HISTORY OF TORTURE IN BRITAIN

Beginning with the medieval trial by ordeal, which entailed carrying a red-hot iron bar in your bare hand for a certain distance, through to the stretching on the rack of political prisoners and the mutilation of those found guilty of sedition, the evidence clearly shows that Britain has relied heavily upon torture, both at home and abroad, for almost the whole of its history. Branding with red-hot irons of blasphemers during the rule of Oliver Cromwell, libelling the monarch in Elizabethan England could result in having the right hand chopped off, the rack, breaking on the wheel (occasionally inflicted in Scotland but never in England), thumb screws used with a variety of names such as pilliwinks, slaves branded and whipped, gibbetting alive by hanging a man in chains to die of exposure and thirst, roasting over a slow fire prolonging death for hours, hanging drawing and quartering, the pillory being stoned to death, the ducking stool, flogging in the 1860s and medieval waterboarding used as late as the 1970s by the British Army in Northern Ireland are illustrated and described. Not a book for the fainthearted. 145pp.