By Sword and Fire

by Sean McGlynn

  Impalement was common. It was for this that Vlad III Dracul of Walachia earned his sobriquet of ‘the Impaler’ in the mid-fifteenth century. Vlad, the inspiration behind Bram Stoker’s Dracula, learned this method from his time spent in the Turkish courts as a youth. One story relates how some visiting Muslim ambassadors to Vlad’s court did not doff their caps to the prince when they were presented to him; Vlad had their caps nailed to their heads. Throughout his territory corpses of his victims were to be seen suspended on huge stakes on which they had been impaled. Other forms of impalement included the ‘Dice’, an inquisitorial device in which the victim was extended on the floor and bound or held down. A metal, spiked die was tightly tied to a heel and forced into the flesh from pressure applied by a screw. Pressing, peine forte et dure, offered a blunted variation: the victim, again stretched out, was subjected to immense weights being placed on his body, crushing the breath out of it.

  Fire was used in the execution of women and heretics, but it was also applied in torture. Executions could either be hastened by oil (and later gunpowder) or protracted by faggots (especially green ones). A detailed account from the sixteenth century offers a gruesome narrative of death by burning, the victim being John Hooper, Bishop of Gloucester:

  But even when his face was completely black with flames, and his tongue swelled so that he could not speak, yet his lips went till they were shrunk to the gums; and he knocked his breast with his hands until one of his arms fell off, and then continued knocking with the other while the fat, water and blood dripped at his finger ends … Soon after, the whole lower part of his body being consumed, he fell over the iron that bound him … His nether parts were consumed, and his bowels fell out some time before he expired.11

  The whole, grisly process took, in this case, forty-five minutes. This was the fate of thousands of medieval victims, from lowly criminals and heretics, to famous historical figures such as Gilles de Rais, Joan of Arc and John Hus; it was also the fate of many victims of warfare, especially those who died in atrocities consumed by flames in the churches in which they had sought sanctuary. The fortunate ones, such as the garrison of Petit-Andely in 1203, died from smoke inhalation. The application of fire in torture was obvious. Branding by iron, and boiling and frying, are frequently attested to in the sources. One form was to place the victim in stocks, grease their bare feet, and literally fry the victim’s soles. The body’s most sensitive parts were exposed to flames; grilling occurred on gridirons over fires; boiling could be in a cauldron, in a suit of armour, or localized, as when boiling water was poured into a high leather boot.

  Suspension and stretching were central to medieval torture practices. The pulley torture, or squassation, entailed suspending the victim using a pulley system; heavy weights were attached to the feet. If no responses were elicited by whipping, the victim was drawn to the ceiling and then dropped precipitously almost to the floor before being jerked to a sudden, bone-juddering halt, the countering forces of pull ensuring a violent jolting of the body. The rack was one of the most commonly employed forms of all torture. Two rollers that moved in opposite directions when operated by levers attached the victim, stretched upon a frame. The distending of the body could lead to dislocation and even dismemberment. Other methods involved tourniquets of thin cords with wooden or iron bars that were twisted around fingers or limbs so that they cut into the flesh, even reaching bone. While on the rack, the victim might undergo water torture in which water was forced slowly down the throat causing massive bloating and even drowning. An accompaniment to the rack was the scavenger’s daughter: a hinged ball of iron hoops into which the accused was compressed to an almost impossible degree, sometimes causing blood to spurt from all the orifices.

  Torture on the wheel normally preceded execution. Tied on his back to a cartwheel, the victim’s body was smashed and broken up by the wielding of a heavy club or another heavy wheel. The severity and intensity of the beating was controlled to regulate the duration of the suffering, starting with the limbs and progressing in the hope of extracting a confession or details of accomplices. Breaking on the wheel remained popular long after the Middle Ages; the State was still sending men and women to this fate in Prussia in 1850, so we should not think exclusively in terms of ‘medieval barbarity’. John Taylor, an Englishman travelling through Germany in 1616, witnessed the execution of a father found guilty of axing his daughter to death. He recorded the agonizing stages of execution. The ‘arch-hangman’ picked up a coach fore-wheel …

  … took it up by the spokes, and lifting it up with a mighty stroke he beat one of the poor wretch’s legs in pieces, (the bones I mean) at which he roared grievously; then after a little pause he breaks the other leg in the same manner, and consequently breaks his arms, and then he stroke four or five main blows on his breast, and burst all his bulk and chest in shivers, lastly he smote his neck, and missing, burst his chin and jaws to mammocks.12

  In its diversification, torture ranged from the obvious to the ingenious. Even whipping and beating offered a multiplicity of tools and methods for flagellants. Like whipping, the pillory was torture as punishment. The prisoner, forced into an immovable position for days on end, was subjected to a public response. For a sympathetic crowd, the pillory was punishment enough; however, if popular opinion deemed the punishment insufficiently harsh, death could (and sometimes did) result from the barrage of missiles hurled at the prisoner, whose head was extremely exposed. Almost anything could be utilized as a missile, even dead cats. Simply being left in a cold, vermin-infested cell, lying in human and rodent excrement, deprived of food and compelled to drink urine constituted an effective form of torture.

  At the other extreme lay the torture of the rope and the torture of the rats. Both these are attested to in sixteenth-century sources and were probably derived from ancient practices. The rope method involved the victim being dragged naked back and forth along the top of a taught rope which thereby sawed into his flesh. The rat method, seemingly known to all ghoulish schoolboys, was quite literally a variation of being eaten alive. An iron bowl was placed upside down over the victim’s stomach and genitals. Under this bowl were placed dormice or rats; on top of it a fire was lit. The rats, desperate to escape the heat, would attempt to gnaw their way through the victim’s flesh and hence into his entrails. Other uses were found for animals. The thirteenth-century chronicler Matthew of Paris depicts a prisoner tied to a tree confronted by a horse being made to trample him with his hooves. A particular vile use of a dog in conjunction with an execution will be examined in the section on political punishments.

  Some recorded tortures were either probably figments of a twisted imagination or were unique in usage. One thirteenth-century account informs us of a lady being tied up naked in a sack with a large number of cats. Unsurprisingly, this failed to extract a confession; surprisingly, we encounter variations of this macabre procedure in later medieval Germany. Most bizarre of all is a reference from the fifteenth-century writer Hippolyte de Marsillis to what I presume we must call the goat torture: the prisoner’s bare feet were soaked in brine and then licked by goats; apparently this resulted in ‘an indescribable torment’.13 However, the disturbing creativity of human sadism, then and now, means that even the most bizarre and seemingly preposterous torments cannot be entirely discounted.

  The violence of the medieval world perversely inspired the medieval imagination, but in a deeply religious world, invention was not always called for. The Bible, with its Old Testament atrocities and New Testament martyrs, offered more than spiritual guidance and inspiration. Antiquity also furnished plenty of ideas and a treasure trove of pain, as in the horrific accounts of the torture of the Maccabees and other victims; the Latin edition of Josephus’ first-century The Jewish War was widely read in the Middle Ages. Authority, in both its judicial and political manifestations, was ready to deploy whatever force it deemed necessary in pursuit of justice, social order and continuing control; and all so much the better if the Bible
offered precedents. Medievalists have rightly drawn attention to chroniclers drawing on biblical inspiration for their accounts of atrocities; but, as we shall discuss later, this does not necessarily mean that such accounts should be dismissed out of hand.

  In such a biblical society, it is not surprising to learn that it was not only property and violent crimes that met with harsh responses. Two offences that incurred violent retribution were blasphemy and sodomy. In 1472 the Estates of Provence blamed blasphemy for God’s infliction of epidemics and other evils upon the region. Blasphemy could be punished by the tongue being bored through with a red-hot poker, although this was reserved for the worst, most recalcitrant offenders. A first transgression was punishable by a day in the stocks followed by a month in prison subsisting on bread and water; a second offence merited the pillory on market day and the splitting of an upper lip; a third the splitting of the lower lip; and a fourth the severance of the entire lower lip. Finally, the tongue would be cut out. An excruciating variation in Germany was to have the tongue split. However, blasphemy was notoriously difficult to stamp out and, as reformation tendencies seeped into the population, sacrilegious acts increased: in 1501 in Florence a gambler was hung for the defacement of an image of the Virgin Mary with horse dung. Homosexuality, as a perverse inversion of God’s divine order and plan, met with harsher responses, as we have already seen. Encouraged by the Church, legislation against sodomy grew increasingly harsh until by the fourteenth century the death penalty became standard punishment, usually in the form of burning or, less commonly, being buried alive. Such punitive judgment was infrequently passed, one exception being Bruges which, between 1450 and 1500, averaged one execution for homosexuality per year.

  If blasphemy, like sodomy, was not rigorously persecuted, one reason could be that although, as a rule, society disapproved of the former and was repulsed by the latter, neither posed as direct or as menacing a threat as property or violent crime. These latter crimes rarely evoked calls of leniency from the public at large; indeed, the Crown was often criticized for leniency and for issuing royal pardons, as when it offered life in the royal army in place of execution. For many people clemency only encouraged further wrongdoing by its mitigation of deterrence. Bowing to public opinion in England in 1389, Parliament successfully petitioned for restrictions of pardons for violent crimes.

  The influential notion forwarded by Michel Foucault that punishment in the Middle Ages was predominantly physical because society was pre-capitalist is misleading for, from the twelfth century onwards, Europe began a remarkable economic transformation and became increasingly monetized, allowing for the greater use of the payment of fines and compensation (if and when judicially stipulated). The number of prisons also grew in the later medieval period, stimulated by the Church, which should not shed blood and which therefore had to find alternative forms of punishment. I suspect that this development has another, overlooked stimulus: as armies grew in size and wars became ever more endemic, so more provision was necessary for the detention of growing numbers of prisoners of war who awaited the payment of their ransom in gaols. Imprisonment was, in any case, reserved for lesser crimes, or as a holding place until execution, this ultimate sanction remaining a very public event.

  As already seen in England, the form a criminal execution took could vary from place to place. The standard methods of hanging, decapitation and burning dominated throughout Europe, but these were augmented by various traditions and innovations. Public hangings could be large-scale, as with the above-mentioned case of forty-four thieves recorded in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, hung in Leicestershire in 1124. Some executions reveal interesting details: when Gilbert of Plumpton went to the gallows in 1184, he wore an iron chain around his neck and his eyes were covered with green clay. If a crowd was, at the last moment, denied the spectacle of an execution, occasionally there was some gruesome compensation. In England in 1221, Thomas of Eldersfield was reprieved from hanging at the last moment; in a show of mercy, he was blinded and castrated instead: ‘the eyes were thrown to the ground, the testicles used as footballs, the local lads kicking them playfully at the girls’.14 Crowd participation was part of the event. Hanging was rare for women, bourgeois and nobility; the latter classes were traditionally decapitated as a concession to a swifter death. A woman hanged in Paris in 1445 drew great crowds, such was the novelty; the hanging of a burgher of Malines in 1423 was the first such for over a century. By the late fifteenth century hanging became the most usual form of judicial execution for men, with burning also common. Trevor Dean’s research into crime in late medieval Italy has come up with these examples of executions in 1490s Ferrara in northern Italy:

  Here we find a peasant burned to death for impregnating his sister and for bestiality with asses, a seventeen-year-old from the suburbs burned for sodomy, another peasant hanged for theft and incest with his sisters, an eighteen-year-old hanged for thieving during public celebrations of a ducal marriage, two more peasants hanged for homicide, and soldiers hanged for robbery and counterfeiting. In addition, an eighty-year-old draper convicted of sodomy and sentenced to death by burning was spared his life, and a teenage wife convicted of strangling to death her husband’s nephew escaped from prison while awaiting the death penalty.15

  We can discern here a pattern of punishment: hanging for ordinary crimes; burning for sexual crimes that required purification of the body. In the case of Ferrara, the harsh sentencing of sex crimes may have been influenced by the contemporaneous events in nearby Florence, then under the control of the puritanical Savonarola.

  In his massive, brilliant study Rituals of Retribution: Capital Punishment in Germany, 1600–1987 (1996), Richard Evans enumerates the various forms of public execution in the Early Modern period. The German basis for capital punishment was derived from and stipulated in the Constitutio Criminalis Carolina, the legal codification by Emperor Charles V from 1532. We have encountered breaking on the wheel for (predominantly) male murders. The number of blows was specified in the sentence and could be top down, i.e. from the head, for a more merciful execution, or bottom up, prolonging the death agonies of the worst offenders. In a display reminiscent of Vlad Dracul the Impaler’s methods, the head was then severed and placed on top of a pole, while the decapitated trunk was bound to a cartwheel which was then placed horizontally on top of another pole; here it was left to rot very publicly. Forgers, prisoners, blasphemers, witches, heretics and sodomites (the last of these were considered to be synonymous) could expect burning at the stake, so that only ashes were left; these were then totally disposed of. The code favoured drowning for women, usually in the form of being lowered from a bridge and held under until dead. The somewhat incredible torture of the woman in a sack of cats is echoed in the code here: notorious women criminals were to be lowered into water in a sack containing a cat, a hen and a snake (the last tending to be a pictorial representation). Unusual as this may sound, there is at least one report from the Hundred Years War of a soldier being executed by being placed in a sack with a dog and then drowned. Like fire, water was believed to have purifying properties, drowning therefore being considered particularly appropriate for moral crimes. Burial alive also sometimes came into this category, the code specifying such a sentence for women guilty of infanticide. As with perhaps the majority of medieval death sentences, this process was more elaborate than its name suggests. The guilty woman was lain in a shallow grave and covered in thorns; the grave was then filled in, starting with the feet. At some point, again mimicking Vlad Dracul, a stake was driven through the woman’s heart, ‘perhaps to prevent the body from returning from the dead in a reflection of folk beliefs about vampirism’,16 fears more prevalent in central and eastern Europe than in the west.

  The deliberate, hoped-for deterrence of execution called for as much suffering as possible to prolong the dreadful spectacle. The condemned person was frequently dragged to the place of execution, all the while undergoing whipping and beating by the guards and crowds; in Ge
rmany and elsewhere, the journey entailed having flesh ripped out by red-hot tongs. The execution could also be designed to protract the dying process. Estrapade, the hurling from a great height, was adapted to this intent. The criminal was left alive after the drop, with his body broken and in agony, to die of starvation; reports tell of how, unable to move, the dying criminal would sometimes resort to autophagic extremes, the eating of his own flesh. Boiling alive could also be dragged out as a death: the offender was slowly lowered into a vessel of bubbling oil by a rope under his arms, his flesh being boiled first from his feet and then slowly upwards; if he was fortunate, the pain would cause the condemned man to pass out in the early stages. With executions like this, it is obvious how torture and capital punishment had an interchange of forms.

  Decapitation was an easy death by comparison, and hence the method favoured by the higher ranks. John Taylor, who gave us the eyewitness account of breaking on the wheel, was also present at a beheading: ‘The fashion is, that the prisoner kneels down, and being blinded with a napkin, one takes hold of the hair of the crown of the head, holding the party upright, whilst the hangman with a backward blow with a sword will take the head from a man’s shoulders so nimbly, and with such dexterity, that the owner of the head shall never want the miss of it.’17 This picture of professional proficiency should not obscure the fact that there were plenty of bungled beheadings. It would seem that the sword was more accomplished than the axe in this act and as such was the offender’s preferred mode of despatch. Dismemberment was also fairly common for the nobility, but this was reserved for political crimes, chiefly treason and rebellion.