The Big Book of Pain: Torture & Punishment through History by Mark P Donnelly, Daniel Diehl

charges were chained, face down, to a dungeon floor and fed a small piece of stale bread one day and given a small cup of brackish water the next. If a week or so of this failed to loosen their tongues, they were pressed beneath an increasing amount of weight; they either lodged a plea or were slowly crushed to death.

     
Here we see an image of three poor souls being hanged, drawn and quartered. On the right we see the hanging (though he will be cut down while still alive), then the drawing out of the entrails, evisceration and castration is shown center. This would be followed by decapitation and then the ‘quartering’ of the body into segments which would be boiled in tar for preservation (shown left) to be displayed in different parts of the kingdom as a warning to others. Note how the executioner with the knife holds up the heart of the victim for the approval and satisfaction of the assembled crowd.
     
    Known as peine forte et dure (long-lasting, intense pain) this new approach to juris prudence was not only like Edward himself – strong and hard – but became the standard, judicial operating procedure for the next three centuries. It must be understood that such measures were not considered torture. Torture was technically illegal in England under the terms of Magna Charta. Being chained to a dungeon floor, fed garbage and slowly pressed to death was just a method of convincing a person to make a plea – after all, if a person was innocent, why would they hesitate to plead their case? For all his harsh treatment of accused felons, Edward was truly and deeply concerned with the corruption permeating the English court system. The main charge levied against local judges was that they arrested innocent men, threw them into prison and only released them after they had paid an exorbitant fine. It was a natural outgrowth of the eminently profitable outlawry system. When witnesses could not be found to support the system’s pre-determined verdicts, totally uninvolved people were dragged off the streets and tortured until they offered evidence against innocent people and complete strangers. Juries were ‘packed’ with friends of the judges and sheriffs who shared in the ill-gotten booty of rigged trials. The predictable result of such corruption was that virtually no one had the least respect for either the law or those who enforced it; when juries were not coerced into bringing in the verdict, which the judge or sheriff wanted, they routinely let guilty men go free simply because they hated the system more than they hated the criminals. Furious that his kingdom had become so debased, Edward threw out everyone accused of bribe-taking, coercion, blackmail and influence peddling and replaced them only to find that after a few years the new officials had become just as corrupt as the old ones.

     
This image shows the process of pressing ( peine forte et dure ) but does little to convey the true agony of the experience. The victim here seems almost relaxed. But in reality as more and more weight is added it becomes increasingly difficult to breathe. Eventually the ribcage will collapse and the lungs will be compressed resulting in slow suffocation.
     
    There were places, outside England, where the system ran more efficiently; if not the judicial system itself, then at least the mechanism for dealing with lawbreakers. In twelfth-century Russia anyone tortured without the specific approval of the local prince was allowed redress for his pain and was even able to sue for compensation; the moral being that if you wanted to torture someone you had to go through proper channels first. By 1300, those mechanical innovators, the Germans, had invented a machine capable of lopping off a criminal’s head with frightening efficiency. What this guillotine-like device looked like is unknown, but in its first year it was used to cleanly, swiftly and bloodily do away with five men in the town of Zittau. Naples, in Italy may have used