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

named Teothic was arrested and convicted of what the church records (where the case is recorded) only refer to as ‘a slight offence’. Under the rules of Anglo-Saxon England – which was one of the more stable societies in northern Europe at the time – the wretched Teothic was shackled and hung up by his hands and feet. The following morning he was taken down long enough to be whipped unmercifully before again being hung up like a side of beef. How long this horrific punishment might have continued we do not know because somehow Teothic escaped captivity and took sanctuary at a local monastery.
    When the crime is more serious than the one poor Teothic was convicted of – serious enough to demand the death of the prisoner, and bear in mind that as late as the eighteenth century, stealing a loaf of bread was a capital offence – the most unspeakable tortures can be justified under the concept that once a person has committed a serious crime they surrender every protection and comfort society extends to its law-abiding citizens. Once publicly placed outside the parameters of society, the malefactor could be legally dealt with – either swiftly and cleanly or in the most unspeakable manner imaginable. If his end was to come swiftly – relatively speaking – the most popular form of execution has always been by hanging.

     
This engraving of a public hanging serves to illustrate what public spectacles these executions grew to be. Though we might assume by the presence of the masked executioner with the axe on the right, that this was not going to be a simple death by strangulation, but was, more likely, to have been a case of hanging, drawing and quartering as described later in this book.
     
    Despite the fact that until well into the nineteenth century – when a trapdoor was installed in the scaffold allowing the condemned to be ‘dropped’ to a nearly instantaneous death – hangings were carried out by placing a noose around the prisoner’s neck and hoisting him into the air where he dangled, kicked and choked himself to death over the next ten to twenty minutes, hanging has never been considered torture. So if hanging was cheap, easy, relatively quick and never considered a form of torture, why were so many strange, bloody and painful executions devised for so many different crimes? Before answering this question, it might be well to recount the more popular forms of execution – and the concomitant crimes – still in use as late as the sixteenth century. The following list comes from 1578 when it was compiled by the English chronicler, Ralph Hollinshed.
    If a woman poisons her husband she is burned alive; if a servant kills his master he is to be executed for petty treason; he that poisons a man is to be boiled to death in water or [molten] lead, even if the party did not die from the attempted poisoning; in cases of murder all the accessories [before and after the fact] are to suffer the pain of death. Trespass is punished by the cutting [off] of one or both ears … Sheep thieves are to have both hands cut off. Heretics are burned alive [at the stake].
    Not included on this list are simple hangings; beheading in cases where noblemen were convicted of treason and hanging, drawing and quartering imposed on commoners found guilty of the same offence. Burning at the stake – that ever-popular horror – took several forms. When the person in question had been convicted of heresy, if they recanted their sin they were usually strangled to death, or hanged, before being consigned to the flames. If they clung to their heretical belief they were condemned to be slowly roasted alive. Simple cases of murder would lead a man to the gallows but a woman was more likely to be burnt. Why? Because the corpse was routinely stripped naked and left to twist in the wind after the execution and it was considered disgraceful to expose a woman’s bare body to the curious stares of the public.

     
In this illustration by