hello I'm Matt Lewis and today I'm going to run you through some of the most brutal and terrifying forms of torture and execution that were used during the medieval period this might not be one for you if you're feeling a bit queasy we're going to get a little bit gory and a little bit graphic and look at the ways that people were put to death in the medieval period with the help of my little friend here the first one we're going to look at is perhaps one of the most famous and well-known but also one of the most brutal forms of execution and that's being hanged drawn and courted this was a punishment frequently used in cases of treason so this was considered the worst form of punishment for the worst form of crimes against the state I'm going to bring my little friend in here uh who I'm calling Joe Joe's going to have an incredibly bad day with us today and so being HD drawn and quoted comes in several stages as the name suggests drawing was actually originally the act of being carried to your place of execution they would frequently tie people's ankles to a horse and literally drag them through the streets they eventually changed this to to being carried on a a piece of wood because they found that people were banging their heads on stones and stuff on their way and were getting to their executions either unconscious or dead which was no use when you want people to be punished by what's going to face them the first part of the story though is the hanging and there are two ways that a criminal might be hanged one is where you have the the short shot drop and the aim of this is to break the neck at the bottom of the Fall so that the person would die immediately of a broken neck but the other way that you can hang someone is to allow them to Simply dangle and slowly strangle to death while they're being hanged and we do hear of cases during this period when members of the family would rush out from the crowd and they would jump off up and pull down on people's legs to try and hasten the end but the idea during this process is to hang someone and allow them to suffer but to also keep them conscious you need them to be awake for the rest of the process that they're going to go through one of the famous cases of execution by this method is William Wallace in 1305 the Scottish independence fighter uh who fought against Edward I first in the film Braveheart we see as part of the process him also being kind of raised up and and racked which was a separate form of punishment too and that was designed to stretch your ligaments and your muscles until they snapped and potentially popped bones out of their joints it's designed to to increase the level of pain but the Knack as part of a hanging drawing and quartering was to bring the person down while they were still conscious so let them suffer while they're being strangled but then bring them down while they're still conscious ready for the rest of what was to follow the drawing would then involve them being being normally tied onto a flat surface and then they would take something like a sharp knife or a hook I've only got a sword letter opener so this is going to have to do for Joe I'm afraid and they would open you up from below the chest all the way down to the groin through your stomach and the intention then would to be to pull your inside your stomach and your bowels out and you can survive this you can remain conscious throughout all of this pain in several stor we hear of a lighted brazer a fire being next to the person that's being executed so that their intestines and bowels are pulled out and thrown onto this fire next to them so imagine the last thing that you smell while you're still alive is your Consciousness drifts from you is your own inside burning we also hear of a case in one account of the the execution of Hugh despencer the younger in 1326 who underwent a very similar me method of execution but also had his genitals cut off and thrown into the fire next to him too just to add to the emasculating embarrassment and the pain of what was going on for him and the idea again is that you remain conscious throughout all of this suffering and pain and then that at some point you would pass out or you would die if you didn't then the Executioner had the option to take what would usually be an Axe and and behead the person and bring about the end of the EXE ution process there would be no more suffering for the person involved but their body would undergo the further embarrassment of being cut into quarters so they would literally be cut into four pieces and those would be distributed to meaningful places so William Wallace's body was sent to four different places in Scotland and this is meant to be a warning to anybody else thinking of rebelling that this is the Fate that you will face heads are often displayed on spikes on London Bridge so as you enter the capital city of London you can see there array the heads of all the traitors who've Fallen foul of the king the next gruesome form of execution that we're going to think about is impaling now this is something for which Vlad the Impaler is particularly famous in the mid-5th century in wakia around Transylvania uh interestingly there is also an English Impaler who will come to too there are several different ways that you can impale someone and this as a punishment has been going on around the world from Antiquity this is an old form of punishment and may well have been going on well into the 19th century before it stops being recorded as a form of execution there are different ways that you can punish someone so we're going to use our Spike that Joe came on you can impale people this way so transverse impaling and this would go kind of through the stomach and then you'd be allowed to dangle there effectively until you died and the idea here again is it's almost like a form of crucifixion but with the added pain of being impaled perhaps the most frequent form of impaling and the one favored by Vlad the Impaler who we're told used to sit and eat his meals while he watched fields of people being impaled in front of him he favored going up through the body and we're told in lots of sources that there there is a knack and art form to doing this so the first way that you might choose to do this is simply to jam the pole in and cause as much internal damage as possible with the intention of killing the victim immediately but people also develop this into something more cruel and perhaps more of an art form when the the pole would be inserted but then it would be slowly threaded through the body normally following the line of the spinal column to avoid the major internal organs and this way someone could be impaled all the way along their back have the spike come out through their throat or the the back of their their neck or somewhere like that and there were records of people surviving days while they were impaled in this fashion and so imagine the suffering the pain that you would be feeling as you're slowly kind of starving and dehydrating to death whilst having this Spike impaled in you as well Vlad used this initially as a tactic against his enemies to frighten his enemies he would line the road with the impaled captured of amongst his enemy but it was so effective Ive that he started using it against his own people too in order to enforce his own will and so he is credited with impaling thousands upon thousands of people the English impaler is a man named John tiptoft who was Earl of Worcester during the wars of the Roses uh and as part of the rebellions that were going on in 1469 and 1470 he was a high conable of England so responsible for delivering the king's Justice and some of those that rebelled against Edward IV were executed they were beheaded first but then their bodies were impaled and left as a sight and we're told that Stakes were driven into the ground and then the stakes were driven up through the buttocks to come out through the neck and then the heads were planted on top of those spikes and this is meant to add embarrassment and humiliation to the fact that these people have already been executed so England had its own Impaler not as prolific as Vlad was or as famous as Vlad was and so impaling is a a gruesome and brutal form of execution used by human beings against others from Antiquity from Millennia until into the 19th century another form of execution that was frequently used around the world was crushing so the Mongols were quite fond we're told of this form of execution as a way to kill someone without extracting blood without spilling their blood anywhere there are accounts across Asia of people being crushed by elephants for example in British law it was most often used as a way to extract a plea in court so it appears in the 1275 statute of Westminster during Edward I's Reign when he starts to to set down lots of laws and the reason for this is in order to execute someone and also to seize their property and all of that kind of thing you have to have been found guilty of a crime in a court that requires you to go to court and enter a plea of either guilty or not guilty in order for the trial to start and so a common way around this to avoid forfeiture of property was not to enter a plea in a court case to refuse to plead guilty or not guilty and then the case couldn't proceed against you even if you were executed you couldn't be deprived of your property so you could save your family from destitution in this manner and so they created this process by which people would be crushed in order to torture them into enter ing a plea in court and so most often they would place a small Stone a small rock under the back under the base of the spine the intention of that is to increase the pain and to potentially crack your spine eventually when the weight gets high enough and then they would take a board and place it on top of the the victim and that board would be slowly loaded up with more and more heavier and heavier ston wounds until you couldn't take anymore and the Hope was always that this wouldn't kill you the intention was for this to become so painful that you would eventually scream out that you were willing to enter a plea of guilty or not guilty one of the most famous cases of this happening actually comes after the medieval period in 1586 when a lady named Margaret Clyro refused to enter a plea in court and so she was sentenced to being crushed and they used her own front door which is a strange Twist on the punishment they took her front door off the hinges laid it laid her down put the front door on top of her and began to load up these stones and weights but it's even more gruesome than that the local executioners refused to enact this sentence and they had to bribe some homeless people some vagabonds to perform this act and it wasn't just because Margaret was a woman she was actually pregnant when they did this to her as well and Margaret managed to endure a huge weight being pressed on top of her until she did eventually die from this process she and her baby were both crushed to death because she refused to enter a plea in court so we're not done with Joe yet I'm afraid but as a a little break we're going to offer him what equated to something like medieval mercy and we're going to talk about beheading we have records of beheading as a form of humans killing other humans for Millennia this was going on in uh ancient times too in the Medieval World it becomes the standard method of execution for a member of the nobility so those convicted of treason would normally be sentence to being hanged drawn and courted but members of the nobility would expect that sentence to be commuted to beheading in which they would kneel down with their heads on a block like this and normally an axe again I've only got my sword letter opener so we're going to have to go for a full sword beheading here in the amberin style but they would effectively kneel over the block and the Executioner then would aim to swing down on the back of the neck and try to get through in one cut the idea was that this was a benefit of nobility and that it gave you a quicker cleaner less painful death and also publicly less embarrassing you would didn't have to endure the humiliation of being hanged drawn and CED I'm not sure I think there's too much Mercy in it but perhaps it's a a cleaner and better way to go if you have to be executed there are lots and lots of famous members of the nobility who are executed throughout the medieval period perhaps the most famous come later during the chuda period when Queen amberin is beheaded and also Margaret pole Henry VII's cousin uh who in her 60s is sentenced to be executed uh but which we're told is botched by an inexperienced executioner so that he takes several swipes of the axe in order to get all the way through her neck and so whatever Mercy there might have been in this form of beheading was probably lost in cases like Margaret Po's where it became pretty gruesome and torturous and beheading would continue being used as a method of execution for centuries after the medieval period the last time someone was beheaded by guillotine in France was as late as 1977 and there are still countries in the world today in which beheading is a legal form of capital punishment another form of punishment that seems pretty brutal but has been around for thousands and thousands of years is the wheel sometimes called the breaking wheel often now called St Katherine's wheel too and that refers to one of the the most famous victims of this punishment St Katherine who was executed using a breaking wheel for refusing to renounce her Christian faith and so became a saint and the firework the Catherine wheel is named after St Katherine's death on a wheel so next time you light one and watch it spin try and imagine what it's actually representing this was used across Europe uh in fact it was used in parts of Germany until as late as the 19th century as a form of execution and essentially what would happen is they would take something like a big cartwheel the victim would initially be laying down on the ground like this and The Executioner's job then was to begin breaking bones using the wheel hence the breaking wheel they would normally start by trying to break bones in The Shins in the legs so they would bang the wheel down on The Shins to break legs and the the point then was to try and move up the body smashing bones at various parts and depending on what crime the person had committed their sentence might dictate the number of smashes with the wheel the Rhythm and speed at which they should be delivered and the amount of damage that they were aiming to achieve but the point would be to break arms and legs and anything else along the way normally the idea is to keep the person alive there are cases in which the person would have been hit either on the chest or the head with the aim of killing them but the idea of keeping them alive was then that the wheel would be reused with their broken and mangled bodies the people would then effectively be woven into a wheel and so this becomes almost then like a form of crucifixion for them and their bent limbs are kind of forced through all of the spokes and they're spread out and left on this wheel they would normally then be left to die there are some instances when the Executioner was given the discretion to strangle them or behead them there are cases when the Weir is set up and a fire is lit beneath it so that the broken person is then burned to death but in most cases they would be allowed to die slowly and painfully over a period of days with their mangled limbs wedged through the spokes of a wheel poor old Joe might feel like he needs a bit of a rest now uh and he might hope that this is for a nice warm bath for him and in some ways it is but probably not in the ways that he's hoping it might be Boy boiling to death is another form of execution that's been used by humans for thousands and thousands of years uh in the Holy Roman Empire you could be boiled to death in hot oil as a punishment for the most extreme cases of murder but also for coin forgery which is a strange equivalent of crimes in England it was very very rare there are cases of people being boiled to death in Scotland but in England we have one particular case in 153 1 Henry VII discovers that a cook a man named Richard ruse had tried to poison a bishop and had in fact killed people in the process and so in response to this Henry thought a fitting and poetic form of punishment would be to boil the cook alive in one of his own cauldrons and so he was placed over a hot fire submerged in the water and effectively just allowed to boil to death in the same year Henry also made this the punishment in statu law for poisoners that they should be boiled to death although that doesn't seem to have lasted very long or been made use of very much like many of these other forms of punishment this is something that Fizzles out over the centuries after the medieval period albeit we hear stories from as late as 1980 to 2000 of rebels in Peru being boiled to death as a form of punishment for their Uprising humans have always found ways to be cruel to whether humans they don't seem to be getting much better another fairly common form of medieval execution is soaring which is exactly what it sounds like this had been used again for Millennia up until this point we know for example that Emperor Caligula in Rome reportedly enjoyed watching soaring in action in the same way as Vlad the Impaler was said to sit at feasts while he was in fields of people being impaled with told kigia used to like to eat his meals while he was watching people being swn there's a couple of different ways that you can do this so you again you can soore across the middle in a magician style but there's no trick you're just going to get Sor in half but perhaps the most common way that this was done in medieval Europe was often to to hang the victim upside down by the feet and I'm sure you can tell where this is going you then get your saw slowly down between their legs and from their groin you start to soore vertically down their torso until you literally get all the way through and cut them into two pieces they did Perfect The Art of making this last longer and hurt more by working out the point at which you could stop soaring in someone's stomach and then allow them to hang there and suffer for potentially hours until they bled or died of shock but again this is a pretty gruesome way to go imagine his hearing that soore cutting through your bones feel it ripping through your skin and feel the blood rushing all the way down your own face as you're slowly cut into two by a saw perhaps one of the most painful and cruel forms of execution that we're going to talk about is the one that Joe is going to enure now and this is being burned burned at the stake during the medieval period again burning as a form of execution has been around for thousands and thousands of years during the medieval period it becomes particularly associated with cases of heresy um so religious fallings out with the church the person would be literally tied to a stake and firewood would be stacked up around their feet the P would be lit and they would just be allowed to burn to death from the feet upwards imagine that searing pain that you feel you quite possibly pass out from shock before you actually died from being burned to death but it would be an agonizing way to spend your final few minutes the first case that we have of this being used for witchcraft in Paris comes in 1390 when a lady is tried for witchcraft and burned at the stake as a witch one of the most famous cases is possibly Joan of AR in 1431 who is burned at the stake as a heretic because the English are Keen to paint her as in League with the devil rather than receiving Visions from God that favored the French and this would be a crowd spectacle again people would gather to watch this happen we know that a large crowd turned out for Joan of arc's burning at the stake for example imagine the smoke and the smell and possibly the screams of the people being executed and In Jonah AR's case we also know that her ases were then gathered up and thrown in the river sen to prevent any of them being used as holy relics afterwards and this idea of heresy really plays into the idea of Witchcraft too in the 16th and 17th century in particular as witch hunts become more common burning at the stake is a punishment used for witches and the idea really has its roots in the Bible that you purify sin through fire that you have to destroy the evil alt together and the best way to do that is to see the body consumed by Flames another form of execution that's been around for thousands of years and another one that is particularly cruel and painful is being flayed alive so this is being skin so this is while you're conscious having the skin removed from your body so the person would be attached to some kind of frame often and then they may prepare them in various ways to loosen the skin you could add hot boiling water was seen as a way to loosen the skin and make this a little bit easier but the job then is to peel the person's skin off quite often to try and keep it in one piece as much as possible so you would use a sharp knife under the skin start at the extremities and you would begin cutting the skin and peeling it away and the idea again here is that you would be conscious throughout all of this and that you would remain conscious for as long as possible you'd probably again pass out from the shock or you die from blood loss or something like that St Bartholomew is perhaps one of the most famous victims to have undergone this there are lots of images of Bartholomew uh who was one of Jesus's disciples who was skinned alive there are lots of images of him holding his skin up as a symbol of the fact that he was flayed perhaps one of the most famous cases in the Medieval World of faying was that of the young man responsible for the death of rich the lionart Richard the first of England Richard was shot in the shoulder by a crossbow bolt and the wound eventually turned gangrenous and killed him while he was on his deathbed they found the young man it's variously described as a boy or a young man in the sources but they found the young man who had shot that crossbow bolt and they brought him before Richard Richard said that he should be forgiven and that she should be given money and released and set free but once the king died his men went and found this young man dragged him back to the English camp and they fled him alive they removed his skin as an act of punishment for having murdered their King as they viewed it this next uh one is kind of not so medieval but I I really wanted to lean into the idea that the medieval people weren't the only ones who could be brutal so this is widely known as the wooden horse quite often called a Spanish donkey and that's because it comes into use during the Spanish Inquisition when this was a way in which they would torture people to get them to confess to heresy and I imagine you can guess where this is going to go it's slightly terrifying how many of these forms of punishment and execution begin for men with the groin this would effectively involve the man being lowered onto a pointed piece of wood May well then have weights attached to his ankles and his feet and the design is to pull him down further and further and this would leave you possibly unable to walk if you were on here for several hours I mean it might leave you unable to have children certainly leave you unable to want to have children for a little while we hear this torture being used during the US Civil War so quite late on we hear about captured soldiers being forced to spend hours and hours of their days sat on these wooden horses until they were unable to walk when they got off and had to crawl back to their cells to try and sleep enough to have to face this again the next day so if we think medieval people were cruel and brutal they certainly weren't the only ones people have been finding ways to hurt people in novel and ever more painful ways since the beginning of time I hope you found this survey of some of the ways in which people in the medieval world were tortured and executed interesting it's fascinating how many of them have long histories both before and after the medieval period anyway I'm going to take Joe away to a quiet and room now and allow him some time to get over his ordeal Poor Joe I've been Matt Lewis co-host of History hits gone medieval podcast you can catch brand new episodes every Tuesday and Friday please like this video And subscribe to history hits YouTube channel to make sure you get more of the greatest content from history