ANCIENT TORTURES. Horrible Punishments Inflicted in the Days Gone By.

Te Aroha News, Volume V, Issue 219, 10 September 1887, Page 5

ANCIENT TORTURES. Horrible Punishments Inflicted in the Days Gone By.

TuEur, are few of us who understand in this nintcenth century what an ordeal a witness had to face whose testimony was needed in an important case in those happy days when the Tudors were on the Throne in England, and when our betters, as the prayer-book puts, ruled the Continent. A very curioLs little book, " Torture and the ; Torturers,'' recently printed in London by Weinyss and Co., throws a flood of light upon the old fashioned methods of crossexamination, j It appears that in the medcrival times the recognised method to induce a witness to tell the truth was to subject his body to excruciating torment, so that as a natural consequence, the witness readily told any story -\\ Inch the people in whose hands he found himself wanted, even to j swearing his own life away to moid further misery. Gradually .we have clipped the wings of the State until it can only sneak in its Dingfelders upon the unsuspecting prisoner, but our ancestois fared badly when they came rightly or wrongly into the clutches of the law. After the somewhat faulty logic of the ancients it was determined that there was no means so certain of educating the truth as jfompelling the suspected criminal to confess. To them nothing appealed so strongly as intense physical pain, and accordingly intense pain was the weapon with which mediaeval justice was armed. The " question," we are told, was synonymous with the toituie ; it meant the same thing. It was dhided into the " question ordinary,'' when the torment was light, and the "question extraordinary," in which the utmost I torture shoit of killing was used. Both were recognised and usual methods of ciiminal jurisprudence. It was a recognised engine of justice in the Justinian code, and in every land to which the great codex penetiated the rack was used. In England the pome fortet et dure, the pain strong and haul, was in u^e two centuries ago. It is not quite a century since it was discontinued in France ; and in parts of Germany it remained upon the statute until 1848. In China and the East it is still not alone in theory, but in practice a recognised and important part of the criminal repressive machinery. Everybody knows the lecord of the Inquisition and the ghastly terrors invented by the cruel ingenuity of the Spaniards, which have made modern Latin history red with blood, but the story is one we can hardly realise untU we read of some such history as that of the death of ftnvaillac, who assasbinaced Henry IV. of France. This unfortunate man, who was to be tormented to death, was deliveied over to the the executioners on Islay 27th, 1610, and by them tied down to a fr.ime which left no motion on his j>art possible. Over his stomach was made a cup of plaster of paris open at the bottom, into which was poured molten lead. The knife with which he had slain the monarch was made to play an almost inconceivably horrible part in the tragedy. The hand which struck the blow was burned off the body, while stimulants were constantly administered to the wretch to keep him from fainting into unconsciousness. Finally his legs and his arms were separately tied to four strong horses, who were lashed away from each other, but so stout was he, quaintly remarks the chronicle, that the muscles and tendons had to be partially severed with -knives before the horses could ! tear him asunder. He was fully conscious to the last. This was but one of the awful tragedies of the period. The best human inventiveness could find no better channel for its work than in making the most devilish machinery. In England there was the Scavenger's Daughter, which squeezed its victims to death with novel spasms and unexpected hurts. There was the rack still preserved in London Tower, upon which punishment could be graduated almost with the nicety of micrometer screws. There was the boot, which crushed the leg into a shapeless pulp, and the thumb-screw whose work is told by its name. On the Continent justice was fully as prolific of Satanic devices. The water torture of the Inquisition, where drop after drop of water gradually falling on the forehead of the victim, drove him to madness and death, vas an example of what could be done in the making of other men miserable. Starving rats were tied under a basin on the body of the recalcitrant one to gnaw their way to freedom ; other victims were sjneared with honey and exposed to insects ; boiling oil was poured into the ears, or the body was slowly dipped into boiling oil. In China at the present day there appears to be yet rife the awful Poang Li — the "punishment of many cuts" in which the eyelids are first removed, the nails pulled off one by one, the teeth torn out, the tongue clipped and the ears and the more delicate parts of the body pared down, cut by cut, until death came as a blessed and almost despaired of relief. The whole record of judioial methods is a frightfully gloomy one. They are full of blood and pain and terror, those good old times that romancewriters write about, and we are well rid of them. We may let an occasional criminal escape that the rack should have punished, but there are to-day no ghastly human wrecks to testify to the miscarriage of justice. There is no particular civilisation that manifests progress and liberality and light so thoroughly as do our courts. They testify to a new dispensation in harmony with newer truth and newer ways. Such books as "Torture and Torturers," and such history as these books teach, make us thankful for the century and the ideas in which we happily ive