Medieval torture devices skin#

The most popular of these torture techniques is strappado, which is still popular today. Here we are talking about the many variants of hanging that were excruciatingly painful forms of torture. This generally involved suspending the victim by one or more of their limbs, often with the aid of weights and sometimes with the added torment of spikes.

No, that would be far too humane for the Medieval sadists. When it says “hanging” above we’re not referring to good, honest, straightforward neck-snapping, strangulating hanging. Hanging Pervy priests stringing up a nubile young “witch” on the strappado Popular with the Spanish Inquisition these little horrors were usually engraved with abiuro, the Latin for “I recant”. After a few days of this torture they would be so sleep deprived that they’d confess to anything.

Medieval torture devices skin#

Then they were left…Īnyone wearing the heretic’s fork is unable to fall asleep – the moment they did the prongs would pierce the skin causing more than enough pain to wake them up. The victim would be restrained so they were upright, either by hanging from the ceiling or tying to a chair. It’s actually quite ingenious and ever so compact.Īs you can see in the picture above the “fork” is strapped around the neck and placed with the sharp prongs just digging into the base of the throat and underneath the chin. Heretic’s fork The Heretics Fork – Don’t fall asleep…ĭespite looking fairly inoffensive this little device is not only great for toasting marshmallows but is all you need to get a confession out of the toughest of heretics, sinners and blasphemers. The Chinese and Japanese had plenty of equally unpleasant torture techniques which I’ll get round to covering another time. The methods of torture below are all European in origin. For the record the main users of these forms of torture were the various churches of the day in the name of Christianity. Yes, now-a-days we could probably develop more effective ways of getting information out of people, but that doesn’t seem to have been the point of half these. Even with all our technology and medical knowledge there wouldn’t be much chance of coming up with any more terrifying torture instruments than this lot. Things seemed to get worse as time went by culminating in the Black Death and the Spanish Inquisition, that orgy of sadism and torture.īy the end of the Medieval period torture had become a fine art.

Whilst I’m sure plenty of lovely things happened during this time none of them spring to mind – all I can think of is war, poverty and plague. Roughly speaking Medieval times (or the Middle Ages) started at the end of the Roman Empire, around 500 AD, and continued until around the 1500s. Of all the times to live in throughout history the Medieval period was probably one to avoid.