Tortures




Burning

It was once commonly believed that a witch's power could be nullified by blooding her or by destroying her blood in a fire, hence the practice of burning at the stake. Sometimes uncooperative witches were burned with green wood, which took longer to kill them. Jacques de Molay, the Grand Master of the Templars, was "slow roasted on a spit".
By far the most well-known punishment for witches was death by burning, a fate reserved also for heretics. Perhaps the most famous death by burning was the execution of Joan d'Arc for heresy.
St. Augustine (354-430) declared that heretics, pagans, and Jews would burn forever in eternal fire unless saved by the Catholic Church. Partially as a result of this declaration, victims were burned to death in order to give them a taste of what was coming.
In France, Germany, and Scotland, expenses concurred by the trial, the stay in jail, and the burning were billed to the victim's estate or relatives.
The burning of a witch was usually a great public occasion. The execution took place shortly after the sentencing, just long enough to hire an executioner, construct the execution site and gather the fuel. In Scotland, a witch burning was preceded by days of fasting and solemn preaching. The witch was strangled first, and then her corpse--or sometimes her unconscious or semiconscious body--was tied to a stake or dumped into a tar barrel and set afire. If the witch was not dead and managed to get out of the flames, onlookers shoved her back in. Records of trials in Scotland report that burning a witch consumed 16 loads of peat plus wood and coal


The Ducking Stool

The ducking stool was a punishment which most often befell women prisoners. Grossly unpleasant, and often fatal, the woman would be strapped into a seat which hung from the end of a free-moving arm. The seat and the woman would be dunked into the local river or pond. "It was up to the operators of the stool as to how long she remained under the water." Many elderly women were killed by the shock of the cold water.
The ducking stool was used in America for witches, and in Britain for the punishment of minor offendors, prostitutes, and scolds.


tortureImpalement

This was one of the most revolting punishments ever devised by the human imagination and even in those days was hardly ever used. The penal code of Charles V did not make provision for it. In the manual Punishments of Life and Limb..., we find the following: 'In barbaric regions, particularly in Algiers, Tunis, Tripoli, and Salee, where inveterate pirates dwell, if a man is thought guilty of treason, he is impaled. This is done by inserting a sharply pointed stake into his posterior, which then is forced through his body, emerging through the head, sometimes through the throat. This stake is then inverted and planted in the ground, so that the wretched victims, as we may well imagine, live on in agony for some days before expiring. . . . It is said that nowadays not so much trouble is taken with impalement as once the case, but such criminals simply have a short spit thrust into their anus and are left to crawl thus upon the earth until they die.' We may well imagine that such a barbaric punishment was calculated to arouse sympathy for the tormented victim among the spectators of an execution. This was no doubt the reason it was not generally employed".

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