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During the past few days, for various reasons, I have been researching and reading with interest some accounts of various forms of capital punishment which have taken place over the years since man became civilised…

As a result, below is an account of the Top Five Most Gruesome.

It must be noted, however, that some forms of capital punishment are practiced today. I’d like to go on record as a student of legal theory; a firm believer in Human Rights; and having spent much time considering justice: I believe there is no acceptable justification for the taking of another’s life.

Slow Slicing

The Chinese, not to be outdone by the ancient Greeks, or the British through the middle ages, invented the particularly chillingly named practice of “Slow Slicing” – “Ling Chi” or “Leng T’che” – which has also been translated in the following less than pleasant ways:

• “The Slow Process”; or
• “Death by a thousand cuts”; or, the crowd favourite
• “The lingering death”.

The method?

The executioner would

“grasp… handfuls from the fleshy parts of the body such as the thighs and breasts slices them away… the limbs are cut off piecemeal at the wrists and ankles, the elbows and knees, shoulders and hips. Finally the condemned is stabbed to the heart and the head is cut off” Sir Henry Norman, The People and Politics of the Far East

Though there is some argument over whether mutilation took place before or after death, it is certain that the Chinese practiced slow slicing for around a thousand years, right up until the early 20th Century.

Boiling Alive

Being boiled alive is a particularly horrific death. There are a number of examples of this punishment in practice, not least under Henry VIII of England who passed an Act, in 1531 (which ran until 1547) allowing boiling as a form of Capital Punishment.

Richard Roose, a cook who had added poison to food which had killed two and injured several others (a treason case), was the first to be boiled alive under this Act (indeed, the Act was made with him in mind). Two other people boiled alive under Henry’s Act were also guilty of poisoning, and it would seem this punishment was used primarily for those guilty of similar offences.

The method?

According to William Andrews, in his book, Old Time Punishments:

The “Chronicle of the Grey Friars of London” (published by the Camden Society) has an account of a case at Smithfield, in which a man was fastened to a chain and let down into boiling water several times until he was dead.

Harsh.

Hanging

This timeless classic is still prevalent today. Notable recently as the punishment employed upon one Saddam Hussein, hanging has moved from being a particularly slow and painful death, which may or may not take place very publicly, to being a slightly less slow and painful death, which may or may not take place very publicly.

There are four different methods of hanging:

• The Short Drop – where the condemned is placed on a vehicle (i.e. a horse and cart) or some other object (i.e. a stool, or box) which is then removed, leaving the unfortunate to die from from strangulation. In English systems, this form of hanging took place until the 1850s.
• Suspension Hanging – instead of lowering the ‘floor,’ the gallows are raised in suspension hanging, either working on a pulley system, or some other mechanism. The results are largely similar to the Short Drop.
• Standard Drop – replacing the Short Drop from the 1850s, this method of hanging, where the condemned were dropped from a height of between four and six feet was considered more humane as a broken neck would be effected leading to paralysis or immediate unconsciousness.
• Long Drop – This variation of the Standard Drop was devised by William Marwood in 1872 and took into account the victim’s bodyweight in order to best devise sufficient force to ensure the neck would break. One unfortunate side-effect of the increase in height (sometimes up to ten feet) was that several victims were decapitated as a result.

Oops.

Brazen Bull

The Ancient Greeks, seemingly, had a lot of time to come up with obscure methods of distinguishing life. A couple of them came up with The Brazen Bull, which was a life size cast of a bull made out of bronze, with a little door cut out of one side, into which the offender would be placed. A fire would be lit under this contraption until the metal “glowed yellow hot” with the net result of effectively baking the hapless miscreant.

Ouch.

As a finishing flourish, this contraption featured several pipes, or ‘horns’, at the bull’s ‘mouth’, through which the cries of the victim could be amplified for the witnesses pleasure and amusement.

Poetic justice was meted out liberally, though, when Phalaris, the despot who commissioned the Brazen Bull (and interestingly, also killed the inventor, Perillos, by throwing him from the top of a hill, thus proving his somewhat macabre hobby of finding interesting ways to murder people) was himself baked alive in a Brazen Bull after he was overthrown.

Pressing

Also known as the less euphamistic title “crushing”, “pressing” is the capital punishment of literally compressing someone to death in some way or another.

Two particularly novel ways were devised, for different purposes:

Crushing by Elephant

You want to crush something, right? So what do you do? You guessed it… get an elephant to stand on it!

Inventive, yet painful.

That hurts, by the way.

Pressing by piling on rocks

Though not strictly speaking a form of capital punishment, this could often have the same results, only without the need for the time-wasting bureaucracy of a trial.

Commonwealth jurisdictions would use this method to obtain pleas from accuseds who “stood mute”.

If one took the decision not to enter a plea, the powers that be would place larger and larger rocks onto a person’s chest until they were prepared to do so. Eventually, the rocks would be so large that the person would suffocate, or, in exceptional circumstances, their rib-cage might collapse.

They called this practice by the French name “peine fort et dure” which literally translates as “hard and forceful punishment” – and the practice was not removed from English law until 1772. Hard and forceful indeed.

In conclusion, I reckon the Brazen Bull is the most imaginative and macabre, though I wouldn’t like any done to me. A pretty harsh environment, Ancient Greece, by all accounts.

If you have details of any more brutal punishments, be sure to mention them in the comments box – I might even add them to this very list.