The Big Book of Pain: Torture & Punishment Through History Read Online Free Page A

crime, whippings were the most common form of punishment meted out in almost all ancient societies. Whether the whipping was inflicted with a stick, a heavy rod, a simple leather whip or a cat-o-nine tails with sharp slivers of metal braided into the thongs, were determined by the seriousness of the crime and how brutal the standards of the society were.

     
Here we see a public flogging taking place. This would have been a fairly commonplace scene throughout Europe until well into the eighteenth century. The victim here (apparently a woman) is being flogged with bundles of sticks (although being hung by the wrists is certainly unpleasant enough). It could well be that the man flogging her is in fact her husband and that he was legally entitled to this recourse for her shrewish behaviour or infidelity, but only if the flogging was administered publicly.
     
    Hand-in-hand with the concept of whippings and other minor, public punishments was the concept of shame and humiliation which inevitably accompanied the punishment. The whole concept of shame has virtually disappeared from modern society, due largely to the anonymity of overpopulated cities and the breakdown of community and family life. Things were different in the past. Small communities, where everyone knows everyone else and knows all about their business, are a perfect platform for imposing soul-crushing levels of shame. In the tiny, isolated communities that existed from the dawn of civilization through the late eighteenth century, when friends, neighbours and family refuse to talk to, or do business with, someone who had stepped beyond the bounds of acceptable behaviour, it was a truly shattering experience. Add to this the fact that the offender had been whipped, or otherwise punished, in full view of the entire community and they would have probably been more than happy to exchange the experience for a few months in a nice gloomy prison where they could suffer in private.
    As was true with minor crimes, the punishment for more serious offences was determined largely by how civilised, or how barbaric, the individual society happened to be. The time period in which the society existed had surprisingly little to do with how ‘civilised’ the punishments were. As we shall discover in the next section of this book, ancient Egypt was fairly civilised but 4,000 or 5,000 years later the punishments imposed during the Dark Ages and early medieval period were unbelievably horrific. Branding, dismemberment, scalping, ripping tongues out by their roots, throwing people from cliffs, skinning them alive and ripping their entrails from their still-living bodies were all commonly imposed punishments used in early European societies. So why did society seemingly deteriorate? In reality, it did not deteriorate at all. As we saw earlier, stable societies are less likely to fall victim to the paranoia that creates brutal punishments than are unstable societies. The Egyptians had a stable, well-organised society ruled by an ancient system of royalty and priests who were not in constant fear of being toppled. The societies of the dark and early Middle Ages, on the other hand, were tremendously unstable and tended to be led by whichever warrior had the biggest sword at the time. To such fearful leaders every lawbreaker offered a perfect opportunity to set an unmistakable example. As late as the Renaissance, punishment throughout Europe was at least as brutal as it had been under the yoke of the Roman Empire 1,500 years earlier. A single example should serve to illustrate this point.

     
These ankle restraints are from the eighteenth or nineteenth century when somewhat more humanitarian concerns affected attitudes towards imprisonment or incarceration. These have obviously been designed for prolonged use as they have been shaped to make them more comfortable and less irritating, and yet maintain restraint.
     
    During the late tenth century, a bell maker from Winchester, England,