The Big Book of Pain: Torture & Punishment Through History

by Mark P. Donnelly

  The impact of religion on the justice system also changed the list of acts which were considered socially unacceptable. For the first time, fornication (that is to say, sex outside of wedlock) and adultery both became punishable offences, as did eating meat during proscribed periods of fasting, working on Sunday and worshiping the old (pagan) gods. Predictably, rules governing the clergy were slightly different than those governing laymen and men of the cloth were frequently provided with neat loopholes by which they could escape punishment. The word of a bishop, like that of a king, needed no second-party confirmation to be accepted as fact. If a priest was accused of a crime he could absolve himself by swearing his innocence before the altar. The system may have had its flaws, but it was a vast improvement over what had gone before and, equally, over what was yet to come.

  With the death of Alfred the Great, King of the West Saxons, in 901 the trend toward leniency slowly began to reverse itself. It was a lawless time in a lawless world and the general public insisted that criminals be soundly, and publicly, made to pay for their crimes. Within a generation whipping came back into fashion, as did physical mutilation. Capital punishment took on new and novel forms: free men and women were thrown from cliffs; male slaves who stole were stoned to death by fellow slaves (presumably as a hands-on lesson in proper behaviour) and thieving female slaves were either stoned or drowned. For the first time witches were punished, the practitioners of these dark arts being confined to prison for four months – unless they had caused a death by their conjurations, in which case they were executed.

  Three-quarters of a century later, King Ethelred tried to reverse this disturbing back-sliding. Late in his reign, around the year 1000, he said: ‘… that Christian men for all too little be not condemned to death; but in general let mild punishment be decreed; and let not for a little God’s handiwork and his own purchase be destroyed …’ Surprisingly, this more lenient policy was adopted by another English monarch of about the same period, King Canute. Canute, a Christianised Viking and King of southern England, Denmark, Norway and parts of Sweden, stated his opposition to harsh punishment with the words: ‘… rather let gentle punishments be decreed for the benefit of the people’. It sounds good, but bear in mind that deep down, Canute was still a Viking and Vikings had a long history of mutilating people. Under Canute’s laws routine punishments included cutting off ears, noses and upper lips: a woman convicted of adultery lost both ears and her nose. Eyes were gouged out and scalping was brought into fashion. To his credit, Canute tried to take all aspects of a person’s life into consideration when judging them, and was notably lenient when the criminal was a teenager, elderly, desperately poor or ill and he took into account whether they were free or a slave – presumably slaves were given less latitude than free men and women. Accidental transgressions were also judged less harshly than premeditated ones. All in all, life under Canute was relatively good and crime was at a low ebb. Sadly, Canute died in 1035 and although his laws survived him by three decades – being made even more palatable by his descendant, the pious King Edward the Confessor – all progress was lost in the autumn of 1066 when England was invaded by a group of ex-Vikings who had recently seized Northern France and begun calling themselves Normans.

  Duke William of Normandy was a bastard. That much is an historical and biological fact; it was also an opinion shared by nearly all of his subjects and most of his followers. For nearly two centuries prior to the Norman invasion of England a few continental powers, including the French, Burgundians and Normans, had been following a new political system known today as feudalism. Under the feudal system, great lords owed obedience to the king, knights owed obedience to their lords, the peasants owed obedience to everyone above them and everybody owed obedience to the Church. In theory, feudalism was meant to protect the poor, the helpless and Holy Mother Church. It was a good idea but, like so many good ideas, it went wrong almost from the start. Somehow, when anything unpleasant happened, the peasants were blamed and suffered mightily under the pernicious greed of their overlords. Because the feudal system did not develop in England, but was imposed on it following the Norman Conquest of October, 1066, it is a perfect case study in how the system worked – or failed to work.

  Beheading by sword or axe was a public entertainment in central and northern Europe until as recently as 150 years ago. The axe was preferred in Gallic and Mediterranean Europe. A long apprenticeship is needed for perfecting aim and force; executioners kept in trim by practicing on animals in slaughter houses.

  William, now known alternately as William the Conqueror and William I of England, treated his subjects like the enemy. To ensure that they would never contemplate revolting he ‘harried’ the countryside. In this case, harrying meant burning the fields, homesteads, villages and towns, leaving the peasants and villagers homeless and starving and creating a famine that lasted a decade. Even William’s own chronicler, Ordericus, was appalled at the devastation. ‘William, in the fullness of his wrath, ordered that the corn and cattle, with all the farming implements and provisions, [were] to be collected on heaps and set on fire.’ To make certain the point was not lost on his subjects, William instituted a program of castle building intended to intimidate any of the English who survived his arrival. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicles described this program of public works with the words: ‘He built him castles as a place to annoy his enemies from … And they oppressed the people greatly with castle building’. Obviously, as punishment for losing the war, the English were used as slave labour in the building of the very castles which would ensure their future good behaviour.

  Beheading was an ‘easy’ death if carried out with skill and as such was reserved for noblemen. Plebeians tended to be executed by slower, more painful means such as slow hanging. This device, known as a ‘fallbrett’ (literally a falling board) was an ancestor of the guillotine. But unlike its later French descendant, the fallbrett would not remove the head in a single swift stroke, but rather, the wooden ‘edge’ would rip and chew its way through the flesh and vertebrae under the impact of the sledge blows.

  Needing all the labourers he could round up, and always believing that lasting, public examples should be made of transgressors, William preferred maiming law-breakers rather than simply executing them. In his inaugural speech, after being crowned king on Christmas day 1066, William said: ‘I forbid that any person be killed or hanged for any cause.’ Then he added: ‘Let their eyes be torn out and their testicles be cut off’. Naturally, the ‘no killing’ part of this speech did not apply if a Norman was killed; in that case, Anglo-Saxon suspects were rounded up and hanged by the score. If one Norman was murdered by another it would have set a bad example for William to execute one of his own people in the same manner as a common peasant, so he devised a death sentence reserved for noblemen: beheading. It was a tradition that would outlive him by centuries.

  Being a delicate and chivalrous sort, William never sentenced a woman to the humiliation of the gallows or headsman’s block; for them, the only socially acceptable death was the burning post. For lesser crimes there was also a nice selection of brand-new castle dungeons now available. In a concerted attempt to keep local Church officials out of his way, the king decreed that ecclesiastic courts would, henceforth, only be allowed to try ecclesiastic crimes. Civil cases, which had previously been overseen by Church officials and carried out according to Church law, were now the Crown’s own private domain.

  Somehow, all these harsh measures did more to propagate crime than to end it. By the time William’s second son, Henry I (reigned 1100–1135) came to the throne, not only were the old crimes still flourishing, but new ones were being invented every day and almost no witnesses could be found who were willing to testify against anybody. Knowing that he simply could not execute every possible suspect, and neither could he allow every miscreant to escape punishment, Henry decided the best thing to do was to let God decide guilt or innocence and, after convincing the Church to support him, he re-instituted
trial by ordeal. There was trial by water (in which the suspect was thrown into a pool and if they sunk were deemed innocent), trial by fire (in which the suspect had to grab a hot iron bar while he walked nine paces and prayed that no blisters appeared after three days) and trial by fire and water (in which the suspect plunged their hands into a cauldron of boiling water, picked up a stone and again prayed that no blisters developed). For priests accused of civil crimes these particular atrocities were replaced with the ordeal of coarsened bread, in which the accused was made to eat bread containing feathers; if they choked, they were presumed guilty.

  Here we see the accused has had his hands bound to his ankles and is being thrown off a bridge in the fast flowing currents of the river below. This is a version of the trial by ordeal. If the water rejects him (he floats) then he will be declared guilty by his accusers. But if the water accepts him (he sinks to the bottom) he will be judged innocent and presumably hauled out of the water by the attached rope. How many individuals were found innocent but died as a result of this method of assessment is unknowable.

  Such grotesque public displays were not the sole province of England. Even such an exalted personage as Holy Roman Emperor Henry IV, when excommunicated by the Pope, travelled to Rome, lay face down in the snow for two days, praying and fasting, until the Holy Father finally relented and forgave him. It did not do much good; in 1105 Emperor Henry was still forced to abdicate. Curiously, as barbaric as these punishments seem, as the Normans’ fierce grip on England relaxed at the dawn of the twelfth century, it was the common people who objected to the demise of trial by ordeal. Even England’s penultimate Norman ruler, Henry I, tried to reform his family’s harsh, earlier laws, relying more on prisons and short turns in a dungeon than on corporal punishment. Simultaneously he increased the number of capital crimes. By 1124 death had become the standard punishment for murder, treason, burglary, arson, robbery and simple theft, and more and more people convicted of lesser crimes were simply being detained behind bars for various lengths of time. It is hardly surprising that during the protracted Civil War (1139–1148) between England’s King Stephen and his cousin, Empress Matilda, the dungeons of England overflowed and by 1155 London’s first purpose-built prison, The Fleet, had been erected by the new king, Henry II.

  It is worth noting here, that the central fortified secure tower of a castle was known as a ‘keep’ in English, but as all of the castles in England were owned by the Normans at this period, they were frequently referred to by their Norman French name, ‘donjon’, from which the term dungeon is derived.

  The unfortunate culprit on the left-hand side of this image is about to have his left hand chopped off. Corporal punishment such as this dismemberment was commonplace throughout medieval Europe for petty crimes, while the capital punishment on the righthand side of the image was reserved for somewhat more serious offences.

  As Henry (the French-born son of Empress Matilda) was an outsider to England, he was not made to feel any more welcome than the Normans had been a century earlier. Rather than ‘harry’ his new kingdom, however, he filled it with prisons. Every town and borough was ordered to have some kind of prison facility – preferably inside a nice, secure castle – and these were to be used, in Henry’s words, ‘to confine tight, presumptive evil-doers’. This meant that anyone accused, or suspected, of a crime was to be locked up until the circuit judge showed up and then returned to the cells to serve their sentence. Henry also proved himself just as fond of maiming his subjects as William the Conqueror had ever been. Murder, armed robbery and counterfeiting were all punishable by having the right hand cut off. Giving in to local demands for gaudy judicial displays, he allowed trial by ordeal for any crime worth less than 5s; but those found guilty were not executed. Instead, they had a foot hacked off. It would take more than a century before trial by ordeal was finally abolished throughout Europe, and then only because Pope Innocent III refused to allow the clergy to assist in such divine judgments. In 1215, the same year Pope Innocent forbade the clergy from taking part in trials by ordeal, King John of England was forced into signing the Magna Charta, the closest England had ever come to a written constitution. In the Magna Charta are specific prohibitions against the use of torture and any and all legal procedures that may involve torture as being contrary to the basic concept of English Common Law. Curiously, both the abolition of trial by ordeal and the signing of Magna Charta did nothing more than throw the entire English and European legal systems into a tail-spin. Without the presence of a priest, trial by ordeal did not have the sanction of God and without trial by ordeal, how could God’s will, and the truth, possibly be discovered? Judicial torture may not have involved God’s will, but without the threat of torture, how could guilt ever be satisfactorily proven? It was not an enlightened age but there were voices of reason popping up here and there. In far-off Germany, Abbess Hildegarde von Bingen (1098–1179, now known as St Hildegarde) not only spoke up in favour of leniency toward those convicted of capital crimes, but even defended the un-Godly, when she insisted that those convicted of heresy should not be executed. Sometimes, voices of reason are heard, even if only temporarily.

  This somewhat comical image shows what appears to be a poet or balladeer (based on the lute hung upon the post) who has probably been sentenced to the stocks for seditious verses. How frustrating it must have been to see the dog making off with his stash of food from his satchel so tantalizingly out of reach. But this is of course nothing when compared to the other tortures endured by his contemporaries.

  England was already moving away from the cruellest forms of mutilation and execution and toward public humiliation that marked criminals as social pariahs without causing them any permanent, physical damage. The public aspect of punishment was important because people demanded that they be allowed to witness a criminal’s punishment – how else could they know that justice had been served? Toward this end, the stocks were introduced.

  Less physically painful than the pillory, the stocks only locked a person’s feet in a wooden frame, the rest of their body remained free. To make this a punishment rather than just an afternoon in a public place, the convict was forced to sit on the narrow edge of a board with their legs extended in front of them and locked in the stocks. Thus secured, they were still subjected to taunts and thrown objects, but could at least fend off large objects and rocks with their arms. Still, the stocks were humiliating and seemed to satisfy the demand for public punishment. This new concept in punishment seemed so enlightened that at one point, the entirety of the House of Commons knelt and prayed that stocks would be erected in every town and village in England.

  Other forms of punishment for all manner of offences were also popular. Among these was the custom of ‘outlawing’. Declaring a person an outlaw (specifically meaning that the guilty party was to remain at large but were no longer afforded any protection by the law) had been introduced by the Normans, but, for several reasons, became more popular as time went on. First, it cost nothing to declare a person an outlaw and, second, it was immensely profitable for the government. An outlaw lost not only the title to his, or her, land but forfeited all personal possessions and wealth to the crown. Further, as the convicted was no longer under any form of legal protection, they could be murdered by anyone, at any time, without any consequences. An idea of just how popular a practice this was can be seen by a quick look at the judicial records for the county of Gloucestershire, England for the year 1221. Of 330 cases of murder tried that year, only fourteen of the convicted were hanged while 100 were declared outlaw and turned loose; the remaining 216 either being given alternative sentences or found innocent of the charges. Outlawing may seem like a relatively easy punishment, but consider that when a man was executed for a crime his family retained the rights to his estate, if he was declared outlaw, they were dispossessed when the land reverted to the government.

  Playing on this easy method of accumulating land and money, in 1255 King Henry III outlawed more than sev
enty murderers, adding whatever wealth they had to his own coffers. The next year, out of seventy-seven suspected murderers five were acquitted and seventy-two were outlawed. In 1279, the Northumbrian courts heard sixty-eight cases of murder, released four of the accused and outlawed the rest. Outlawry was good business, not only for the courts, but for the convicted. If an outlaw discovered evidence that would clear them, they could apply to have their case retried. Should the new evidence convince the judges, the convict would have his sentence revoked. Of course this made him, or her, essentially a new person, and therefore not entitled to reclaim any property which may have been the possession of the ‘old’ person; but at least they had their life back. Other crimes that had once been punished by harsh, physical tortures were also treated in a humiliating but harmless manner. Bakers found guilty of selling loaves smaller than regulation size, or of adulterating their flour with chaff, sand or sawdust were either displayed in the stocks or dragged through the streets of town on a section of woven fence (known as a hurdle) with a loaf of bread tied around their neck. It may not have been the best advertisement for their business, but it was a lot less grim than having a hand chopped off.