Victor R. Claveau, MJ
“Of the means or instruments of torture employed in the Tower [of London] there were seven different kinds.
“The first is the Pit—a subterraneous cave, twenty feet deep and entirely without light.
“The second is a cell or dungeon so small as to be incapable of admitting a person in an erect posture: from its effects on its inmates, it received the name of Little Ease.”[1]
The third is the rack: a torture device consisting of a rectangular, usually wooden frame, slightly raised from the ground, with a roller at one or both ends. The victim’s ankles are fastened to one roller and the wrists are chained to the other. As the interrogation progresses, a handle and ratchet mechanism attached to the top roller are used to very gradually increase the tension on the chains, inducing excruciating pain.
By means of pulleys and levers, this roller could be rotated on its own axis, thus straining the ropes until the sufferer’s joints were dislocated and eventually separated. Additionally, if muscle fibers are stretched excessively, they lose their ability to contract, rendering them ineffective. Prisoners were tortured and interrogated in order for them to give up the names of their conspirators.
“The fourth is called The Scavenger’s Daughter. It consists of an iron ring, which brings the head, feet and hands together until they form a circle.
“The fifth is the iron gauntlet which encloses the hand with the most excruciating pain.
“The sixth consists of chains or manacles attached to the arms: and
“The seventh, of fetters, by which the feet are confined.”[2]
The torture instruments used on John Gerard at the Tower of London were the manacles, and the rack.[3]
May the blood of the martyrs, and their prayers, heal the divisions caused by the evils perpetrated during the 16th century Protestant revolt in England.
The Tyburn Tree[4]
“Others suffered mocking and scourging, and even chains and imprisonment. They were stoned, they were sawn in two, they were killed with the sword; they went about in skins of sheep and goats, destitute, afflicted, ill-treated— of whom the world was not worthy—wandering over deserts and mountains, and in dens and caves of the earth.” (Heb. 11:36-38)
The punishments meted out by the various courts of medieval England were:
- The death penalty for serious offences, Fines, for most petty offences.
- Criminals who were felt to have offended the public were put in the stocks. This is called a “shaming punishment” as it humiliated the offender in front of his or her neighbors. But it was all over quickly. Another shaming punishment was the ducking stool, for women the village disapproved of.
- Prisons (gaols), often in castles like the Tower of London, were used in a few cases, but they were usually used to hold on to a prisoner awaiting trial.
Church Courts and Sanctuary
Throughout the Middle Ages, the Church had its own courts. These tried crimes of a religious nature: blaspheming, failure to attend church etc. They claimed the right to try anyone who was a member of the church. Further, anyone on the run from the law could claim “sanctuary” by going into a church. The pursuers could not follow and the offender was allowed to leave the country.
The death penalty was used to punish serious offences such as murder, arson, forgery, as well as robbery of goods valued at more than a shilling (5p). In England the method of execution was normally by hanging, right from medieval times to its abolition in 1965.[5]
Tyburn
Historian Andrea McKensie, in her book Tyburn’s Martyrs, describes Tyburn: “the main place of execution for the City of London and the county of Middlesex, was located at what was, in the early modern period, the north-west edge of the metropolitan area, at the junction of Oxford Street with Edgware and Baywater Road, near the present-day site of Marble Arch (marked today be a small plaque in a traffic island). The ‘Elms’ at the crossroads that had served as the medieval gallows had probably been replaced by a beam placed across the branches of two trees sometime in the fifteenth century. The first mention of the distinctive ‘Tripple Tree’ design dates from a 1571 account of the execution of the Catholic cleric John Story, in which it was claimed that ‘a new payre of Gallowes made in triangle manner … was prepared for him’. This structure seems to have been replaced from time to time: in the late 1670s, the Court of Aldermen ordered ‘the setting up a new Gallowes at Tyburne the old Gallowes there having for a good while past has been altogether useless’, while in 1678 execution sheet makes specific reference to ‘the new Gallows’. A newspaper report of a June 1759 execution noted that ‘all the Cross-Beams [had been] pulled down’, possibly as a result of vandalism; in October of the same year, the permanent structure was replaced by a ‘new Moving Gallows. From this time until the last execution at Tyburn in November 1783, a temporary scaffold was erected and dismantled for each execution. After the abolition of the Tyburn procession, malefactors were hanged outside the Debtor’s Door at Newgate [prison], the first execution taking place there in December 1783. While the vast majority of the hangings of common criminals too place at Tyburn, there were other execution sites in England.”[6]
Drawn, Hanged, and Quartered
There has been much confusion as to the punishment of “drawing,” forming down to times comparatively recent a portion of the punishment awarded to those found guilty of high treason. The correct order of the several punishments in such cases is drawing, hanging, and quartering. But today everyone inverts the order, putting hanging first. Even the old chroniclers sometimes make this mistake. The proper order is inverted by Capgrave, the Grey Friars’ Chronicler, and by Latimer in his third sermon. Owing to this mistake it has not infrequently been assumed that drawing was a process following hanging, and consisted in drawing out the bowels of the victim. In fact, drawing meant dragging along the ground. There were three kinds of drawing. In the vast majority of cases drawing means dragging to the place of execution, where hanging, disemboweling and quartering followed. But drawing sometimes means dragging till the sufferer died of the mere dragging. In some cases, drawing means tugging by horses in opposite directions till the sufferer was torn to pieces. It is not in all cases easy to say what punishment is indicated by the chroniclers, who use indifferently the words ” tractus,” ” detractus,” and ” distractus.”
Examples of the first kind of drawing, dragging to the foot of the gallows, for execution, are superabundant. There were degrees in this. In the earliest times the victim, stripped to his shirt, with his arms tied behind his back, was thus dragged along the rough and miry road — how rough and miry it is almost impossible for us at this day to realize. That any human being could survive such a drawing from Newgate to Tyburn is marvelous. But the way was not uncommonly longer, from the Tower to Tyburn, or even longer still, from Westminster to the Tower, and then from the Tower to Tyburn. In the case of William Longbeard, it would appear that sharp stones were placed on the road to be followed. But, apart from any such aggravation, the sufferer would probably in most cases be found at the end of the journey incapable of further suffering.
In 1295 Tuberville was drawn on a fresh ox-hide (sur un quir de bof fres), and one of the chroniclers expressly states that he was so drawn that he might not die too quickly. Something was also due to sentiments of humanity. There is a case recorded from which it is clear that “humanitarianism” was as odious to the judges of old time as it is today to the advocates of flogging. The case finds a record in the old books, because in it the judge evidently strained the law. A man was arraigned in 1340, before Justice Shard, on an indictment charging him with the murder of “his master.” It was found that murder had indeed been done by the man, who, however, had for a year ceased to be the murdered man’s servant. Shard inquired whether the servant had not a grudge against his master, and did he watch him? The questions were answered affirmatively, and Shard sentenced the man to death as guilty of petty treason — the punishment due to a servant who killed his master. Shard ordered that the man should be drawn by horses from the court in which he was tried, and forbade, under pain of imprisonment, that any friars or other persons should place a hurdle or anything else under him.
Whether owing to compassion or to the ferocity of judges who had discovered that the drawing as at first practiced rendered a victim insensible to the spectacle of the burning of his own bowels, it is certain that the ox-hide became an established institution, for in a case later than Turberville we hear of ” the common ox-hide.” This in its turn gave place to the hurdle, and this to the sledge — no doubt to the infinite disgust of judges like Shard.
The following is a case in which drawing was carried out till the death of the sufferers from mere dragging: —
There were frequent and bitter disputes between the citizens of Norwich and the prior. These disputes came to a head in 1271, when, in a quarrel at the gates of the priory, two citizens were killed. The townsmen flew to arms. The men of the priory retreated within the walls and prepared for a siege. The citizens, unable to force the gates of the priory, tore down the doors of the church. The prior threatened excommunication: the citizens demanded redress for the killing of two of their number. Finally, the prior put in execution his threat of excommunication: the citizens retorted by seizing provisions on their way to the priory. The prior now disposed his men in the belfry, and fighting went on for some days. At last, the citizens set fire to the belfry: the fire spread till almost all the conventual buildings were destroyed. The citizens rushed in, killing all, monks and laymen, they could find; they destroyed everything on which they could lay hands. The bishop and other priests gathered together outside Norwich, excommunicated nine men by name, and all others who had taken part in the matter. The case was grave: the king came down, and spent twelve days in investigating the case, with the aid of his justices, and forty knights as jurors. The finding was that the prior was the cause of the burning of the church, and the king therefore took the manors of the priory into his own hands. But a terrible penalty was exacted from the citizens, thirty-three of whom were put to death: some were hanged, some burnt, others were drawn by horses (equis distracti). What is meant in this case is revealed by one chronicler, who gives details of the drawing: “Attached to horses by the feet, thy were dragged through the streets of the city till, after great suffering, they ended their lives and expired.
The chroniclers record only, I think, one case in which it is made clear the victim was actually dragged to pieces, as we see in old pictures of the martyrdom of St. Hippolytus : —
“In 1238, King Henry III., being at Woodstock, a certain learned squire came to the court. He feigned madness, and demanded of the king that he should give up the crown. The king’s attendants sought to drive him away, but the king forbade this. In the middle of the night the man came again, bearing an open knife. He made his way into the king’s bed-chamber, but the king was not there, being with the queen. But one of the queen’s maids, Margaret Bisseth, was awake, and, sitting by the light of a candle, sang psalms (for she was a holy maid, and one devoted to the service of God). Margaret gave the alarm, and the man was secured. He declared that he had been sent by William Marsh on purpose to kill the king. On learning this, the king ordered that, as one guilty of an attempt to kill the king’s majesty, he should be torn by horses limb from limb, a terrible example, and a lamentable spectacle to all who should dare to plot such crimes. In the first place he was drawn asunder, then beheaded, and his body was divided into three parts, each of which was dragged through one of the greatest cities of England, and afterwards hung on the robbers’ gibbet.”
There has been much confusion as to the punishment of “drawing,” forming down to times comparatively recent a portion of the punishment awarded to those found guilty of high treason. The correct order of the several punishments in such cases is drawing, hanging, and quartering. But today everyone inverts the order, putting hanging first. Even the old chroniclers sometimes make this mistake. The proper order is inverted by Capgrave, the Grey Friars’ Chronicler, and by Latimer in his third sermon. Owing to this mistake it has not infrequently been assumed that drawing was a process following hanging, and consisted in drawing out the bowels of the victim. In fact, drawing meant dragging along the ground. There were three kinds of drawing. In the vast majority of cases drawing means dragging to the place of execution, where hanging, disemboweling and quartering followed. But drawing sometimes means dragging till the sufferer died of the mere dragging. In some cases, drawing means tugging by horses in opposite directions till the sufferer was torn to pieces
We come now to the question of the punishment for high treason, regarded as the greatest of all crimes, one therefore to be punished with all possible severity. Treason was elaborately denned by 25 Edward III., st. 5. c. 2, but the statute does not prescribe punishment for the offence. Treason seems to have been held to include a number of distinct crimes, to each of which a distinct punishment was allotted. This is the sentence when it had been settled in a form which, with an alteration to be noted presently, endured for centuries: —
1. That the aforesaid … be drawn to the gallows of …
2. He is there to be hanged by the neck, and let down alive.
3. His bowels are to be taken out,
4. And, he being alive, to be burnt.
5. His head is to be cut off.
6. His body is to tie divided into four parts,
7. And his head and quarters are to be placed where our lord the king shall direct.”
Torture and the peine forte et dure (French Law for “hard and forceful punishment”) “By the second half of the eighteenth century, educated people viewed the peine forte et dure as irrational and benighted- one of an increasingly discomforting constellation of legal practices that enlightened thinkers castigated as barbaric, such as the drawing and quartering of men, and the burning of women for treason.”
[1] Caraman, The Other Face: p. 241.
[2] Ibid. p. 242.
[3] Gerard, The Autobiography of a Hunted Priest.
[4] Marks, Alfred, Tyburn Tree: Its History and Annals. (London: Browm, Langham & CO, 1908).
[5] Low, Sidney J., and Pulling, F. S., eds. The Dictionary of English History. (London: Cassell and Company, Ltd., 1910), p. 950.
[6] McKenzie, Andrea, Tyburn’s Martyrs, (London: Continuum Books, 2007), p. 6.