Types Of Ancient Punishments

Boiling Alive
In England a law of 1531 allowed poisoners to be boiled alive. In 1532 a cook called Richard Roose was boiled alive and in 1542 a woman called Margaret Davy was boiled alive. However the law was repealed in 1547.

Beheading is another ancient method of punishment. Beheading with a sword or an axe may have been more merciful than hanging but that was not always the case. Sometimes several blows were needed to sever the persons head. In England beheading was normally reserved for the high-born. The last person to be beheaded in Britain was a Scot named Simon Fraser, Lord Lovat in 1747.

Burning
Burning is a very old method of killing people. In 1401 a law in England made burning the penalty for heresy. In the 16th century during the reign of Mary (15531558) nearly 300 Protestants were burned to death in England. In the 16th and 17th centuries 'witches' in England were usually hanged but in Scotland and most of Europe they were burned. In the 18th century in Britain women found guilty of murdering their husbands were burned. However burning as a punishment was abolished in Britain in 1790. Sometimes a person about to be burned was strangled with a rope first to spare them pain.

Branding
Branding people with red-hot irons is a very old punishment. In Britain branding was abolished in 1829.

Cangue
This was a Chinese punishment. It was a wooden board locked around the prisoners neck. He could not reach his mouth with his arms and so could not feed himself or drink without help.

Drowning
Although drowning is an obvious method of killing people it was seldom used as a method of execution. The Roman writer Tacitus said that the Germanic peoples drowned cowards in fens under piles of sticks. The Anglo-Saxons also sometimes used drowning as a punishment. In the Middle Ages drowning was sometimes used to punish murder. In England in the 13th century it was enacted that anybody who committed murder on the king's ships would be tied to their victims body and thrown into the sea to drown. In Portsmouth at that time male murderers were burned but female murderers were tied to a post in the harbour and left to drown when the tide came in. Drowning was occasionally used in Europe through the following centuries. It was revived in the French Revolution in Nantes by a man named Jean Baptiste Carrier as a convenient way of killing large numbers of people. They

Electric Chair

Garrotting
Garrotting was a form of strangulation. Often it was carried out using a metal collar attached to a post, which was tightened around the person's neck. Garrotting was once used in Spain.

Gas Chamber
The gas chamber was first used in the USA in 1924. The condemned man is strapped to a chair in a sealed room, which is then filled with cyanide gas. After his death powerful fans remove the gas.

Guillotine
The French Revolution is notorious for its use of the guillotine. In fact mechanical devices for beheading people had been used in various parts of Europe for centuries before the French Revolution. (One was recorded in Ireland as early as 1307). Joseph-Ignace Guillotin (1738-1814) proposed that there should be a swift and humane method of executing people in France. The French Assembly agreed to his idea in 1791 and the first decapitating device was built by a man named Tobias Schmidt, with advice from a surgeon named Antoine Louis. The first person to be executed by the new machine was Nicolas Jacques Pelletier in 1792. The guillotine was last used in France in 1977. The French abolished capital punishment in 1981.