Betwixt The Sheets: The History of Sex, Scandal & Society - Medieval Torture & Execution

Episode Date: May 14, 2024

When you say ‘going medieval’ on someone, it brings up quite nasty connotations. But is this brutal suggestion a fair depiction of medieval times and their thoughts on torture and punishment? What are some of the more gruesome methods they employed? And why did Henry I give authorisation for his own granddaughter-in-law to be blinded? Joining Kate today is Matt Lewis, co-host of our sister podcast, Gone Medieval, to find out more. This episode was edited by Sophie Gee. The producer was Stuart Beckwith. The senior producer was Charlotte Long. Enjoy unlimited access to award-winning original documentaries that are released weekly and AD-FREE podcasts. Get a subscription for £1 per month for 3 months with code BETWIXT sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscription/You can take part in our listener survey here. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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Sign up to join me in locations around the world and explore the past. Just visit historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. Leave the tricksters. It's me, Kate Lister. You are here. I am here. Everybody is here that should be here. But before we can go any further together, I have to give you the fair do's warning because this is a podcast that contains language and it contains adults and it contains an adulty language. So here we go. This is an adult podcast spoken about adults to other adults about adulty things in an adulty way. Covering the range of adult subjects and you should be an adult too. you've wandered in here, thinking that Betwixta Sheeps is some nice little programme about bedding. You are not wanted here. Be off with yourself. Don't be writing us angry letters.

For the rest of you. On with the show. Good morrow, kind, betwixta's lovely day for a public execution, wouldn't you say? It's the 14th century after all, and the people of London are out in their thousands for today's poor soul who is being subjected to, let me just see, ah yes, they're being hanged, drawn and quartered. A punishment it would seem which was the result of a what's the worst thing that we could possibly do to a human being brainstorm? And they nailed the brief to be fair. You've just missed the first part which is the drawing. That's the dragging the poor bugger by a horse through the streets of London to the place of execution, giving us plebs a chance to chuck all sorts of things at them as they go.

It really brings the community together, don't you think? What comes next? I hear you cry. Well, come with me and you will find out. What do you look for a man? Oh, money, of course. You're supposed to rise when an adult speaks to you. I make perfect copies of whatever my boss needs by just turning it up and pushing the funny. Yes, social courtesy does make a difference.

Goodness, for a beautiful time. Goodness has nothing to do with it, Derry. Hello and welcome back to Betwixt the Sheets, the history of sex scandal in society. With me, Kate Lister. Whilst they weren't the ancient pioneers of torture and punishment, lawmakers and executioners in the medieval period certainly took this work seriously.

I am very hesitant to call it an art form because, well, because yeah, it's bloody grim, if you'll excuse the pun, but they would have seen it that way for sure. What kind of crimes could land you in these horrendous situations? Just how cruel could they get? And how far have we really come since these times? Joining me today is Matt Lewis, the co-host of our sister podcast Gone Medieval,

to talk about all the ways that people tortured one another and the horrendous punishment to be inflicted during the medieval period. Axes and nipple clamps at the ready betwixters, let's do this. Hello and welcome back to, betwixt the sheets. It's only Matt Lewis. How are you doing? I'm good. Thank you. Thank you very much for inviting me back. Always a pleasure to be asked somewhere twice. Well, I mean, we want to talk to you about medieval torture today. I mean, who else are we going to talk to about that? That is very much in your wheelhouse. You were thinking, who is the most torturous guest I've ever spoken to?

No, no, never, ever. I was thinking who would be the guest who would know the most about inflicting pain in the medieval period. Matt's got lots of children. It must be him. I wanted to talk about torturing the medieval period because that is one of those reputations that the medieval era has.

People will say things like I remember in Pulp Fiction when they're about to torture those guys say we're going to go medieval on your ass. It has that reputation as being a time when everyone was torturing everybody. It was just like a small infraction at work,

tortured. how does it deserve that reputation? Is that an unfair reputation in your opinion? It's massively unfair. The way that the word medieval is still used as a pejorative term today, all across talks and debate, you know, anyone wants to say that anything is backward, stupid, vicious, cruel. They call it medieval. I think without understanding the word that they're actually using. Undoubtedly, torture existed throughout time. It's not a purely medieval thing. it was around in the ancient world and in fact some of the

worst forms of torture were probably invented in the early modern period and certainly then it becomes better recorded as well so we do struggle with knowing how prevalent it is in the middle ages that people weren't great at writing down today I gave John 50 lashes with a birch tomorrow I might dunk someone

in a stool and then it's flaying day on Friday so they're not great at recording at all so we have much more record of it happening from say the Tudor period onward particularly in England. But I don't think it's anywhere near as prevalent as people were. Certainly probably society is much more violent than it is today. But there are still rules around the idea of torture, at least judicial torture. So the courts might resort to torture where they can't quite reach a verdict.

They can't quite tip over that burden of proof. So they may examine witnesses and all of that kind of stuff. If there's lots of circumstantial evidence that this person is likely to be guilty, but they just can't quite be sure, then they might authorise torture as a way to try and encourage this person to confess if they believe that they're guilty. But there is still this mechanism where torture has to be authorised.

It's not the norm. It's not the go-to. It's not what's happening in every pub on a Friday night. Right. There are rules around how and when it can be done. So, I mean, we'll get on to some of the torture methods because once they'd green lit this, they could be pretty fucking vicious.

But then throughout time, as you've right said, And if you want to talk about someone who's particularly sadistic, the Romans were pretty back crap crazy for torture, weren't they? But it's interesting to hear you say that, so there has to be quite a high burden of proof for it to be initiated in the first place. Who was doing it? I'm going to presume that it's not just something that, like you said, it can't be done down the local pub.

So what is the judicial mechanism for this? So I've done something. I'm not willing to fess up. What is the mechanism before someone can start torture? The courts would have to effectively ask them for these people to be tortured. We don't have quite as much evidence as we'd like. We're 99% certain this guy did it. But if you can apply a bit of pressure and get him to confess,

then that's going to tip us over into being able to convict him. Part of the problem is medieval world isn't big on prisons. If you owe money, you might end up in a prison, but otherwise if you commit a crime, you're not going to end up in prison. They want to have a quick trial and deal with you speedily. Keeping people in prison costs money and who's going to pay for that. No king wants to be paying to keep loads of dodgy people in prison. So there isn't the mechanism for those kind of long drawn-out investigations and everything else.

And the medieval world does have quite a high standard of proof in criminal cases. So today it's beyond a reasonable doubt. But the medieval world, they would tend to go even further than that. They want to be really, really, really certain. But meeting that high bar can be really, really difficult. And so sometimes they did resort to employing torture as a way to, encourage people to confess. But I think they did have a sense, though,

that a confession extracted under torture, like we would think that that isn't a reasonable thing to rely on. There was a sense in the medieval world of that too. So it was kind of a last resort. It wasn't the go-to way of getting things done. I was just about to ask you that. I was just about saying, there must have been a conversation around the time of like,

well, of course they've admitted to it now. Yeah. You threatened to pull the head off. I would admit to it. Yeah. And people were well aware of that at the time. And they would have gone through a process of summoning as many witnesses as they can find interviewing people,

trying to establish what's going on. And it's only if you've got that 1% that you're not certain about that the judges might feel like it justifies applying a bit of pressure to see if this guy will confess. Was there certain crimes that torture would be allowed for? Or was it just like anyone that wouldn't fully confess to anything? Or was it like only reserved for murder cases, heresy cases, that kind of thing? theoretically it could apply in any legal case you would only really tend to see it in the most serious ones though

because it's a fairly long-winded expensive process you've got again you've got to pay people to go away and perform torture on these people who's paying these people's wages when there isn't a huge state machine behind all of that so it wasn't really anyone's go-to and it would be a case of if the crime is bad enough if we're pretty close to being sure that he's done it anyway and if we think this will make a difference in the case then we might authorise it, but otherwise it tends not to be. I mean, famously, you know, Guy Fawkes is a really great example in the early 17th century of when he's refusing to give up any information, James I first. And it requires the king to specifically give written authorization for Guy Fawkes to be tortured. And he talks about working your way up the scale.

So he says start with the gentler tortures, whatever they might be, because even those probably aren't very nice. But the intention then is kind of something like Racking is the last resort again, because that does permanent damage and risks kind of death during the torture. So James says, you know, start with the gentler tortures and only if you can't get information out of him then move on to something more serious and more painful. When we're thinking about torture, does it have a categorisation that it has to be something that's applied to get a confession? Because you just torture someone just as part of the punishment?

Or would that be viewed as something very different? It comes under the same umbrella, really. So you can torture people to try and exercise. extract a confession or some information from them. Torture can be a form of punishment. So in the medieval period, political punishment quite often involved blinding a rival because it was believed that if you were blind, you couldn't operate politically. So you quite often see rivals for the throne being blinded deliberately and sometimes they

die as a result of that. So that's kind of a form of torture as a punishment, a way of dealing with a rival or something like that. Henry the first famously gave authorization for his own granddaughters to be blinded and to have their noses cut off. No. Their parents were involved in a dispute. So his daughter and son-in-law were involved in a dispute with someone else.

And they ended up, Henry tried to resolve it by letting them have hostages of each other's children. And his daughter and son-in-law blinded the child that they'd been given custody of. And so Henry felt that the only way to make them. make up for this was to give permission for the other parents to be allowed to both blind and cut the noses off two of the daughters. But those are Henry's own grandchildren. Wow. So, you know, they were pretty brutal ways of using what we would probably call as torture as a form of punishment. And ultimately, some of those could be being tortured to death. You know, some of the

methods of execution, it had this really horrible streak of torture about them. There was an art form that developed in keeping people alive for as long as possible through their execution. so they could endure as much as possible before they actually died. So again, you know, torture forms are part of that ultimate sanction of taking your life. Did they blind the grandchildren and cut their noses off? Or did they get away with it? No, no. Henry had it done.

That is grim, isn't it? Yeah, it's pretty horrible. I mean, you know, Henry the first gets remembered as a great king because he was tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime. But he was also a pretty ruthless, pretty nasty guy. Pretty shit grandfather. Must have make Christmas is quite awkward. It's just the family reunion, just awful.

Yeah, we're going around to grandads for Christmas. That WhatsApp group must have been a mess. Before we get on to the actual specific methods that we used, I'm very interested in what you're saying there about it being an art form. Can I ask what kind of person would be doing this torturing? Because when you said that it's an art form, that implies that there is a level of skill here, that it isn't just someone that you found down the pub and you've gone,

look, here's an axe. go notes. I mean, normally you would have an official executioner whose job it was to execute people and to deliver sentences in a structured way and he would have, you know, some officers around him. It was considered a dodgy job. So we quite often see executioners in illustrations wearing hoods. And that's because it was a fairly shameful thing. You didn't want to be out in the community, waving to all the neighbours of the people whose head you cut off and all of that kind of thing. So there was a degree of anonymity in who the executioner might be. And even if lots of people were aware, of the name of the execution, he might still want to hide his face

while he's actually performing those tasks. So again, we don't have huge records of people saying, I'm the best person at keeping someone alive whilst inserting things into their body. No. But I mean, there wouldn't have been a torturer training school for people to attend or a qualification in thumb screws. So this must have been like a learning on the job type of a thing. Yeah, absolutely.

And you do get cases. So there's a late Anglo-Saxon case of, some Anglo-Saxon princes that come back from exile in France, and their rival has the older of the two brothers blinded, but he dies almost immediately afterwards because they just botch it so much. I don't know quite what they do. Stick the red-hot pokers in his eyes too far, I don't know. But there's always the risk of kind of infection or overdoing it.

And that's part of the reason why it's viewed as a last resort, because if somebody dies during torture, you can ever answer that question of whether they were guilty or not. God, yeah, that's true. I mean, there would be an art to it and a kind of a skill set, I suppose, wouldn't there? Yeah. Oh, let's talk about the big one that you hear about a lot, the hanging, drawing and quartering. Because that sounds like a bunch of people got together and thought, what's the worst thing that we can do to somebody?

It's absolutely vile. For anyone listening that's never heard of that before, can you give us a rundown of what hanging, drawing and quartering is? Yeah, and it was deliberately designed to be the worst thing that they could come up within their imagination. The first instance that we have of someone undergoing this is in 1283 so this is a Welsh ruler named Daphethap Griffith who falls foul of Edward I and is convicted of treason and Edward sort of comes up with this brand new way of inflicting pain on someone who has betrayed him. Okay. And so hanging,

drawing and quartering consists of the three main parts. Actually, drawing is most often now thought of as coming in the middle, but it's technically it's the bit that comes first. And that's the process of being drawn from where you're held in custody to the place of your execution. And initially, this would involve being tied by your ankles behind a horse and dragged through the streets. The problem that they found with this was that people would bang their heads on stones on the way and things like that. So they might arrive for their execution, unconscious or already dead. And obviously that's no good if you really want to hurt someone. See, it was viewed as somehow letting them off the hook if they arrived not in a fit state.

Cut away with it lightly. Yeah, not in a fit state to endure the rest of it. My God. So then they started using these big sort of wooden frames, wooden hurdles, that they would attach to the back of a horse and you'd be dragged through the streets, tied to a wooden hurdle. And this would be the opportunity for crowds to jeer at you, shout abuse, bring out your rotten vegetables, all of that kind of stuff, and pelt people.

Because these moments were meant also to be huge public spectacles. And the idea was that you would watch it, there was a degree of entertainment that people took away from it. It's so weird. Yeah. But what the state wanted you to feel is a sense that I don't want to undergo this. There is the pain and there is also the social embarrassment of everybody watching you and jeering you while you're going through all of this.

So it had a huge deterrent element to it too. And that's why it's reserved for the worst crime, so for treason, really. So if you make it to the place of execution and you haven't banged your head and passed out, you would then be hanged and essentially hanging as a punishment has two forms so you can do the the quick drop which snaps your neck and you die instantly or you can have the long slow strangulation where you'd have less of a drop and you would just hang by your neck until you strangled to death. In hanging, drawing and quartering they use that slow method of choking you on the noose but they do it just to the point of almost being unconscious.

So the art form here, the practice that they develop here, is in knowing when to cut someone down so that they're still alive and still breathing and ready to endure the next part of it. Guy Fawkes, again, is a famous case of he was sentenced to be hanged drawn and quartered, and when he got to the gallows, from the sources, it's not quite clear whether he trips and falls or whether he actually runs and jumps, but he manages to launch off the steps to the gallows and make that kind of really quick fall and snap his own neck

so that he avoids the rest of his execution. Oh, well done. Whether that's him having the last laugh, I don't know. So he wouldn't have been conscious for what they did? No, he died immediately, snapped his neck and so he was dead already for the rest of it. Wow. Interesting. But normally you want the person,

you want, I don't want the person to still be alive. I'm not doing this. Somebody wants the person to be allowed. The idea is that you would be alive and away. and conscious for the next part which involves you being tied to a table of some description. A blade would then be used to cut you down the chest and all the way down the stomach, cut you open. And the idea is that they then light a brazier, so a little fire next to where this is being done. And they pull out your intestines from your stomach and they throw them

in the fire next to you. Hugely painful. Undoubtedly, you would begin to go into shop, but you can survive this. You can be conscious through this. So one of the last things you're going to smell is your own inside burning in a fire next to you. Oh, that is grim. There are cases then of people also having their genitals cut off. So again, the emasculation in public is part of the embarrassment and the punishment that's going on. And the idea that you're not going to reach heaven whole as well. And only then, when the person's on the point of death anyway, would they be beheaded with an axe?

and then their body would be cut into four quarters. Usually the head is then dipped in tar and placed on London Bridge, where it could stay for potentially years as a deterrent and a reminder to people of what happens to traitors. And the four parts of their body would normally be distributed around the country to places that might be relevant to what they did. So for example, William Wallace, Braveheart, really good example. Executed in 1305.

It's one of the few things the film kind of gets right. but the four parts of his body are then sent to Newcastle, Berwick, Sterling and Perth. So to all the places that he was active so that everybody knows he's dead. Everyone has this reminder of what happens to traitors. And also there's this idea that he's not whole in a grave. So on the day of judgment,

when everybody else is rising up from their graves and ready to go to heaven, his body's in bits all over the place and he can't do that. How long would that have taken? I know that we can't recreate these things to test it, but like how long and drawn out is this thing? I mean, I don't know is the short answer. as short as possible.

But you have to imagine, you could be dragged on the hurdle through the city for a couple of miles behind a horse. So that could take half an hour or so. The hanging, it's as long as the person, because you're going to be struggling for breath and to stay conscious and keep breathing as long as you can. So that might depend on your body weight and all of that kind of stuff. But you might be up there for 10 minutes, 20 minutes, 30 minutes. And then the last bit is probably going to be the quickest because you would start to go. into shock and bleed out very quickly. So you endure that last bit of pain

and then your head is cut off. But I mean, it could last, I guess it could last an hour if they managed to make it last that long. I suppose the other thing you've got to factor into this is it's not just about humiliating the person. In fact, in some ways, the actual person dying is kind of the least of it.

This is a spectacle, isn't it? This is a crowd of people, which leads me to a whole other raft of questioning. Who the hell? was going to watch this kind of stuff of just like it blows my I know that it's well documented that big crowds but just the idea of you know with your kids on a day out we'll go and watch the executions yeah and it is one of those things that feels very alien to us today I mean it's probably still happening not all that long ago you know a couple hundred years ago people still attending

big public executions you go back to the Romans and you think of the gladiator games is it any different you know humans have always had this weird draw to going and seeing other humans suffer and die. And it's only fairly recently, I think, that we've, hopefully, most of us have stopped doing that. But it is something very weird about humans that this would be considered a form of entertainment. I mean, I know you've got no TV in the medieval world, but there's got to be better things to do.

I find it hard to imagine that I would want to go and watch this. But maybe that's because I don't live in those times now. I suppose you've got to, like, think, God forbid, if, like, the king or one of the royal families, suddenly it was announced they were going to be beheaded in London in front of the Waterstones or something and everyone can come and have a look. I reckon there'd be a crowd, Matt. I like to think I wouldn't go. I like to think I'd be like, no, I'm not going to watch this, but I think there'd be a crowd. Yeah, I mean, you do wonder how much we've changed. You think of social media pylons and stuff like that. And I know it's not quite the same. But, you know,

that is a crowd mentality of being vicious to one person for something they've done that probably isn't something they've done to you, but you're there to watch them be picked on and to suffer under all of that. There is something very weird about people in all of that. I suppose I, you know, a psychologist would probably break it down to the, it's you and not us kind of a mentality. So you kind of really jump on that. Like when we're talking about big crowds, what kind of numbers? Something like William Wallace being done. How many people would have gone to see that? I mean, that happened in London. So you're potentially talking to looking thousands of people.

The government would have been encouraging people to come because they've got this guy who is famous for causing all of this trouble, championing Scottish independence, threatening the crown of England. The crown has a real interest in getting as many people as possible there for them to witness it and then for them to tell everybody that they know how horrendous it was and all of that kind of things.

So potentially, these were often held in places that could accommodate thousands of people to watch it. 1326 we have a guy called Hugh Dispenser the Younger is hanged drawn and quartered in Hereford. And they construct a special scaffolding, essentially a huge ladder that's rested against the walls of Hereford Castle. And he's executed, you know, the hanging and then the cutting open and the quartering is performed up on this ladder so that the whole crowd can clearly see him. Fuck. Wow. It's a special apparatus so that the more people can see it than would otherwise be able to if it was done. on the floor. Do you know what? Even though hanged drawing and quartering sounds, what sounds absolutely

hideous, beyond hideous, like one of the worst things people could have thought up. I don't think it is one of the worst. I think there's been worse things that have been thought up. Impaling is a particularly nasty one. And I think that like, if you were like, right, we're going to do hang drawing and quoting or you can be impaling. A lot of people might choose the impaling because you think, well, that would be over quite quick. But you tell me about impaling and what that would actually involved and who was a fan of the old impaling? It's going to make me squirm in my chair just talking about all of this, but I'll try my best. So impaling is another one of those things that has a long history.

The first evidence we have of it comes from the 18th century BC in Babylonia. So there is a long history of sticking people on spikes as a form of punishment. And again, there are a couple of ways that you can do it. You can do it quickly so that the idea is driving this thing into their body, which is usually done through the anus or the genitalia and the idea is then you just push it up through the body. You can do that quickly so that they die from that. They die very quickly from the shock and the internal bleeding

that all of that will cause. We have somebody who practiced impaling in England. Really? In 1469, a guy called John Tiptoft, who was the Earl of Worcester and is remembered as the butcher of England. It's in the middle of the Wars of the Roses, so he captures some Lancastrian rebels. and he has them beheaded and then impaled.

So these people are already dead when their bodies are impaled. But he has spikes put in the ground. He has the bodies put onto the spikes through their neck and then out through their buttocks and then the heads put on top of the spikes above that. So he doesn't enjoy a particularly favourable reputation in England and he was actually captured by the other side the next year and he was beheaded by them.

So they at least weren't as cruel as he was to some other people. But, you know, the most famous person associated with this is Vlad the impaler. Yeah. Who is, again, contemporary, mid-15th century, ruler in Wallachia, in modern-day kind of Romania, fighting against the Ottomans. And he uses impaling initially as a way to punish his enemy. So when he captures Ottoman soldiers, he will have them impaled at the sides of the road as a way to discourage other Ottoman armies from entering his territory.

But he finds it so effective. that he starts to employ it against his own people too. He is particularly fond of trying to make the impaling last as long as it possibly can. So they begin to perfect this method of using a finer steak and they drive it up through the body slowly and carefully along the line of the spine, which means it will avoid most of the internal organs. And the idea then is you can get it out through the shoulder or somewhere like that so that the person can still breathe and that they're alive and there are accounts of people being alive impaled on stakes for days out in the sun and whatever else and what a twat oh my god well possibly the worst thing he does as well is that

vlad is well known for having fields of people impaled at a time there'll be hundreds of people on stakes like a forest and he will have his dinner table set up in the middle of all of this and he will sit and eat his lunch surrounded by the screams and death groans of hundreds of people. That's next level, isn't it? That's something else. I'll be back with Matt after this short break. It's so sadistic that, isn't it? To like actually, to not only impale some poor bugger, but like thousands of them and to actually come up with a method where, so I suppose that's like crucifixion almost, isn't it? Is they're just kind of dangling there? Yeah. And again, it's this idea of prolonging the pain that's involved. So there's no swift death for you, you know,

you cross Vlad, you're not getting off lightly, you're going to suffer. And not only that, he's going to sit and eat his dinner and watch you suffer. So what would you die from then? I mean, apart from the fact that you've got a giant spike up your ass, is that exposure to the elements if they've managed to miss all the internal organs? Or like, what would actually be the cause of death there? It could be a number of things. I mean, you're likely to be paralysed.

If they've got this stake up the line of your spine, they've quite possibly severed lots of things. Yep. But you're likely to die of perhaps exposure. dehydration, starvation, suffocation, maybe. Any of these things, you know, whichever one of these things gets you first. Maybe shock, you know, it could still have done some damage internally. And you're going to be in pain and it's going to be deeply, deeply and pleasant.

You're going to be bleeding. So there's shock and blood loss that play into that. So I guess it's whichever one of those things gets you first. It's just horrendous. It's honest. Like, just when you kind of look back through this stuff, it's like the things that human beings have come up with to do to each other is really quite astonishing. One of the interesting things that I've heard you talk about before

was this torture process known as crushing which I'm interested in not only because what it actually was but the way it operates in a legal system it was very specific. It wasn't just right we'll go and crush some people it was part of a judicial system so what was crushing which actually after talking about Vlad

sounds like a fucking day at the races bring it on for what was crushing So the idea of crushing is born out of the notion that when you go to court today, you're required to enter a plea of guilty or not guilty. In the medieval period, if you refused to enter a plea, you couldn't then be tried. And the thing was, if you were found guilty, all of your goods could be seized, if your own lands and titles, all of that could be seized, so your family would lose everything.

So by refusing to enter a plea, you couldn't be found guilty and your goods couldn't be confiscated. You might end up being executed or whatever else anyway, but your goods couldn't be seized and you would be protecting your family by refusing to enter a plea. So obviously that causes a problem for the legal system because that's not what they want. They don't want everybody getting off and bypassing the system this way. So in 1275 we have the statute of Westminster introduced by Edward I,

who crops up a couple of times in these kind of things. He does, doesn't he? He's creative, this guy. Yeah, although his version of this, if someone refused to enter a plea, was that they should be imprisoned and starved until they do plead either guilty or not guilty. In the beginning of the 15th century, this system is slightly changed and it becomes what we now refer to as crushing.

So the idea there would be that the person would be laid on the floor, a stone would be placed under the base of your spine, and then a board would be placed on top of you, and gradually heavier and heavier weights would be put on that board so that you're crushed beneath that weight, but you've also got that stone that is pressing into. to the base of your spine. And the idea is that this is so painful

that you will shout out a plea to get all of this stuff taken off and then you can go to court and be dealt with. There are instances where people die during this process. So if you can hold out long enough, you're still evading that confiscation of all of your goods and the ruin of your family,

but you're having to endure a lot of pain to do it. There are instances where that stone can break the back so someone can be left paralyzed by this process. So it's still not, particularly nice. There is a particularly horrendous case that happens in 1586. This is the reign of Elizabeth I. A lady called Margaret Clitherow is accused of harboring some Catholic priests. She's taken to court and she refuses to enter a plea and they then sentence her to be crushed to try and extract a plea from her and they can't get the executioners, the people that would normally do this. They can't get

them to agree to do it. So they effectively go and pay some homeless vagabonds to come and perform this. But the reason they can't get anybody to do this is that Margaret is pregnant. Oh no. Oh. So they managed to get some people to agree to do this for some money. They bribe some people to do it. They, for some unknown reason, they use Margaret's own front door. So they take the front door off her house and lay her beneath it and start piling the weights on top of this front door. And I mean, she holds out. She and her baby both die in the process of being crushed and she never entered a plea. You do hear these stories of people really withstanding the tortures. Because I suppose that in many ways, their most effective tactic would have just been to show people this stuff.

Show them the rack. Show them the pincers. I would have cracked before he'd even got me into the room. You wouldn't even have to say the word and I would just sing like a birdie. but there are people who really do hold out. It's incredible. Yeah, there's another Catholic priest who's held at the Tower of London during Elizabeth I reign. And he is tortured in lots of ways. He's hung from manacles and all sorts of stuff. And he won't give up the name of his Catholic associates that the government are hunting for. And so he is sentenced to the rack. So they take him to the rack and they put it in front of him.

And he kind of looks at it and shrugs his shoulders and said, meh, won't work. And then his torture. has actually ended up taking him back to his cell and going back to the authorities and saying, we didn't even put it on it because we believe him. We believe he wouldn't give up anything. And, you know, he's getting into such a state we're liable to kill him if we put him on there. They genuinely believe that he wouldn't crack even under the torture of the rack. Jeez. The rack, I hear about that one a lot. And that seems to have been a particularly terrifying, torturous implement. What was that? So this is essentially a flat surface with

winches at either end. So your ankles will be tied to one end. Your wrist will be tied to the other end and then it has, you know, a lever and a ratchet so they can gradually wind the two ends of it round, which will tighten the ropes at either end. And the idea here is that it just becomes increasingly more and more painful to start off with. But if you can endure it for long enough and they carry on, then your joints will begin to dislocate. So your elbows, your shoulders, your hips, your knees, your ankles will all begin to dislocate. Then your tendons and muscles are being. stretched to and if they do that enough it can cause permanent irrevocable damage

because those muscles will lose their elasticity they'll never go back to where they should be and they'll never work again so this can cause a lot of pain and serious long-term problems too I would crack straight away wouldn't you there's no way I would get on that thing holy shit no it is one of those things today you know you think just looking at that would be enough to make me say what do you want to Exactly. Like absolutely, just throw everybody under the bus. And another, it's not quite the rack, but I was wondering about the wheel, being broken on the wheel. I've heard that mention before. And I wasn't sure if that was just some kind of medievalist fantasy of what people could do.

If that was an actual torture method, what was the wheel? I'm tempted to make a Michael McIntyre Saturday Night reference to being broken on the wheel. But no, it is a real thing. Possibly the most odd thing about the wheel is that it's the, inspiration for the firework, the Catherine wheel. Okay. So when you light a Catherine wheel on Bonfire Night, you are celebrating or commemorating the death of St Catherine on the wheel. So she was tortured to death and executed on the wheel.

And that's why you have Catherine wheels. That seems poor old St. Catherine, you're like, oh, say Catherine, we've got a firework named after you. Oh, brilliant, have you? What's it called? Is it called Catherine's Fury or Catherine's Power? Nope. We've named it after the thing you were killed.

on, bloody howl. And this is a form of torture and then execution that's popular on the continent in the medieval period and into the early modern period. Actually, it's still going on in Europe until the 19th century. So it's amazing how late some of these things are actually done away with. And the idea of the wheel is a person would be tied onto the floor, a huge cart wheel would be bought and would essentially begin to be dropped on them, starting at their feet and ankles and working their way up. And the idea is to break as many bones as you can and inflict torture. So this giant cartwheel, smash your ankles are broken, smash on your shin, smash on your knees. That would obviously be hugely painful, but the idea again is that you remain conscious

throughout all of this. Once you've endured that, they would pick you up, they'd strap the wheel up facing a crowd, and they would then kind of twist your broken arms and legs into the spokes of the wheel, and you would then be left there as a form of crucifixion. So sometimes you get people being strangled by the executioner so that they die quickly once they're on the wheel. But there are cases where it's effectively a crucifixion and you're left on that wheel with all your smashed up limbs until you die again of dehydration or starvation or shock. What kind of thing would you have to have done to have ended up there? I mean, these are the most serious crime.

So, you know, these are really reserved for the murderers and the traitors and people like that. It's not something that would happen, you know, for Nick and an Apple off the market. Thank God. or something like that. What is your, I don't want to say favourite, that's not right? What, in your opinion, would be like the worst way to go for medieval torture? I mean, it's horrific, but you can't say these people aren't creative with what they can come up with. What do you think would be the worst one?

I mean, to be honest, out of the ones we've talked about, something like the wheel, I think, would be horrendous because there is that element of all of the pain, but then the prolonged bit at the end of it, the impaling, I think would be a similar. thing. If you're being hanged drawn and quartered or if you're being crushed or anything like that, you at least have that element of, it might take an hour and it's going to hurt. But there's an end in sight. God, I never thought starting this conversation I'd get to the point where hanging, drawing and quartering actually seems like the better option of something. Yeah. One that I've always thought would be like just awful, burning alive, being burnt at the steak.

Like when you think about how much it hurts just to burn your hand. just like, you know, if you touch the kettle or something, like to be burnt alive at the stake, that's beyond hideous. It is a particularly horrific form of execution. The normal way for a criminal to be executed, excluding kind of nobility and everything else, is to be hanged. So if you're a thief, you would be hanged.

And quite often actually, when people are convicted of treason and they're sentenced to being hanged drawn and courted, you will see them being a thief included because that's the bit, that's the crime that gets you the hanging sentence. Yeah. And burning at the stake is sort of the female equivalent of men being hanged. Fucking patriarchy. I knew it.

Absolutely. You know, why have we got to find what is arguably a much worse way to execute women than we do for men? But it obviously becomes closely associated with witch trials and things like that because it's also a punishment for heresy. So religious dissent. And it's this idea that the flames and the fire will purify your soul and burn the sin out. of you. And there are, you know, the first case of it being huge for witchcraft is in 1390 in Paris. And obviously then it escalates through witch trials in the centuries that follow. Maybe one of the most famous cases is Joan of Arc in 1431, who, you know, the age of 19 is tied to a stake in Ruan

marketplace and then set on fire. And literally, again, there's a crowd there who watch this 19 year old woman burn to death. Her ashes are then swept up and thrown in the river Sand to make sure that they're never used as relics. So she's not even afforded any kind of burial or anything like that. I suppose with that one, you'd have to hope that maybe the smoke could get you quite quick, that you'd pass out from smoke inhalation pretty fast. Yeah, and you do get cases again. You get cases where the executioner is authorized to strangle the person before they're actually set on fire

so that you're burned sort of after you're dead. I mean, interestingly again, in Tudor England, so under Henry VIII, who is, Henry VIII, is big in the torture world. he's really not a nice guy if we didn't already know that. There are two women, and it's two women as well. So Margaret Cheney and Anne Askew are the only two women ever to have been recorded to be both tortured and then burned at the stake. Margaret was involved in the Pilgrimage of Grace,

a big religious Catholic rebellion against Henry the 8th's religious reforms. And so Henry wanted to make an example of her. And Anne was an early kind of Protestant, while Henry was still very Catholic and she was put on the rack she passed out she wrote a diary while she was in prison and she talked about

named members of the government who turn up and give the rack a turn they're almost taking pleasure in turning up and giving it a crank while she's on there so she was brought back to consciousness twice so that they could carry on and then she was burned as a heretic after that anyway

Jesus that's what about something like boiling has anyone ever been boiled alive because that would be if you were being really sadistic because then the smoke couldn't get you. That might prolong it. That might take a while. Yeah. And it's that slow bit of gradually getting worse and worse until you can't take it anymore. So again, it's existed for a very long time. We know that the Roman Emperor Nero in the early years of the first century AD is said to have boiled thousands of Christians in oil as a way to punish them.

In the Holy Roman Empire, so this is in the medieval period, this is, in the medieval period, this is the bit of central Europe that's largely Germany and Austria and that kind of part of the world today. In the Holy Roman Empire, you could be boiled to death for being a coin forger. It was used in some murder cases too. Wow. They're surviving records of in 1392, a man was boiled alive in Nuremberg for having committed the rape and murder of his own mother. In 1452, we have a gang of coin forgers all being boiled to death in Danzig. And then even into, so there's a case in 1687, you know, as late as that, of a man in Bremen who's boiled to death in oil for having helped some coin forges.

So they all escaped, he got caught. And in 1687, people are still being boiled to death. Wow. In England, it's much less common. But we do get this piece of legislation, and it's passed in 1531. And can you guess who it's passed by in 1531? Our favourite torture king, Henry the Eighth. Yeah, big Henry.

So he encounters a case in which the Bishop of Rochester is poisoned and dies. and his cook is suspected of being involved. He's found guilty. And so Henry passes this law, puts it all the way through Parliament, to say that being boiled alive is now the prescribed punishment for poisoners. So this cook, a man named Richard Ruse,

is then put in a big cauldron and slowly boiled to death, again, in front of an audience. And I think there was this element of the idea that the punishment would sort of fit the crime. You know, this is a cook who's used his food to poison a bishop. Oh, very clever.

So his punishment is to be boiled to death in him. I'm sure it made Henry smile, but not really anybody else. I'm sure as the poor bugger was sat there heating up, he'd be like, I see you, Henry with your clever pun. What a shit. Yeah, I mean, there's another case during Henry's reign of a lady called Margaret Davy, who is also convicted of poisoning and boiled to death. But then you do get Edward the 6th, so Henry's son, when he comes to the throne,

one of the first things he does is repeal that law and do away with it. So clearly he thinks his dad wasn't being particularly reasonable there. I'm now imagining like family arguments about like I've had quite enough of your anti-boiling agenda son. Just stop it. It's so woke. It's so woke. Can't even boil a poisoner anymore. You'll never be king with that kind of an attitude.

A lot of this stuff, it seems like it's not just about pain, it's about humiliation. And one of the things that I've noticed, I don't know why this surprised me, it shouldn't. But when men are being tortured, the genitals seem to be involved a lot. They seem to like that. And even something like impaling, that is its anal penetration, its genitals are involved, or maybe I've just overthought that.

Is that a sort of a feature of medieval torture? It is because there is that sense of emasculation in public, you know, literally removing your manhood in front of a huge crowd, who will be laughing probably and baying while this is going on because it is a form of entertainment for them. And there is also that element that your body is no longer whole. So even if that's the only thing that happens to you, if you rise on the day of judgment, you're going to heaven without your bits. They're still going to be missing until you're no longer whole.

But you do get specific forms of torture that are targeted at male genitalia. So there's something like the Spanish donkey, sometimes called the wooden horse. And this emerges really under the Spanish Inquisition. So late 15th century into the 16th and 17th centuries. And this was essentially a big triangle of wood with a point at the top, which a man would be made to straddle. and sit on and then weights would be tied to his ankles and his wrists to essentially pull his genitalia and drive this wedge up into his body as much as possible. Oh God. There are accounts also of this being in the form of a chair that was sort of a pyramid effect. So you'd be sat on the point of

this pyramid and then have weights tied to your ankles and legs. The idea being obviously that it gradually works its way into the body. People would be left on there for hours. And there are there are even accounts from the American Civil War of the Yankees using this as a form of punishment on captured soldiers. So there are diary accounts of prisoners of war during the American Civil War saying that today a dozen of our men were sat on the wooden horse for many hours to the point where when they actually let them off, they can't walk and they have to be carried back to their cells. And then it's days and days and days before they're even able to walk again because it just has so much damage. to that part of your body. So there's a reason why men wince in our eyes water when anyone gets kicked in the private parts on TV.

And there's probably a reason why lots of these punishments are specifically designed to focus on that area. I was going to say I can't believe that that was going on as late as the Civil War. But I suppose that we forget that torture is still with us to this very day. It isn't something that's confined to a medieval slash new modernist period. It's still around today. Absolutely. You know, there are parts of the world where,

torture is still a part of the state's arsenal and weaponry to be able to deal with people they consider to be criminals. Today, we think it's awful and terrible and barbaric, but it's still happening in the world today. There are countries that still use this as a way to control their population. And I don't know if sort of, you know, America or Britain or countries that consider ourselves very sophisticated, if we still use torture methods. But I suppose what we kind of do more of his psychological torture. Yeah, which I know, torture is still so prevalent. There are records of the British government torturing German prisoners of war after

Second World War had ended. You think about what the Americans were doing at Guantanamo Bay after 9-11. You know, there is this idea, and that's something that comes from 17th century, England during the Civil War, there is an idea that if you get people off British soil, they're no longer subject to British law. And that's exactly what happens with Guantanamo Bay. the idea is it's not American soil. These people have never been,

they're foreign citizens who've never been on American soil, therefore they don't have any rights as citizens. And that is really just an excuse for torture. So, you know, 20 years ago, the Americans were still taking people to a specific place to torture them in the belief that that was the way to get information that would help them win the war on terror. Absolutely grim, isn't it?

Matt, I was going to say you've been amazing to talk to. I'm not sure if that's the word that I want. you have been horrifying but fascinating at the same time. And if people want to know more about you and your work, if they want to suggest other torture methods to you, where can they find you? Or tell me off for being too graphic. That's time I spoke about this kind of thing,

someone accused me of reveling in it too much and sounding like I was enjoying it and endorsing the idea of torture, which I am absolutely not. That's absolutely not what's happening. You can find me on Gone Medieval Podcast. So my episodes go out on a Tuesday. There's also Ellen Ejarniger's episodes go out.

on a Friday too so you can find us talking all things medieval during those you can find me on history hits YouTube channel and on the sbod channel talking about all kinds of medieval nonsense fabulous thank you so much for talking to me today you i winced through it but you've been marvellous thank you very much for having me thank you know people are horrible thank you for listening and thank you so much to matt for joining me and if you like what you heard. Don't forget to like, review and follow along wherever it is, you get your podcasts. Or we'll put the thumb screws on you.

If you want us to explore a subject, or maybe you just wanted to say hello, then you can email us at betwixt at history hits.com. We have got episodes on everything from a mini-series on the real Bridgeton to the history of monogamy all coming your way. This podcast

was edited by Sophie G. The producer was Stuart Beckwith. The senior producer was Charlotte Long. Join me again, Betwixt the sheets, The History of sex scandal in society, a podcast by HistoryHits. This podcast contains music from Epidemic Sound.