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

such a device slightly earlier, and only seven years later a similar machine was in use in Ireland. It did not take long for the English to catch on and by the middle of the 1300s a beheading machine was in constant use in the Yorkshire town of Halifax. There, on market days, the excitement of buying, selling and general merrymaking was added to by the steady chop, chop, chop of the Halifax gibbet.

     

     
Here we find two illustrations of early medieval beheading machines sometimes known as ‘fallbrett’ (or falling board). These ancestors of the guillotine were slow and gruesome affairs which took a distant third to the guillotine or the headsman’s axe in terms of efficiency. As the ‘board’ would frequently chew slowly through the victim’s neck, it was hoped that the first hit might paralyze the condemned to keep them still throughout the process.
     
    We know that as late as the mid-sixteenth century, the Halifax gibbet was still in use because in 1565 the Earl of Morton, regent of Scotland, watched it at work and was impressed enough with its efficiency that he carried the idea back across the border with him and had a similar device built in Scotland. Adding a novel twist to what could well have become stale entertainment, if a man stole a farm animal the object of his heist was used to haul in the rope attached to the Halifax gibbet’s blade. When the axe, or blade, was drawn to the proper height, the rope was released and thus even God’s lesser creatures could extract vengeance on their abductors. Occasionally, however, animals wound up on the wrong end of the rope. Literally. Throughout Europe, if an animal attacked a human it could be tried and, if found guilty, duly executed for its ‘crime’. In France, in 1386, a sow convicted of biting a child was dressed in women’s clothing and hanged. Only three years later a horse was hanged for kicking a man. So it was that the public execution of criminals, both human and animal, became as much a form of public entertainment as a judicial punishment.

     
Saxon flagellation. From the Harleian MS. 603.
     
    If public humiliation and execution failed to change the habits of medieval Europe, the Black Death (1347–50) changed things beyond all imagining. As two out of every five individuals, regardless of age, sex or social class, fell victim to the ubiquitous and pervasive disease, the political and social glue that held society together slowly dissolved. Fields and shops went untended, cities and towns became mass graveyards and crime skyrocketed. Groups of religious fanatics accepted this as God’s punishment on a sinful mankind and took it upon themselves to expiate the sins of the world by punishing themselves for all of humanity’s wrongdoing. These were the flagellants, and they wandered across the face of this devastated world, whipping themselves mercilessly, in the hope that their pain might ensure the salvation of all Christian souls at the final day of judgment.
    If the flagellants and their self-imposed punishment had no lasting effect on the social order, the Black Death certainly did. As civilisation buried the dead and tried to reassemble the shattered pieces of civilisation, it became obvious that there were no longer enough workers (either simple peasants or skilled craftsmen) to fill the endless number of job openings. And those who did remain alive quickly realised that they could virtually name their own price for their services. Terrified of the effects of unchecked inflation and of losing their hold on power, kings, noblemen and local authorities scrambled to keep the lower classes, and the economy, under control. Laws were passed declaring that wages and prices were to be frozen at pre–1346 levels. All able-bodied men and women under the age of sixty were required to take any job offered to them and anyone demanding, or paying, increased wages was to be fined or imprisoned. If a worker left one job to seek a higher-paying one