It fell to the Scots in the 16 th century to introduce a punishment arguably even more bizarre and barbaric than those being used south of the border.īeing ‘broken on the wheel’ was a form of both torture and punishment adopted from continental Europe. Otherwise they would die from smoke inhalation or in agony from burns.Īlice Arden, who masterminded the notorious conspiracy to murder her husband Thomas, the former mayor of Faversham, Kent, would be burned at the stake on 14 March, 1551 in Canterbury. If they were lucky, those condemned to be burnt at the stake were strangled first, by having a cord tightened around their neck, then left to the flames. Hanging was considered too mealy mouthed a form of execution. In fact, in a sign of just how unequally women were treated at the time, this type of crime was actually considered more heinous than other types of murder and branded ‘petty treason’. Often associated with witches (though most of those were actually hanged), this gruesome form of execution was also used for murderers, specifically women who had killed their husbands or servants who killed their masters or mistresses. The burning of Latimer and Ridley, from John Foxe’s book (1563). In this way the families of murder suspect Lodowick Greville (1589) and Margaret Clitherow (1586), arrested for harbouring Catholic priests, kept their inheritance. Although they would die of course, these unfortunate souls hoped to avoid the confiscation of lands that usually followed a conviction by the courts. Incredibly, because of another legal loophole, some people still opted for it. Even at the time it was acknowledged by Sir Thomas Smith that being crushed like this was ‘one of the cruellest deaths that may be’.
But by Tudor times this had morphed into a practice even more ghastly – being pressed to death.Īlso known as ‘peine forte et dure’ it involved the placing of heavy stones on to the accused until they either decided to make a plea or expired under the weight. Sometimes those who tried to avoid justice this way were simply starved in prison until they changed their minds. We think of legal technicalities as something modern, but in Tudor times you could not face a jury unless you entered a plea of guilty or not guilty. He was a Lambeth cook accused of serving poisoned gruel to two people in a botched attempt to assassinate John Fisher, the Bishop of Rochester, who himself survived. In 1531, paranoid about being poisoned himself, Henry VIII forced through the Acte of Poysoning in response to the case of Richard Roose. However, when compared to some other methods of Tudor execution, it was probably still preferable.
They often ended in strangulation, rather than a broken neck, resulting in a protracted death.
#Torture methods used by serial killers professional#
Hanging was the usual punishment for serious crime, including murder, in Tudor England but it could often be a messy affair.Ĭontemporary writer William Harrison might have assured us that those who were hanged went ‘cheerfully to their deaths’, yet executions were amateurish compared to those performer by professional hangmen of later centuries. Here are 5 of the most petrifying execution methods employed by the authorities in the 16th century.
Life was often nasty, brutish and painful for criminals in Tudor England, with a host of fiendish punishments dished out by the state to wrong-doers, including some new methods of execution dreamt up by King Henry VIII himself.
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