering would end in a matter of seconds. Presumably, there were instances where the condemned man’s family bribed the executioner to find the heart knife immediately. An almost identical torture was practiced in Japan where it was called Death by Twenty-One Cuts, presumably based on the possible number of knives involved.
Decapitated heads following Chinese execution of pirates.
Pass (or cradle).
* * *
PASS (OR CRADLE)
* * *
This little grotesquery seems to have been unique to the Germans and may have been intended for towns that could not afford an Iron Maiden of their own. Looking disturbingly like an over-sized baby’s cradle the Pass was a large, rectangular wooden box with rockers affixed to the bottom. The interior surfaces of the ‘cradle’ were set with sharpened iron spikes; when the victim had been stripped naked and lowered into the Pass, it was rocked violently back and forth. The results seem too self-evident to require description.
Pendulum.
* * *
PENDULUM
* * *
Any reader who would be drawn to pick up this book and read thus far will undoubtedly be familiar with Edgar Allan Poe’s story entitled ‘The Pit and the Pendulum’. It tells a macabre story in which a man is cut in half by a giant clockwork pendulum with a weighted blade whose edge was as sharp as a razor. As the clockwork winds down the pendulum slowly descends, a fraction of an inch at a time, allowing the victim to see his own horrific death coming toward him over the course of several hours. The story may be fictional but the device was all too real and was yet another bizarre invention thanks to the creativity of the Spanish Inquisition.
We have found that sometimes the torture of the pulley also known as suspension or garrucha or Squassation was occasionally referred to as the pendulum. This seems to have been especially so when the torture victim had heavy weights attached to their ankles or toes and were made to swing back and forth while suspended in the air. For more on this variation see garrucha on p.204.
Pincers.
* * *
PINCERS
* * *
Ripping strips of flesh from victims’ bodies with pincers, which looked and worked much like an over-sized pair of pliers, was a common form of pre-execution mutilation employed across much of Continental Europe throughout the Middle Ages.
Although the English seem not to have used the pincers,
the French, Germans, Dutch and others found them quite attractive. In some instances the pincers were heated red-hot as a means of increasing the pain. In France, if the victim was not to be put to death, the gaping wounds left by the pincers were further tormented by having boiling wax or hot lead dumped into them.
Pincers at work.
The Big Book of Pain: Torture & Punishment Through History Page 21
