The Big Book of Pain: Torture & Punishment Through History

by Mark P. Donnelly

  Saxon whipping and branding. From the Cotton MS. Claud B. iv.

  Throughout the fifteenth century the most common form of punishment for capital crimes was hanging. This is not the form of hanging familiar to us from nineteenth-century photographs and cowboy movies, however. The condemned was not dropped through a trap-door where the sudden jerk would break their neck and end their life in a split second. All hangings, up until the mid-nineteenth century, were slow, painful, macabre affairs. Rather than being dropped through a trap, the convict was simply hauled into the air and left to dangle in the noose until they choked to death. In the case of the physically fit, or those with a heavily muscled neck, this could mean as much as twenty minutes of kicking and choking their life away. Unlike earlier periods, by the 1400s the right to hang someone found guilty of a capital crime was not limited to royal courts; every town and village worth its name had its own gallows and regularly dispatched those found guilty of murder, grand theft, desertion from the local militia, forgery, arson and any other crime which seemed to warrant it at the moment. Even when the gallows were kept busy it did not always satisfy the public demand for justice. In 1429 a woman accused of murder was seized and lynched by an entirely female mob – this was England’s first recorded case of an individual having been hanged without the benefit of at least some form of trial. Even in the face of such rude justice the social structure in England was about to break down even further.

  For the three decades between 1455 and 1485 the English nobility went to war with itself. What has become known as the Wars of the Roses was actually a dynastic struggle between the noble houses of Lancaster and York for control of the throne. For a generation and a half the Lancastrians, the Yorkists and their hired armies of mercenary thugs slogged it out across the English countryside; the balance of power shifting one way and then the other until the nation, and the families involved, were nearly decimated. In August 1485, an army led by Henry Tudor – last surviving claimant to the Lancastrian line – met and defeated the forces of King Richard II at Bosworth Field. In claiming Richard’s crown, Henry Tudor (now Henry VII) inherited a kingdom where order existed only in theory. A few months after Henry’s ascension to the throne, the Venetian envoy to England wrote: ‘There is no country in the world where there are so many thieves and robbers as in England. Few venture to go alone in the country excepting in the middle of the day, and fewer still in the towns at night, and least of all in London’.

  During the decades of turbulence the local courts had become corrupt beyond imagining, blithely condemning the innocent if there were a profit to be made in it, and for the same reason frequently turned dangerous criminals loose on society. Even where there was no corruption, there was massive incompetence. In an attempt to prevent wholesale injustice from consuming society, the Church routinely granted sanctuary to all who requested it and even those who did not seek sanctuary often escaped punishment by pleading ‘benefit of clergy’ – that is to say, ordained or not, the person in question claimed to be in the service of God. In a world where almost no-one except the clergy could read, the only proof required to qualify for benefit of clergy was to read the first verse of the fifty-first psalm: ‘Have mercy on me, O God, according to Thy loving kindness; According to the multitude of Thy tender mercies, blot out my transgressions’. How clever did a criminal have to be to memorise these few lines and simply pretend to read them when handed a Bible? The benefit of all this was that civil courts had virtually no control over clerics and clerical courts had no power to execute and seldom even imprisoned. Contrition and penance were considered the only earthly punishments needed by those in the Church – any additional punishment would be dealt with by God, in the hereafter. It may have been sufficient for legitimate clergymen and it may have provided a grand loophole for criminals, but it was not at all good enough for Henry VII and his Chief Justice, who is quoted as having said: ‘The devil alone knoweth the thought of man’.

  Henry’s first step in redressing the shortcomings in his legal system was to limit the number of times someone could claim benefit of clergy to a single incidence; after that they would be tried in lay courts. To make certain that no one could hide their past conviction in an ecclesiastic court, Henry decreed that those being granted benefit of clergy be branded on the thumb. Upon conviction, the prisoner’s thumbs were tightly bound together with cord while a hot iron was pressed against the flesh. As the skin seared and smoked, the torture master declared to the judge: ‘A fair mark, my Lord’.

  Three cages hanging ever since the early 1500s from the apse of the cathedral of Munster Germany. It was within these cages that wrongdoers would be left to die of starvation, dehydration and exposure for their perceived crimes. Their public display would have served as a warning to other members of the populace and would also serve to underline the authority, control, and power of the church and city government over the citizens of the city.

  When Henry VII died in 1509 he was succeeded by his son, the much-married Henry VIII. Following in his father’s reforming footsteps, the new Henry declared that anyone accused of murder on a public highway or in church could not claim benefit of clergy, thereby making them liable to receive the death penalty. He soon extended these crimes to include all murder, piracy, rape, abduction and sacrilegious acts of all kinds. As Henry aged, his once sunny disposition soured. His protracted war with the Pope, brought about by the Vatican’s refusal to grant him a divorce, did nothing to improve his mood and he soon took out his frustrations on his subjects. Punishments of all types became ever more creatively brutal. When a sailor and his common-law wife were accused of stealing a chest of Henry’s gold from the hold of a ship, he ordered them to be wrapped in chains and suspended from the Thames embankment; when the tide came in they were slowly engulfed by the rising water. A guard at the Tower of London who was suspected of complicity in their crime was similarly bundled in chains and hung from the walls of the Tower where he was left to die of exposure.

  The Roman Inquisition burning off the tongue and lips of a dissenter with a red-hot iron.

  Vagabonds, hobos and the homeless always bothered Henry. People with too much time on their hands were probably trouble-makers and likely to foment rebellion. The old law prescribing a good whipping for layabouts was amended to include being burned through their right ear with a hot iron, marking them, as well as their crime, for life. A second offence brought them to the hangman’s noose. Worse crimes brought such creative sentences as having the tongue ripped out, hands chopped off and – in a move reminiscent of the worst of Roman atrocities – boiling in oil. When the Bishop of Rochester died of food poisoning in 1531, his cook was accused of the crime and boiled alive at London’s Smithfield Horse Market without even being allowed to make his last confession. This was one of two such instances that same year.

  Not everyone in Henry’s government agreed with such harsh measures. Henry’s Chief Minister of State, Sir Thomas More, pleaded for less severe laws, but when he openly opposed Henry’s separation with the Catholic Church and establishment of the new Church of England, More went to the headsman’s block and his proposed reforms died with him. Henry formally established his own religion in 1534 and by 1539 made his power absolute over both Church and State with the Act of Six Articles. Crimes against the Church were now considered crimes against the king; crimes against the king were crimes against God. Henceforth, a person’s failure to attend Henry’s Church regularly brought a sentence of having their ears cut off. Anyone denying the king’s right to decree the word of God could be hanged. Anyone adhering to either traditional Roman Catholicism, or taking up the new Protestant religion would be burned as a heretic. Anyone caught eating meat on Friday, or denying the doctrine of transubstantiation (the belief that the wine and bread used in Holy Communion literally transformed themselves into the body and blood of Christ during the service) would be burned as a heretic. When a merchant named Thomas Sommers was caught in possession of the writings of the German P
rotestant Martin Luther he was condemned to be stoned to death. Heresy and treason were now the same crime and even being heard to utter a word against King Henry was liable to lead to the torture chamber and the burning stake.

  To forestall any possible, organised opposition, Henry spent the years between 1535 and 1539 disassembling the English monastic system and tearing down monasteries. The fact that these religious houses provided the entirety of the kingdom’s charity to the poor, all of its hospitals and nearly all of its educational facilities, mattered not to the king. When an army of somewhere between 50,000 and 75,000 common people rose in revolt against the dissolution of the monasteries, Henry became convinced that the Roman Church was out to destroy him. Hundreds were sent to the burning stake, hundreds more were hanged in towns, villages and crossroads across the kingdom, but Henry remained certain that a rebellion was fomenting and the only way to get to the bottom of it was to torture the truth out of everyone who even looked like they might be a closet Catholic or a private Protestant.

  This scene from Johan Coppenburg’s Le Miroir de la tyrannie espagnole perpetree aux Indes Occidentales (The mirror of Spanish tyranny perpetrated against the Indians in an effort to Christianize them) shows a collection of ‘heretics’ being burned together in a great conflagration. Remember that this was believed by the executors to be a charitable act of redemption and salvation imposed upon the perceived heathens.

  The problem with this idea, despite what you have read over the past eight or nine pages, is that torture still remained illegal in England. No matter how much pain and mutilation was inflicted on an individual, if it was a part of a punishment or death sentence it was not considered torture. Extracting information by means of applied pain, however, was. To circumvent this little glitch in the system, Henry created the Star Chamber, a court which answered to no-one and was not subject to the laws of Parliament nor to the dictates of Common Law. As a result, the thumb screws (which could crush a victim’s thumb knuckle), the boot (an iron boot that could crush the ankle bone and was sometimes applied red-hot), the scavenger’s daughter (which crushed the body until blood squirted from the nose, mouth, ears and finger tips), and the rack (which pulled a person’s limbs until the joints were dislocated) all became common methods of extracting information. Reserved for special prisoners were hell-holes in the Tower known as Little Ease (a cell so small that a man could neither lie down nor stand up but was forced to remain in a crouched position) and the Dungeon Among the Rats (a cell so filled with rodents and insects that occupants frequently had the flesh eaten from their arms and legs while they slept).

  This simple but devilish device shows the functional mechanics of how thumbscrews (and later thumbcuffs) would function. Of course there were many different types and styles and designs, but they all (for the most part) functioned the same … they could be tightened more and more, increasing pressure on the thumbs until such time as the thumbs were completely severed. To get a sense of what this may have been like, we suggest that you use one hand to squeeze the knuckle of your other thumb. … Now imagine that sensation times about a billion … and only ceasing when someone else decides to release you. This sort of empathy for the victims of torture should perhaps not be attempted in every description of this book.

  This device (aptly named ‘the boot’) would slowly crush the bones of the foot. Some devices ground the bones together laterally – others were designed for breaking each bone in turn vertically – this contraption applied increasing amounts of pressure linearly from the heel, crushing first the bones in the toes and then further application would shatter the metatarsals in the feet. Archbishop Gandier was famously subjected to the boot in order to confess his heresies to the Inquisition only to then be forced to ‘walk’ to his own execution where he would be consigned to the fires of faith. Of course walking after having endured such devastating torture was wholly impossible.

  This image (taken by the authors at the Museum of Medieval Torture in Prague, Czech Republic) shows an example of the rack. The victims would be laid on their back on the ‘bed’ and their ankles would be locked into the restraints while their hands would be stretched up over their head and attached to the rope on the windlass. Spiked rollers would penetrate along the length of the spine and lower back augmenting the agony of having the wrists, elbows, shoulders, hips, knees and ankles systematically dislocated before the separation of the vertebrae of the spine. However, few victims held out long enough for it to reach that stage.

  This image shows a synthesis of breaking with and braiding into the wheel. Whether the official on the left is holding a staff of office or a club to be used on the victims is uncertain. If the torturer did his job correctly, the victims would have every major bone in their bodies broken but with no fatal injuries and would then be left in their excruciating condition to slowly die of exposure.

  Everywhere, victims of Henry’s paranoia were tortured, hanged and burned. Monks, priests and nuns were burnt for their faith as were protestant ministers and deacons. Noblemen went to the block or were hanged, drawn and quartered for defying the king’s orders to slaughter the common people in ever greater numbers. In one tragic case a boy of fifteen was burnt for repeating snatches of banned liturgy that it would have been nearly impossible for him to understand because they were in Latin. Over the course of Henry VIII’s thirty-eight-year reign it is estimated that 72,000 men, women and children were executed. How many more were tortured is impossible to guess.

  It would be heartening to say that the England of Henry VIII represented a tragic but isolated instance in the increased use of torture, but such was not the case. Throughout Europe, as religion factionalised and intolerance and fear increased, torture became more prevalent than it had been since the Roman persecution of the Christians more than 1,000 years earlier. Breaking on the wheel was becoming one of the most common means of execution in both France and Germany and for lesser crimes the French now sent men on extended sea cruises as galley slaves – a practice not employed since the Roman Empire. Half a century earlier, in the Eastern European principality of Walachia (now part of Romania), Prince Vlad III, known alternatively as Dracula (son of the dragon) or Tepes (the impaler) executed local miscreants, recalcitrant noblemen and captured enemy soldiers by impaling them on sharpened poles and using their carcasses as a warning along the border he held against the Turks.

  Here we see an impaling. The spike has been passed up through the victim’s rectum and in this case has emerged out of his chest. If the spike managed to miss the heart, lungs and brain, then the victim could be alive for a considerable amount of time before finally succumbing to their wounds. Some executioners who favoured this method took great pride in their ability to achieve this.

  When Henry VIII finally had the good grace to die, his throne was assumed by his son, Edward VI. In addition to ending the religious terror and firmly establishing the Church of England as a Protestant institution, Edward outlawed many of his father’s more barbaric punishments, including boiling alive. Would that this reform could have lasted. Sadly, Edward died at the age of fifteen after ruling for slightly less than six years and his place was taken by his eldest sister, Mary, whose enforced reversion of England to the Catholic faith earned her the undying sobriquet ‘Bloody Mary’.

  Mary’s particular brand of faith did credit neither to herself nor the Catholic Church which she claimed to represent. Everyone who had converted to her father’s Church was ordered to re-convert to the Church of Rome or suffer penalties even her monstrous father had never dreamed of. To enforce her draconian laws she selected Edmund Bonner, Bishop of London. Known as ‘The Devil’s Dancing Bear’, Bonner was the sort of man who enjoyed taking his work home with him. In his house he installed a private torture chamber where he could discuss matters with his more reluctant victims. Even in public court, Bonner delighted in torturing witnesses and defendants alike. In one instance, a witness who did not give the answers Bonner wanted to hear had a candle flame hel
d beneath the palm of his hand until the flesh burnt. On another occasion, a witness had his thumbs tied together and a barbed arrow pulled backward between them. The rack was in such constant usage that seldom a day went by when some poor soul was not being disjointed in the basement of the Tower of London. Single punishments were seldom enough to satisfy Bonner. When a Protestant Minister was accused of possessing ‘scandalous books [which spoke] against kings, peers and prelates’, Bonner had him severely whipped before being locked into the pillory where one ear was cut off and one side of his nose was split with a knife. He was then branded on one cheek with a red-hot iron. A week later he was returned to the pillory to be whipped until his back looked like half-digested meat, the remaining ear was hacked off, the other side of his nose split and the other cheek branded. Obviously the man had said something to offend the Devil’s Dancing Bear. In most cases, a turn at Bonner’s pillory consisted of little more than the usual public humiliation – with the exception that the victim’s ears tended to be nailed to the wooden back-board. When their stretch in the pillory was over, their ears were either ripped free or cut loose with a knife.

  This image depicts a Swiss version of the pillory. The result is the same. Note how the figures on the right-hand side of the image are selecting stones to throw at the culprit. And while the image does not show his wrists bound and thereby incapable of self-defense, it appears as though the entire pillory is designed to spin which may make for additional sport for the outraged public.