The Dark Side of Medieval England

Summary

After Dark: Myths, Misdeeds & the Paranormal
Episode Title: The Dark Side of Medieval England
Date: August 25, 2025
Hosts: Dr. Anthony Delaney & Dr. Maddy Pelling
Guest: Matt Lewis, historian and co-host of Gone Medieval

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Episode Overview

This episode of After Dark plunges into the grim realities of medieval England’s most notorious tortures and executions. Hosts Maddy Pelling and Anthony Delaney invite Matt Lewis to uncover the methods, motivations, and social context behind infamous punishments like hanging, drawing and quartering, impalement, the rack, and more. Through chilling stories, historical analysis, and thoughtful discussion, they challenge popular myths and illuminate the complex meanings of violence in medieval justice.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

The Spectacle of Medieval Punishment

• Purpose of Brutal Justice:

  • The most severe punishments, such as being hanged, drawn and quartered, were primarily for high treason and designed both as a deterrent and a spectacular display of state power.
  • Matt Lewis: “The point of this was that it was for the worst crime… it needed the worst punishment that they could come up with.” (05:19)

• Public Display:

  • Punishments were staged in public to maximize humiliation, shame, and deterrence. The procession through town (being ‘drawn’) was as much about spectacle as punishment.
  • Rotten vegetables, feces, and public jeering were all part of the ordeal.
  • Matt Lewis: “You would be drawn through the town… as many people as possible can see your shame and your embarrassment at the public nature of your punishment.” (06:44)

Anatomy of Hanging, Drawing & Quartering

• Stages of Punishment:

  1. Drawing: Originally being dragged to the execution site, later modified for maximum suffering and spectacle.
  2. Hanging: Prolonged strangulation, not instantaneous neck-breaking.
  3. Disembowelment and Dismemberment: Incision, removal, and burning of internal organs, occasionally while the victim was still alive; beheading and then quartering the body.
  4. Public Dissemination: Body parts displayed in different regions as ongoing warnings.

• Religious and Symbolic Significance:

  • Punishments reflected and compounded cultural anxieties, including the need for wholeness of body for resurrection.
  • Emasculation—removal of genitalia—was used for added humiliation, sometimes tied to accusations of heresy or same-sex relations, as in the case of Hugh Despenser.
  • “His penis and testicles were cut off because he was a heretic and a sodomite.” (15:47)

• Notorious Cases:

  • Guy Fawkes: Noted for trying to escape extended torture by leaping to break his own neck at execution.
  • William Wallace & Hugh Despenser: Heads and body parts sent to significant locations for maximum effect and as stark reminders.

Impalement in Medieval England

• Origins and Methods:

  • While more famous in Eastern Europe (e.g., Vlad the Impaler), impaling had occasional use in England.
  • The case of “John the Impaler,” or John Tiptoft, who impaled corpses post-mortem for public display as a warning.
  • Matt Lewis: “It’s the only example that I know of people being impaled in medieval England. And it was done to them after they were already dead. But nevertheless, we do have our very own John the Impaler.” (27:13)

• Purpose of Impaling:

  • Designed less to kill than to horrify observers—sometimes the impaled lived for days.
  • “...presumably paralyzed, but you’re essentially just then starving to death and dehydrating to death or dying of exposure.” (21:20)
  • Vlad Tepes used forests of impaled corpses to frighten entire armies.

Torture to Extract Information

• The Rack – Fact vs. Fiction:

  • Contrary to dramatic portrayals, torture (especially the rack) was not routine in medieval England.
  • The rack required special royal permission, as in the case of Guy Fawkes.
  • “Torture wasn’t something that was widely used during the period… it was illegal, really, it wasn’t the done thing.” (31:33)
  • Victims were stretched until dislocation and damage forced confessions, but authorities were wary of unreliable information.

• Alternative Punishments:

  • Blinding, mutilation, and public shaming were self-contained punishments with ritual significance.
  • Sometimes, torture was avoided if authorities believed the victim would die before providing useful information.

Reliability of Confessions under Torture

• Medieval Perspective:
  • Extracting confessions was often seen as necessary, especially for treason; yet there was some awareness that torture produced unreliable admissions.
  • “They did have this understanding that information isn’t going to be reliable… but it was legitimate as an ultimate step.” (38:30)
  • The religious ethos sometimes conflicted with the routine infliction of harm.

Execution, Torture, and Punishment: The Spectrum

• Nuanced Application:
  • The medieval justice system wielded a diverse array of punishments, often carefully calibrated (“the punishment ought to fit the crime”).
  • Examples: Cutting off hands for coiners; blinding heirs to disable their claim to the throne; escalation to gory executions for treason.
  • Public perception of medieval violence may be distorted by the extreme (but rare) cases that have survived in culture and memory.
  • “We have a view of them as being slightly barbaric and maybe a little bit backward, which is unfair… they just lived in a different world.” (43:47)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On deterrence and state power:

  • “What they’re suffering is a lesson to everybody else who might be thinking about doing what they’re doing. Really, the impact is meant to be on the crowd.”
    — Matt Lewis (08:29)

• On the psychological dance of torture:

  • “It’s quite a dynamic scene, isn’t it? It’s a bit of a psychological struggle between the person being tortured and the person doing the torture.”
    — Maddy Pelling (37:47)

• On spectacle and fame:

  • “There’s something there that people would have been drawn to these events to see these famous people as much as to see them be killed by the state, I guess.”
    — Maddy Pelling (17:13)

• On the rarity of torture:

  • “That’s a real new nugget of information for me as well. But here’s the final question before we wrap up…”
    — Anthony Delaney (44:12)

• Closing hypothetical:

  • “You have to choose from crushing, the rack, impaling, or being hanged, drawn and quartered… which are you going to choose as your form of punishment?”
    — Anthony Delaney (45:10)

• Comedic relief amid the grim:

  • “I often think about Margaret Clithero, who is crushed, I think, in the 16th century in York on the Ouse Bridge. And I think she’s crushed under the weight of her own door. I mean, it’s insulting.”
    — Maddy Pelling (46:16)

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Timestamps for Major Topics

| Timestamp | Topic | |-----------|-----------------------------------------| | 03:38 | Introduction to torture & executions | | 05:01 | Hanging, drawing, quartering explained | | 09:31 | Public spectacle and deterrence | | 10:03 | Quartering and significance | | 15:12 | Sexual humiliation & ritual symbolism | | 19:59 | Impaling: Vlad & John the Impaler | | 30:12 | The rack & extraction of confessions | | 37:47 | Psychology of torture & truthfulness | | 41:36 | Justice spectrum: punishment, torture | | 45:10 | Which punishment would you pick? | | 46:16 | Margaret Clithero and crushing |

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Episode Takeaways

• Medieval punishments were carefully staged performances, intended as much for the living audience as for the condemned.
• While the era’s violence can seem appalling today, many punishments were rare, purpose-driven, and embedded in cultural, religious, and legal contexts.
• There is a crucial distinction between torture (to extract information), punishment (to fit specific crimes), and spectacular executions (often political in aim).
• Misconceptions, heavily influenced by modern depictions, obscure the complexity and infrequency of torture in medieval England.
• The conversation ends with a darkly humorous “would you rather?” about preferred medieval punishments, highlighting both the horror and the enduring fascination with this period.

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Further Listening:
Check out Matt Lewis’s podcast, Gone Medieval, for more deep dives into Britain’s shadowy past.

Contact:
Email your thoughts or suggest episodes to [e-mail]

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Transcript

[A]

Hello everyone, it's us, your hosts, Maddy Pelling and Anthony Delaney.

[B]

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[A]

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[A]

Hello and welcome to After Dark. Before we get into today's episode all about medieval torture, a warning. No surprises for guessing that this is grim stuff and not for younger listeners or or indeed the faint hearted. There's going to be descriptions of torture, execution and generally stomach turning chat. So listener beware and continue only if you dare. Also, we recorded this episode a little while ago and you might spot that there are not the usual dramatic scripted sections between the chat that we usually have. But don't worry, it's a great episode and the beloved dramatised sections aren't cancelled. Last thing, it's been a while since we've reminded you that you can get in touch with us to tell us how much you like the show. Give us ideas and suggestions for episodes and anything else you want to share with us, you can email after darkistoryhit.com okay, that's it. On with the show.

[B]

Hello and welcome to After Dark. Myths, Misdeeds and the Paranormal. My name is Dr. Anthony Delaney.

[A]

And I'm Dr. Maddy Pelling.

[B]

And today we are talking about one of the most light hearted subjects you could possibly imagine. Torture and brutal execution. Now, in medieval England, these things were used to instill a sense of fear and that fear was used to maintain social control and assert power. And these extreme methods were used to deter crimes, obviously to display authority and to extract confessions.

[A]

To list them is to immediately conjure a very dark image of the medieval world. We're talking impaling the rack to be hanged, drawn and quartered. But what did these processes actually mean, look and feel like, why were they used? And was this all as grim or grimmer than we imagine today? Our guest today is someone who drips facts and grisly stories about medieval torture. It is the brilliant Matt Lewis, historian and co host of our sister podcast Gone Medieval. Matt, welcome to After Dark.

[D]

Thank you very much for having me. I'm granted glad to be able to bring a bit of light to you and talk about torture and ways to murder people.

[B]

Matt, how do you feel about dripping fun facts and grisly stories? Is the dripping inconvenient or is that just something you've become accustomed to?

[D]

I guess it's better than being grisly.

[B]

Sure, let's go with that. Talk to us then about specifically in this instance, hanging, drawing and quartering. It's something we've all heard about. I think people are very familiar with the term. But actually in terms of the process, what did that look like in medieval England?

[D]

It could look like several different things. But to answer your question in the introduction, it is way grislier than you probably ever imagined to undergo this. The point of this was that it was for the worst crime. So in England we're talking high treason against the crown. It was the Worst crime, it needed the worst punishment that they could come up with. Hanging was a fairly typical punishment that goes all the way back to Anglo Saxon times. You know, hanging has been a way to kill people judicially throughout history. In the medieval period, they kind of begin to bolt things onto this to make it worse for the person. So hanging itself can have two ways of killing you. You can either die from a broken neck, from the fall, so you yank on the rope, it snaps your neck, and you die almost immediately, or you can be allowed to dangle there while you slowly strangle to death. So even the hanging part, without any other frills around it, being hanged could be more gory or less gory, depending on how it was done. And one of the most famous cases of this was when Guy Fawkes was sentenced to be hang, drawn and quartered for his part in the Gunpowder Plot. You know, he famously manages to summon whatever energy he has left and according to some sources, sort of makes a little jump up the. The scaffolding and jumps off so that his neck snaps when he dies, so that he doesn't have to undergo the rest of the torture that everybody else. He's already watched everybody else go through. And drawing kind of comes into it a little bit earlier as well. So actually drawing can go at the start of the process of being drawn and hung, because drawing originally referred to the way that people were brought to their execution. You would be drawn through the town, and this starts off by being quite often tied to a horse. You'd have your ankles tied to the back of a horse, and you'd be dragged through the streets. The problem they found with this was that people would quite often bang their heads on stones and either be unconscious or potentially even dead by the time they get to their own execution, which is inconvenient for a crowd that's looking to cheer on and enjoy somebody's suffering. So what they didn't want to do was damage people when they got there. So then they alter that slightly so that you would normally be drawn there on a hurdle. So a wooden framework. The wooden frame would be attached to the back of a horse, and you would be paraded through the town on the way to your execution. And the point of this is to make it incredibly public so that as many people as possible can see your shame and your embarrassment at the public nature of your punishment for the crime that you've committed. And they would be allowed to pelt you with whatever they wanted to. In lots of cases, it is rotten vegetables, you know, Sometimes this is where films get things like this quite right. Pelt you with rotten vegetables. There are some accounts of people being pelted with feces while they're being dragged through the streets. So this could be a pretty awful beginning to your process. But it's actually probably the nicest thing that's going to happen to you today.

[B]

And it is, is it not, the idea that you are meant to remain alive during these. These first two phases, whether. Whichever one comes first. The ideal, if we can use such a word, is that you are alive during those two processes.

[D]

The State's notion, wherever you get to that highest point of execution, where it becomes much more gory and difficult to endure, you know, things like the death of a thousand cuts is a real punishment that existed in the Far East. Wherever you reach that kind of pinnacle, the State's objective is for you to be awake, alive, conscious, for as long as physically possible throughout all of these. And they will quite often try to find ways to prolong it to make you stay alive for longer so that your punishment is greater. Because the real reason for this, there is a limit to how much damage you can do to a person by making their death prolonged and painful. What they're suffering is a lesson to everybody else who might be thinking about doing what they're doing. Really, the impact is meant to be on the crowd. It's horrible for the person that's going through it. But the purpose of the State's interest in making it as gory and difficult as possible is to say to everybody in the crowd, you want some of this? Fancy a go? No, maybe not. Behave.

[A]

Yes. Matt, you talk about these processes being a deterrent to commit some of the worst crimes, for example, treason. But I do think that spectacle is so important, and I think it seems to me that it's a way of the state exercising its power in public and really performing that. And there is nothing more performative than the final step in being hanged, drawn and quartered, which is to be quartered. So tell us what that involves and what it looks like if you are someone in the crowd watching this spectacle unfold.

[D]

It's one of those things, I think, that lots of people today would probably be utterly amazed at the thought that people considered this any kind of entertainment, that you would willingly go and watch someone have to endure their deaths in as gory a way as possible. So the hanging part in this hanging, drawing and quartering would always be the strangulation rather than the quick death of the snapped neck. So the hanging part would involve you being raised up on a rope and left there to strangle until you're almost unconscious. So there's kind of an art here in balancing making this as difficult as possible, with making it as painful as possible, with keeping the people alive and conscious to endure it for as long as possible. And again, what you want the crowd to understand is that you will be awake through all of the suffering. And if you decide to go this way, but having been strangled almost to the point of death, you would then be brought down, laid on a table. And this is where drawing has ended up in the middle. Because the next part of drawing is often that you would have an incision made down your stomach, it would be pulled open and your intestines would be very carefully lifted out and dropped into a brazier, a burning fire next to you, so that possibly the last thing you would ever smell in your life is your own burning insides. And it's possible to live for a little bit longer while this is going on. So people would generally be conscious while this is happening to them as well. There are occasions where presumably the cause of death is that they then decide to also take the person's heart out and throw that onto a brazier. And so again, there's this idea of your, your body is being dismembered while you're still alive, that you, you can't be buried whole. If this has happened to, you know, Christian concern for your body being buried whole because on the Day of Judgment, it's going to sit up in your grave and you're going to face Jerusalem and prepare to enter heaven. Well, if your body is in bits and it's been disemboweled, that's not very helpful in that aim. If you manage to stay awake through having your intestines burned and you manage to stay conscious, the final part of it will be that you would be beheaded. If you hadn't died by this point, that would be your cause of death. And then the final kind of embarrassment for your body is that it would literally be chopped into four pieces, quartered. And generally, because these are high profile state prisoners, those quarters will be sent off to four corners of the kingdom as a warning to people. You know, if you weren't able to make the execution, it's coming to a theatre near you, or at least a part of it is. The head would generally be dipped in tar and that would normally be spiked on London Bridge. And that would be a reminder to anybody going in and out of London that this is the fate that traitors will suffer. They dip it in tar to preserve it for as long as possible so that it can stay there as a warning for as long as possible. So we think people like William Wallace, you know, the famous Scottish rebel, he undergoes this execution in London. His head is placed onto London Bridge and then his four quarters are sent to Newcastle upon Tyne, to Berwick, to Stirling and to Perth. So all the places that he's been active are kind of framed with quarters of his body that are meant to act as a warning to people about his behavior. There are a couple of parts where the bit just before you die gets a little bit gorier. So there's a guy called Hugh Despenser the Younger, who in the early 14th century, he is a close ally of Edward II. And we get these dispenser wars because they're, they're unpopular, they're disliked favorites of Edward ii. And eventually Hugh Despenser the Younger is captured. He has this kind of show trial in Hereford. And quite often you see as part of these state trials, the person will be accused of theft. So Hugh is accused of stealing something like 60,000 crowns or whatever. And that's because theft is what gets you hanged. So to deliver the hanging part, you have to be a thief. So you'll quite often see random accusations of theft being added to high treason as a way to make sure that you can layer up these punishments. And Hugh is then taken to the market square in Hereford where he's hanged, drawn and quartered. But we get one account from Froissart, a French chronicler who talks about when Hugh is hanged, he's lowered down onto a ladder, kind of 60 foot high ladder that has been placed in the market square so that as many people can see this as possible, that he is cut open, sort of lying almost vertically on this ladder, cut open down his stomach and his entrails are taken out and thrown onto the fire. But then he's also emasculated. His genitals are cut off and also thrown into the fire for good measure too. And this again, this is all about humiliating the person, emasculating them, inflicting as much embarrassment on them in front of a crowd as you possibly can to add to that deterrent. So Frassar is actually the only source that says that this happened to Hugh. But there are other accounts of people having their genitals cut off as part of this process too. And again, it adds to that kind of humiliation element to the execution too.

[B]

And it would bring in this idea of the same sex attraction between Edward II and Hugh de Spencer that is very prevalent in the Queer Archive. And I have looked at this somewhat myself as well. And apparently Isabella of France, Edward II's wife, was involved in some of the actions against Hugh Despenser. And so in terms of removing the genitalia, in terms of the humiliation of that, it feeds into this same sex attraction that's often linked with Edward II and his subsequent relationship with Hugh Despenser. So this humiliation element feeds into different aspects of social, cultural and religious life.

[D]

Absolutely. And one of the things that Froissart says is that his penis and testicles were cut off because he was a heretic and a sodomite. Even it was said with the king. And this was why the King had driven away from the Queen. So there is that element of the accusation of a sexual relationship between Edward and Hugh leading to the emasculation of Hugh and the fact that he has kind of driven a wedge between the King and the Queen being the root of the cause of all of the kingdom's problems by this point.

[A]

There's an idea here of the punishment fitting the so called crime, the so called crime here being sodomy, but the actions done to the body, this absolute obliteration of the body by the state reflects the things that this individual or group of individuals has done as a crime to threaten authority. Something that really interests me, Matt, is this use of the heads after people have been hang, drawn and quartered and beheaded, either pre or post death. And of course, for most of the period that this particular punishment is taking place, most of that period, there isn't the technology to reproduce images. Certainly in the same way that we get in the late 17th, early 18th centuries with the print sort of advent of print media coming in, where people can buy relatively cheap images of celebrities or statesmen or whoever. And it strikes me there's something there about the head of the alleged criminal, the, the condemned criminal being paraded, being shown around. It adds a level of infamy and it allows ordinary people in various parts of the city, the town, the countryside, wherever these body parts being paraded, to come face to face not only with the brutality of the punishment, but with that person themselves. And I suppose going back to that idea of spectacle, there's something there that people would have been drawn to these events to see these famous people as much as to see them be killed by the state, I guess.

[D]

Yeah. I think just what you mentioned about the destruction of the body by the state also acts as a reminder that your body belongs to the state. You are subjects of the King or the Queen, you theoretically at least belong to them. And if you digress against them, they will exercise their ultimate right to utterly destroy your body physically. It's a kind of a reminder of the position of everybody in the country beneath the monarch. But, yeah, the parading of heads is important for two reasons. I think there is that element of notoriety. So we see lots of cases where William Wallace's head is displayed when Jack Cage rebellion. So the wars of the Roses is kind of my history home. So I always go back to the wars of the Roses for examples. When Jack Cage's Rebellion takes London in 1450, some of the people that were sent against the rebels that they defeat, they walk across London Bridge carrying their heads on spikes in front of them. And this is a very clear projection of your power over these people. These people have tried to beat me and they can't beat me. And here are their removed heads for all of you to look at. Those faces, particularly in London, would be recognisable to people. So the other important element of this is understanding that the person is dead, that criminal is dead. They cannot continue to have any kind of notoriety. And this becomes really prominent in the wars of the Roses with you think about people like the Duke of York, Richard, Duke of York's head is cut off and spiked on Micklegate Bar with his son Edmund and his brother in law, the Earl of Salisbury. And we get the frequent display of the bodies of defeated enemies in the wars of the Roses because it's about making sure everybody knows they're dead. I don't want any rumours that they're still alive. You know, Richard ii, lots of rumours. He's still alive in Scotland long after he's believed to be dead. Edward ii, lots of stories, he's still alive and living a comfortable life in Italy. They want you to understand they're dead. Here is their head. So there is the punishment element of it, but there is also, you know, I don't want any idea that this person is living a romantic outlaw life in the countryside or that they escape justice in the end, that that they didn't have to pay for their crimes. You want the public to understand here is the face of this person and they have paid for what they did.

[B]

So we've looked at hanging, drawing and quartering, but that wasn't the only form of medieval torture, although it might be the most notorious. Can you tell us a little bit more about impaling? And specifically, if you can, John the Impaler, who sounds a Little less glam than Vlad the Impaler. Good old John the Impaler. But tell us a little bit about him.

[D]

Yeah. So impaling, again, has an incredibly long history. It goes on for centuries, millennia, I think impaling has been going on. There are lots of ways to impale people. Again, there's some kind of art that grows up around impaling people. You can aim to kill people immediately by impaling their bodies on a spike, or you can develop techniques, which some people did, to get a spike into someone but make sure they stay alive. And there are some accounts that talk about people surviving six, even eight days impaled. They kind of worked out that if you used a thinner metal rod, and if you follow, because the damage is done if you hit an internal organ, so then it becomes infected or you bleed out or whatever else, you can die relatively quickly in that way. They worked out that if you follow the course of the spine, you're not going to hit any major internal organs. So they could get a spike in through, normally, the anus, but it could go anywhere convenient, work its way up the course of the spine, and then it could come out kind of in the back of the neck or the throat or anywhere else through the mouth. If you could, you know, I don't know how you want to work where this comes out, but then you could keep someone alive for six to eight days, and then you're at the point where you're presumably paralyzed, but you're essentially just then starving to death and dehydrating to death or dying of exposure if you're out in the heat or anything like that. So it isn't the impaling that kills you. There are other versions of impaling where you're impaled kind of into your body, so that it goes into your stomach and out your spine. You see, there are different directions that you can impale people. You can kind of tie them to the stake so their legs are kind of wrapped around it. All sorts of weird and gory ways that people have found to inflict this death. But I guess the most famous person is Vlad the Impaler, Vlad Tepe. So Vlad Dracul, the guy who gets written off in history as Dracula, the kind of prototype for Dracula. And he. So he was raised kind of in the Ottoman Empire, the Muslim world to his southeast. And when he. He takes over his own kingdom of Wallachia, he kind of uses impaling, which was fairly common in the Ottoman Empire, to impose his rule on his own territory. So he begins impaling enemies when they're defeated in battle, but he very quickly uses it also as a punishment to his own people for crimes that they commit. There are accounts in which Ottoman armies begin to invade Vlad's territories and the armies literally stop, turn around and go home, because they're walking along streets that aligned with tens of thousands of impaled Ottoman soldiers. And this is so terrifying to them that they're just like, you know what? We don't want any of this. And they will literally turn round and go back into the Ottoman Empire. So as a deterrent, it works. We're told in some sources that Vladimir enjoyed seeing people impaled. He enjoyed hearing their screams of agony and anguish to the point where some sources say, he would sit and eat his meals surrounded by forests of people on stakes who were slowly dying and screaming, and he would just sit there and eat his food. But ultimately, this is about similar to hang, drawing and quartering. It's not all that different, really. It sounds more gory, I think, to our mind somehow. But is it really any different? This is about the public display of power and authority in an effort to restore law and order and to project strength so that people won't challenge your position. You need it to be as gory as possible. And if Vlad, in sitting there and having his dinner, it sounds quite sadistic, but perhaps it's less sadistic and it's more about saying, I'm in control, I'm willing to punish people who misbehave around me and I'm willing to make sure that this punishment is delivered in the most gruesome way that is possible. John the Impaler is perhaps a slightly softer version of this.

[B]

His English cousin.

[D]

His English cousin. So this is a guy called John Tiptoft, who was the Earl of Worcester, and this is in the wars of the roses. So in 1470, there is a rebellion against Edward IV. The Earl of Warwick is fermenting, lots and lots of problems, and a bunch of rebels are captured on the south coast. And we're told that they are executed, that they are hanged and then beheaded, and actually they're only impaled then after death. So I don't know if this is a slightly more gentle version of impaling, because what John does, John is constable of England. So the role of constable is to deliver law and order in England. He's responsible for, I guess the modern equivalent would be the head of the police. He's in charge of the judiciary and all that kind of thing. So on behalf of Edward iv, he delivers this sentence. Of execution and then has the corpses impaled. So he has stakes placed into the ground and the torsos have stakes driven through them from the buttocks up through the neck. They're rammed down onto the stake and then the decapitated head is placed on top of the spike as well. And so this is all about the display of bodies again. So these executions take place on the south coast, Southampton, I think. And so they're not at London to put the heads on London Bridge to display them. So that I wonder whether this is a way of creating that public display of the remains when you don't have London Bridge, which is the normal place that you would send these heads to be dealt with. Maybe they're in too much of a hurry to do stuff like that. Maybe there are people in the south coast who they think are still encouraged in this rebellion. And what they want to do is say, this is your fate. If you do it, not only will you be executed, but your remains will be humiliated in front of everybody. I find it hard to believe that John Tiptoft didn't do this with the knowledge of Edward iv. So there is a sense that the King would have been aware that John was going to impale all of these bodies. John had, I mean, up to this point. This is a brutal episode in John's life. But up until this point, he has a fairly sparkling career. He's a learned man, he's been to Italy, he's to learn all of his letters. He's an incredibly well traveled man and has maybe heard the stories of what Vlad is doing contemporaneously in Wallachia and thought, do you know what? Sounds like it might work as a deterrent. Why don't we bring some of that over? It's the only example that I know of people being impaled in in medieval England. And it was done to them after they were already dead. But nevertheless, we do have our very own John the Impaler.

[C]

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[A]

So we've talked about these punishments that are intended, as we've said, to quite literally eradicate individuals who've committed crimes against the state. But there are punishments in the medieval world, in medieval England in particular, that are used to extract information during torture, largely, I suppose, with the aim of not killing someone, but bringing them close enough to death that they will give up their secrets. And one of these processes is the rack, which I have to say for me just conjures images of Monty Python or maybe Alan Rickman in the Robin Hood film. What is happening with the rack in reality, Matt? Is this something that's used widely in the medieval world? Or is this something that's a bit rarer and that's crept into our Hollywood portrayals of this period?

[D]

I'm probably going to show my age here and say that the rack makes me think of Carry On Henry. When Charles Horton's character comes in about 8 foot tall because he's been racked. That's probably just me showing my age.

[B]

Matt, you could play Henry viii. A young Henry viii. You totally could.

[D]

That is the worst insult you could possibly give to a historian of Richard iii.

[B]

Oh, fair enough. Okay, sorry.

[C]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[D]

I look like a Tudor. To be fair, I've been told that before and I always have to hang on to the hope that you mean Henry viii when he was significantly younger than me.

[B]

I said younger.

[D]

He was my.

[B]

I said younger.

[A]

Yeah, younger than.

[B]

Sorry. Let's get back to medieval torture.

[D]

That's fine. That was a medieval torture for me. I'm joking. There isn't wide evidence for the rack being frequently used in medieval England. I think there's a perception that medieval justice was incredibly cruel and I know we've talked about some of its gorier and most brutal elements so far, but torture wasn't something that was widely used during the period. There is a story that the rack in the Tower of London became known as the. The Earl of Devon's Daughter because he would use it so much. But we can't actually find records of him ever using the rack in the Tower. It's not documented. We know that when in the gunpowder plot in 1605, when Guy Fawkes is racked, it requires special written permission from the King. So James I and 6th has to specifically write to say, I hereby authorise the use of torture because it was illegal, really, it wasn't the done thing. So I don't think there is the resort to torture quite as often as we think there might have been. But racking, when it did happen, was fairly horrendous. It did happen to Guy Fawkes and that's the reason that we see on his confession, his signature is so almost illegible because he's been tortured just so much. And racking literally involves your four limbs being tied to four corners of a contraption that can then be slowly wound to stretch you further and further. And I guess it begins being quite uncomfortable, quickly gets quite painful. And you're talking here about your muscles being stretched, your tendons and sinews being stretched to the point that they will break, and then you're dislocating joints all over the body and the kind of pain that would go with that. And the idea would be that this would encourage you to give up your secrets. There's a story of one Catholic priest in Elizabeth the first reign who is in the Tower of London and they're torturing him, desperately trying to get him to give up his Catholic allies around the country. He's chained to a wall, sort of suspended off the ground for periods of time. He's deprived of sleep, he's not given food and water and things. And actually they decide they're going to rack him and they take him to the rack and he kind of says, what did he say? He says he'll never give them up any name but the name of Jesus so they can rack him to their hearts content kind of thing. And they actually decide not to bother racking him because they think it would be pointless. This guy has resisted everything else so far and given us nothing. There is a danger now if we put him on the rack that he's just going to allow us to kill him because he's clearly so resolute. So at that point they decide not to rack this priest because it has dangers involved in it. So I think torture is actually fairly rarely used in the medieval world. There are elements of medieval punishment that sound like they might be torture, but they're actually just self contained punishments for the crimes that you would have committed. So blinding is quite often used as a form of punishment. It's widely used in the Anglo Saxon world and the kind of later medieval world as a way to deal with political enemies. If he blinded someone, it hampered their capacity, for example, to be king. So heirs to the throne would sometimes be blinded. And there are moments where that blinding causes infection or causes too much damage or is done in a dangerous kind of way that ultimately leads to the death of the person involved. There is a case with Henry I where he kind of oversees an adjudication between some political enemies and they're given hostages for each other. So the one family give a son as hostage and the other family blind this son, which they weren't entitled to do. So the family go to Henry I and say, look, this wasn't part of the deal. They've blinded our son. So what Henry does is give the other family two of the daughters and those daughters are blinded and have their noses cut off in retribution. And those two daughters are granddaughters of Henry I. He allows his own granddaughters to be blinded and have their noses cut off. And this is kind of the medieval idea of restorative. Justice, I guess, of the punishment, fitting the crime, that you can't get away with doing these kinds of things. And it sounds like torture, but you know, it's kind of self contained punishments really. So yeah, I mean, that's a really long winded way of saying that I think racking was fairly uncommon in the medieval world and that lots of forms of torture weren't kind of as commonplace as we might think they were.

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[A]

I'm interested in what you said, Matt as well about the priest who they decide not to rack him because there is a danger that he will allow them to go so far, that he will die, that they will have killed him. And I suppose there's something there about torture. It's quite a dynamic scene, isn't it? It's a bit of a sort of psychological struggle between the person being tortured and the person doing the torture. In terms of the outcome of the torture that did happen, was there a belief in the legitimacy of information that could be extracted from people who had been tortured? Or was there a hesitation when it came to believing the things that people would say if, for example, they were put on the rack or whatever the torture was that they were subjected to?

[D]

I think there's an element of both of those things. So I think today we would absolutely not accept a confession that's extracted under torture. We would deem that to be utterly unreliable. In the medieval world, I think in lots of these cases, particularly where we might be talking about treasonous things, there is a belief that if you know the person is guilty, there's perhaps that, not that requirement for due process, process of the law to be undertaken. If you believe that person is guilty, then extracting a confession justifies torture, because you need them to admit their crime so that they can be punished for it. There is also the element of if there is a wider conspiracy, there is a time pressure to finding out who else is involved in this conspiracy. Again, if we think about the Gunpowder Plot a little bit, the government would have been incredibly tense and nervous about who else was involved and how far this had spread. So what they wanted from Guy Fawkes was a list of names of other people that were involved. And I think to them, that would justify the resort to torture in those instances. And I don't think they had the same kind of concern that something extracted under torture was invalid. But I do think they had an understanding that torture was designed to make you confess whether you've done something or not. You know, you inflict so much pain that someone will say what you want them to say. That is inherently unreliable. And I think that's why people don't resort to torture as often as we perhaps think they do. They did have this understanding that information isn't going to be reliable, that it was. It was legitimate as an ultimate step, as a final step, if you couldn't achieve what you needed to in any other way, or if there was some kind of time constraint that meant you needed to find out the information that that person had. And again, maybe Hollywood gives us this idea that medieval people kind of relished in torture that they wanted to torture people. I don't think that's true at all. We don't see much evidence. They were certainly gruesome in the ways that they executed people who'd been found guilty of crimes. That was all about the display and being as gory and gruesome as possible. But I don't think they relished inflicting physical torture. I mean, to some extent, you go back to the religious mind of the medieval church, it was a crime to inflict injuries on fellow Christians. So routinely torturing and harming and killing innocent people wasn't a great place for you to be in, to be doing those things. So there are reasons to think they were cautious about the use of torture and relying on information that was gathered under torture. But I think we today go a lot further than they probably did. I think they would have felt that there was a point at which torture was justified.

[B]

I really like this distinction. I think it's really helpful, and I've never thought about it this way before, the distinction between torture and punishment. I think that's a really nice distinction. If you're taking one thing away from this conversation, that would be something to take away. Another thing I'd like to get your insight on is we've talked a little bit about execution in hanging, drawing and quartering, but I'd like to know what you find the relationship between execution, torture and punishment is then bringing those three elements together, how they sit side by side, and is there a kind of gradation from one to the other, or do they operate quite separately?

[D]

I think they're all part of the same arsenal of weapons that are in the government's locker to deal with criminals. And perhaps there's a sense in which they did have an idea that the punishment ought to fit the crime far more. I mean, I'm wary of sounding like I approve of medieval methods of execution, because I absolutely don't. But we do seem to have this idea now where, for a crime that's committed today, the punishment is prison. There's very little else that is available to deal with that. And the medieval world seemed to have a much wider array of things. You know, if you do a certain thing, it will lead to this kind of thing again. Henry I. When he found out that lots of people were debasing his coinery, so making the coins valued at less silver content than they should have had, he had the hands chopped off. All of his coin makers, seemingly, whether he felt they were guilty or not, he just had all of their hands cut off. So, you know, if you use your hands to inflict harm on me, I'll take your hands away. And I think there was an element there of the medieval world feeling like the punishment ought to fit the crime, or it was somehow more justified if it was a punishment that was in line with the kind of crime that had been committed. But there is definitely a point at which it reaches cruelty and hang drawn and quartering. Flaying was a way that people used to kill people. When Richard I is shot with a crossbow arrow that turns gangrenous and eventually kills him, his men go and find the lad that shot him with a crossbow bolt and they flay him alive. They peel his skin off him while he's still alive. And that is just about cruelty and retribution and making the death. You know, they could have just cut his throat, but they didn't. They chose to make it as painful as they possibly could for him as a form of retribution. So I think they would probably have seen it as quite well categorized. So there are punishments, there are forms of torture, and there are gruesome forms of execution. And I think maybe we don't see it in quite that kind of categorized way. We see it in a much more grey kind of. Medieval people liked being violent and hurting other people far more than we do, because we have a view of them as being slightly barbaric and maybe a little bit backward, which is unfair. You know, being medieval is quite often still used as a pejorative term today. I've seen it in the news in recent times. People will say, you know, this is such a medieval way to behave. And that's because we think these people were somehow more cruel and more backward than we were, when actually they just lived in a different world that had different values and everything else than we do today. So I don't know if that's answered your question, Anthony. I've kind of waffled on a little bit around it, probably.

[B]

No, it has, because the point I was trying to get to was this idea that medieval people were notoriously violent and that they surrounded themselves with violence by default. And actually, what you're saying is it's far more nuanced than. Than that, and it's possibly the more extreme versions that we have been left with that makes a lasting impact. That makes us think it was far more prevalent than it was. I mean, I would have thought that torture was far more prevalent in the Middle Ages than you're saying it is. So that's a real new nugget. Of information for me as well. But here's the final question before we wrap up. You have both Maddie and Matt done something absolutely awful and it is 11. No, let's go. 1349. You've done something absolutely horrendously bad. It's been against the law. The king is implicated. Things are not good. You have to choose from crushing the rack, impaling, or being hanged, drawn and quartered. Which are you going to choose as your form of punishment? Not that you will get the choice, but I'm giving you the choice now because I'm kind.

[A]

You're so generous, Anthony. I think for me it would be hanging, drawing and quartering with the hope I'd probably do a Guy Fawkes and have to leap to my death with the hope that you wouldn't make it to the quartering process. I mean, none are a good choice, I have to say. None are great.

[B]

Matt, what are you choosing?

[D]

Yeah. Which is the lesser of these many, many evils? If I thought I was going to die from the impaling, from the spike going in, I might go for that. Hanging, drawing and quartering, I guess, would be the next option because there is at least an end to it. You will endure this process, but it's only going to be 10, 15, 20 minutes and then it will be done. At some point, it will be ended. The worry, I guess, if you're impaled is that you could be there for days and days in absolute agony going through it. If I had to choose, it might be that one.

[B]

Yeah. No, I mean hang me, draw me and quarter me. I am not getting impaled, not sticking around.

[D]

And I would also say that if Maddy was a noblewoman in 1349, she couldn't be executed.

[A]

Oh, well, I can commit whatever crime I want then. Do you know, I often think about. I mean, often. This is my Roman Empire. How do you think about this every other day? I often think about Margaret Clithero, who is crushed, I think, in the 16th century in York on the Ouse Bridge. And I think she's crushed under the weight of her own door. I mean, it's insulting.

[B]

Wait, why is it insulting? Why is the door insulting?

[A]

I feel it's insulting for someone to use her own front door to crush her. I just. It's.

[B]

They put the rocks on top of the door, though.

[D]

No, I mean, crushing. Crushing is an interesting thing because it was quite often used as a way to extract a plea from someone. If you went to court, you would be asked to plead guilty or innocent. If you refuse to enter a plea, which people would quite often do on the basis that if you don't enter a plea, your goods can't be seized from you. So if you enter a plea of guilty or not guilty and then you're found guilty, all of your goods can be seized, and your family would lose everything. If you don't enter a plea, your goods simply can't be seized, even if you're then executed. So you're protecting your family by not doing that. And so crushing was kind of used as a way to force people. This was probably more of a torture as a way to force people to enter a plea. So they would be. They would have stones placed on top of them, gradually heavier and heavier and heavier, causing them pain until they did die, or they eventually entered a plea. And I guess the question is, can you hold out from this pain long enough to protect your family? Kind of a pretty brutal position to be in. When Charles the First is brought before the court of the Commonwealth, he refuses to enter a plea because he doesn't recognize the authority of the court before him. And they toy with the idea of crushing him. But then they decide it's too much of a dangerous spectacle to crush the king and potentially have him die that way, not having answered the charges that are placed before him. So they seriously think about doing this to a king, but they decide it's a bad way to deal with that process. But Charles understands the law well enough to know that if he doesn't enter a plea, he can't be found guilty in the court eventually.

[A]

And it comes back to that weighing up of the spectacle and the punishment. And it has to serve. Serve both purposes, I guess. I think that's probably a good place to leave it today. And I'm sure listeners will be now thinking of ways in which they would prefer to die in the medieval world. Thank you very much for listening, everyone. And you can catch Matt's podcast Gone Medieval. Wherever you get your podcasts, it's part of the history hit network. Please leave us a review. Follow us along, and we will see you next time.

[C]

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[D]

Sam.