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The "Rats Dungeon", or "Dungeon of the Rats", was a feature of the Tower of London alleged by Catholic writers from the Elizabethan era. "A cell below high-water mark and totally dark" would draw in rats from the River Thames as the tide flowed in. Prisoners would have their "alarm excited" and in some instances, have "flesh ... torn from the arms and legs".
In England, statute 22 passed in 1532 by Henry VIII, made boiling a legal form of capital punishment. It began to be used for murderers who used poisons after the Bishop of Rochester's cook, Richard Rice , gave a number of people poisoned porridge , resulting in two deaths in February 1532. [ 5 ]
In modern times, it is considered in most criminal justice systems that non-human animals lack moral agency and so cannot be held culpable for an act. The archives on animal cases are spotty. France has preserved significant documentation, but, more generally, extant documentation does not permit a comprehensive analysis of the prevalence and ...
The punishment consisted of being sewn up in a leather sack, with an assortment of live animals including a dog, snake, monkey, and a chicken or rooster, and then being thrown into water. The punishment may have varied widely in its frequency and precise form during the Roman period. For example, the earliest fully documented case is from ca ...
Execution wheel (German: Richtrad) with underlays, 18th century; on display at the Märkisches Museum, Berlin The breaking wheel, also known as the execution wheel, the Wheel of Catherine or the (Saint) Catherine('s) Wheel, was a torture method used for public execution primarily in Europe from antiquity through the Middle Ages up to the 19th century by breaking the bones of a criminal or ...
Other times the dungeons under the trap-doors included pits of water where the victim was thrown to drown after a lengthy torture session in the chamber above. [ 6 ] In Peru, the torture chambers of the Spanish Inquisition were specifically constructed with thick walls so that the screams of the victims could not penetrate them and no sound ...
Jack Black was a rat-catcher and mole destroyer from Battersea, England during the middle of the 19th century. [ 1 ] [ 2 ] At the time, England was ravaged by a massive population of rats that disrupted crops and spread disease, and Black's rat killing abilities made him a minor celebrity and Queen Victoria 's official rat-catcher.
To be hanged, drawn and quartered was a method of torturous capital punishment used principally to execute men convicted of high treason in medieval and early modern Britain and Ireland. The convicted traitor was fastened to a hurdle, or wooden panel, and drawn behind a horse to the place of execution, where he was then hanged (almost to the ...