The Big Book of Pain: Torture & Punishment Through History

by Mark P. Donnelly

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

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  BOOKS

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  Abbott, Geoffrey, Lords of the Scaffold: A History of Execution, Headline, 1991.

  Abbott, Geoffrey, Rack, Rope and Red-Hot Pincers: A History of Torture and Its Instruments, Headline Books, 1993.

  Abbott, Geoffrey, The Book of Execution: An encyclopedia of methods of Judicial Executions, Headline, 1994.

  Abbott, Geoffrey, The Who’s Who of British Beheadings, Andre Deutsch, 2000.

  Andrews, William, Old Time Punishments, William Andrews and Co., 1890.

  Andrews, William, Bygone Punishments, William Andrews and Co., 1899.

  Anonymous, Torture, Inquisition, and the Crime of Capital Punishment: An exhibition presented in various European and American cities since 1983, Avon and Arno Publishers, 2001.

  Burford, E.J. and Shulman, Sandra, Of Bridles and Burnings, The Punishment of Women, Robert Hale Ltd., 1992.

  Byrne, Richard, The London Dungeon Book of Crime and Punishment, Little, Brown and Company, 1993.

  Cameron, Joy, Prisons and Punishment in Scotland from the Middle Ages to the Present, Canongate Publishing Ltd., 1983.

  Dawson, Ian, Crime and Punishment Through Time, John Murray (Publishers) Ltd., 1999.

  Duff, Charles, A Handbook on Hanging – the fine art of Execution, The Bodley Head, 1928.

  Earle, Alice Morse, Curious Punishments of Bygone Days, Loompanics Limited, Port Townsend Washington, 1896.

  Hibbert, Christopher, The Roots of Evil: A Social History of Crime and Punishment, Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1963.

  Hroch, Miroslav/Skybova, Anna, Ecclesia Militans: The Inquisition, Dorset Press, 1988.

  Hurwood, Bernhardt J., Torture through the Ages, Paperback Library, 1969.

  Farrington, Karen, Hamlyn History of Punishment and Torture: a journey through the dark side of justice, Hamlyn, 1996.

  Foxe, John, Foxe’s Booke of Martyrs, Whitaker House, 1981.

  Innes, Brian, The History of Torture, Brown Packaging Books, 1998.

  Kerrigan, Michael, The Instruments of Torture, Spellmount, 2001.

  Lane, Brian, The Encyclopedia of Cruel and Unusual Punishment, Virgin Publishing Ltd, 1993.

  Laurence, John, A History of Capital Punishment, The Citadel Press, 1960.

  Lee, Stephen, Crime, Punishment and Protest 1450 to the Present Day, Longman Group Limited, 1994.

  Levinson, Sanford (ed.), Torture: A Collection, Oxford University Press, 2004.

  Lyons, Lewis, The History of Punishment, Amber Books, 2003.

  Mannix, Daniel P., The History of Torture, Sutton Publishing, 1964.

  Oakley, Gilbert, The History of the Rod and other Corporal Punishments, The Walton Press, 1964.

  Peters, Edward, Torture, Basil Blackwell, 1985.

  Pettifer, Ernest W., Punishments of Former Days, Taylor and Colbridge, 1939.

  Priestley, Philip, Victorian Prison Lives, Pimlico, 1999.

  Ransford, Oliver, The Slave Trade, Readers Union, 1972.

  Ruthven, Malise, Torture: The Grand Conspiracy, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1978.

  Salgado, Gamini, The Elizabethan Underworld, JM Dent and Sons Ltd, 1977.

  Scott, George Ryley, The History of Capital Punishment, Torchstream Books, 1950.

  Scott, George Ryley, The History of Corporal Punishment, Torchstream Books, 1968.

  Scott, George Ryley, The History of Torture Through the Ages, Torchstream Books, 1940.

  Silverman, Lisa, Tortured Subjects: Pain, Truth, and the Body in Early Modern France, University of Chicago Press, 2001.

  Sprenger, Jacobus/Kramer, Heinrich (Summers, Montague, Trans.), Malleus Maleficarum – The Hammer of Witchcraft, The Folio Society, 1968.

  Swain, John, The Pleasures of the Torture Chamber, Noel Douglas Ltd., 1931.

  Swain, John, A History of Torture, Tandem, 1931.

  Tyldesley, Joyce, Judgement of the Pharaoh: Crime and Punishment in Ancient Egypt, Phoenix, 2000.

  Van Yelyr, R.G., The Whip and the Rod: An Account of Corporal Punishment among all Nations and for all Purposes, Gerald G. Swan, 1942.

  Walker, Peter N., Punishment: an Illustrated History, David and Charles, 1972.

  Whiting, Roger, Crime and Punishment: A Study Across Time, Stanley Thornes (Publishers) Ltd., 1986.

  Wilkinson, George Theodore, The Newgate Calendar (Book 1), Panther Books, 1962.

  Zimbardo, Philip, The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil, Random House, 2007.

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  MAGAZINES AND JOURNALS

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  Brushfield, T.N., ‘Notes on the Punishment known as the Drunkard’s Cloak of Newcastle-on-Tyne’, Journal of the British Archaeological Association, September 1888.

  Rushkoff, Douglas, ‘Peer Review: The reason we should loathe ourselves for watching reality TV’, Discover, May 2007.

  PLATES 1

  These interrogation chairs are basic to the art of the inquisitor. In the modern world updated versions are used, and have been made even more effective through the use of electricity.

  The effect of the spikes – even non-electrified ones – on the victim, who is always naked, is obvious and requires no detailed explanation. He or she suffers horribly from the first instant of the questioning, a procedure that can be heightened by rocking them or striking the limbs or through the application of weight or pressure.

  The image here on the right and the one on the preceding page depict acts of evisceration (disembowlment). The victim is staked out on his back alive and fully conscious. A small cut is then made in the lower abdomen or stomach and his entrails are wound up onto the windlass. This horrifying process would be done slowly and carefully so as to prolong the execution as long as possible before the victim eventually died. It is a type of punishment which seems to have been common to several early Christian Martyrs.

  There are two basic types of the legendary garrotte. The first type is the Spanish garrotte, in which the screw draws back the iron collar, strangling the victim and killing him through the process of asphyxiation. The second type is the Catalonian garrotte which differs in that it has an iron point which penetrates and crushes the cervical vertebrae whilst at the same time forcing the entire neck forward and crushing the trachea against the fixed collar, thus killing by both asphyxiation and slow destruction of the spinal cord. The agony could, therefore, be prolonged according to the executioner’s whims. It must be remembered that the garrotte was a public spectacle and crowds could be unsatisfied by quick executions.

  It is worth noting that there were variations in the functional mechanism at work in these devices. In some cases, the iron band around the throat was drawn back with the screw. In other cases, the iron spike at the back of the neck would be screwed forward. And in still other cases, the band would contract while the spike simultaneously bored forward.

  The history of torture records many devices that worked on the principle of anthropomorphic containers with double doors, fitted with spikes on the inside that pierced the victim contained within. The most famous example has always been the so-called ‘Iron Maiden of Nuremberg’, which was reportedly destroyed in the air raids of 1944.

  It is difficult to separate legend from fact concerning this contraption because most published material is based on nineteenth-century research distorted by romanticism and fanciful popular tradition. The first reference to an execution with the Iron Maiden is on 14 August 1515, although the device had supposedly been in use for decades by then. On that day a coin forger was put inside the Maiden and the doors shut ‘slowly, so that the very sharp points pierced his arms, and his legs in several places, and his belly and his chest, and his bladder and the root of his member, and his eyes and his shoulders, and his buttocks, but not enough to kill him; and so he remained making great cry and lament (gross Geschrey and Wehklag) for two days, after which he died’. It is likely that the spikes were moveable among various sockets so as to be more or less lethal or mutilating acc
ording to the stature of the victim and the requirements of the sentence.

  Investigative torture fell slowly into disuse in Germany with the passing of the eighteenth century, so that a tourist guide of 1784 speaks of ‘the Iron Maiden, that abominable work, of horror that goes back to the times of Frederick Barbarossa’, (an error of nearly four centuries, but one that showed the Maiden had already been relegated to the museum). Nevertheless, in 1788 sentences of drawing-and-quartering, breaking on the wheel and cutting off of tongues and hands were still being carried out in Nuremberg.

  Appearing disturbingly like an over-sized baby’s cradle or bassinet, 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 would be ‘rocked’ violently back and forth. The results of which seem too self-evident to require further detailed description.

  It is worth noting, however, the presence of the ‘spiked pillow’ within this device. Obviously this would not have afforded the victim any comfort whatsoever and may even be the product of a vicious and twisted sense of humour.

  The Pillory is a form of torture similar to stocks. The victim’s head and/or limbs were locked in place, leaving them both helpless and defenceless. This device could be fixed solidly to any immovable object, or could be worn freely (as in the case of the Chinese Cangue), or perhaps tethered to a stationary point. In addition to the public humiliation the victim had to endure, they were commonly assaulted, molested and abused by members of the passing populace. Anyone sentenced to be pilloried was fair game as an open target to one and all unless loyal friends or family stepped forward to protect them.

  After hanging, ‘breaking with the wheel’ was the most common means of execution throughout Germanic Europe from the early Middle Ages to the beginning of the eighteenth century. The victim, naked, was stretched out supine on the ground with his or her limbs spread and tied. Crosspieces were placed under the wrists, elbows, ankles, knees and hips. The executioner then smashed limb after limb and joint after joint, including the shoulders and the hips, using the iron edged wheel, being careful to avoid fatal blows. The victim was transformed, according to the observations of a seventeenth-century chronicler, ‘into a sort of huge screaming puppet with four tentacles, like a sea monster, of raw, slimy and shapeless flesh mixed up with splinters of smashed bones’. Then the shattered limbs were ‘braided’ into the spokes of the wheel, and the victim hoisted up horizontally to the top of a pole, where they were left for the birds and exposure to the elements to slowly perish. Death came after a long and atrocious agony. This method of execution seems to have been a popular spectacle in medieval Europe.

  Although forever associated in the cultural imagination with the French Revolution, devices which mechanically decapitate by means of a falling blade existed long before the birth of Dr Joseph Guillotin. Primitive ancestors of the guillotine were used in Ireland, England and Italy in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Several known decapitation devices, such as the Italian Mannaia, the Scottish Maiden and the Halifax Gibbet are well documented and pre-date the use of the French guillotine by as much as 500 years.

  At the bottom of the page is an image depicting one of these early ancestors of the guillotine, known as a Fallbrett (literally, a ‘falling board’). In this instance, there is no sharpened (or even metal) blade to sever the head from the body in one swift stroke, but rather this device is simply constructed of planks of solid oak. Here it is the blunt edge of the wood alone which rips and chews the flesh and vertebrae under the impact of the sledge blows. Presumably by breaking the neck on the first blow the victim would be spared a prolonged and tortuous death, though that would be rather uncertain. It is of course possible that a broken neck may simply result in paralysis rather than death, and so the victim would have to suffer through the entire ordeal as the executioner wielded sledge blow after sledge blow.

  When one thinks of torture by stretching, this device – known by many names, but most commonly referred to as the rack – springs immediately to mind.

  When ‘racked’ the victim is literally ‘prolonged’ by force of the winch, and various sources testify to cases of thirty ems or twelve inches! This inconceivable length comes of the dislocation and extrusion of every joint in the arms and legs, of the dismemberment of the spinal column, and of course of the ripping and detachment of the muscles of the limbs, thorax and abdomen – effects that are, needless to say, somewhat fatal.

  But long before the victim is brought to the final undoing, he or she, often in the ‘Question of the first degree’ suffers dislocation of the shoulders because his arms are pulled up behind his back, as well as the agony of muscles ripping like any fibre subjected to excessive stress. In the ‘Question of the second degree’, the knee, hip and elbow joints begin to be forced out of their sockets; with the ‘third degree’ they separate, very audibly. After only the second degree, the victim is maimed for life; after the third he is dismembered and paralysed and gradually, over hours and days, the life functions cease one by one.

  This example has spiked rollers, which is a refinement that is more of an exception than a rule.

  The Shrew’s Fiddle, or Halsgiege (neck-violin) is akin to other devices meant to humiliate and torture a person. The head went through the larger hole with the wrists clamped within the two smaller holes. In this way the victim could be easily directed and pulled along. Some examples were chained together near the ‘neck’ of the violin, still others consisted of one long ‘standing pillory’ of two fiddles joined neck to neck by a solid piece of wood.

  An iron version was widely used during the years of slavery in the United States until its abolition in 1865.

  (See also: stocks; pillory; drunkard’s cloak; brank; noisemaker’s fife, masks of shame or infamy; and the Chinese Cangue)

  This device is known as the noise-maker’s fife or flute. A variety of instruments of this form (trumpet, trombone, oboe and recorder made of wood or brass or iron) are known to have existed in the sixteenth–seventeenth centuries – though earlier and later representations can be found. The iron collar was locked around the victim’s neck, and his or her fingers, posed like those of a playing musician’s under notches in the long vice, were squeezed with a force varying from uncomfortable to unbearable.

  This was essentially a form of pillory (see also pilliwinkes), of exposure to public ridicule, with all the customary painful and sometimes fatal consequences that marked the fate of all those treated in this manner. It was inflicted for relatively minor crimes and sins such as disturbing the peace. In Italy, it was often meted out to those guilty of baldoria e baccano – ‘revelry and din’ – in front of a church during holy functions. The term ‘piffero del baccanaro’ or ‘noise-maker’s fife’, appears in several eighteenth-century Bolognese documents.

  The horrific procedure of torture by means of the Judas Cradle has remained essentially unchanged from the Middle Ages to the present day. The victim is hoisted up in the manner shown in the illustration (opposite below), and lowered onto the point of the pyramid in such a way that his or her weight rests on the sharpened point. This point would be positioned at the anus, in the vagina, beneath the scrotum or under the coccyx.

  The torturer could then, according to the pleasure of the interrogators, vary the pressure from zero to that of total body weight (or even greater through the addition of weights). The victim could furthermore be rocked or made to fall repeatedly onto the point. And, of course, they could be left in this ‘perched’ position for indefinite periods of time.

  The Judas cradle was also known as culla di Giuda in Italian and Judaswiege in German, but in French it was referred to as la veille, ‘the wake’ or ‘nightwatch’ (this presumably because victims would be left in this precarious suspended anguish overnight). In the modern world, this method of torture and interrogation has been known to be used in Latin America (a
nd elsewhere) both with and without ‘improvements’ such as electrified waist rings and bladed ‘points’ to the apex of the pyramid.

  A staple, in one variation or another, of any respectable torture chamber. A deviously simple design which delivered the requisite amount of pain to any victim unlucky enough to be seated within, the chair was of a sturdy wooden construction strategically embedded with up to 2,000 metal spikes.

  The victim, always naked, was strapped within the chair using tight leather straps, wooden braces, and/or metal cuffs. The initial pain of hundreds of sharp rusty spikes penetrating the flesh could always be increased by the torturer forcibly pressing the prisoner down and back against the spikes. Variations (without spikes) were used to bind the victim so that the torturer could easily baste his or her feet with lard or oil heated by nearby braziers.

  Often, the ‘seat’ would be made of metal so that a fire could be lit beneath with obvious painful consequence. Note also in the image above left, the presence of the spiked plank designed to be tightened against the shins forcing the calves tight against the spikes of the frame. And of the second plank designed to rest beneath the soles of the victim’s bare feet.