History’s Most BRUTAL Execution Method

Have you ever heard stories about entombed human remains in the walls of fortresses or old manor houses? Scientists have long wondered how the human body got there until they came to the awful conclusion that such finds are echoes of the ancient execution by immurement. It originated in the days of ancient Rome and was applied to servants of the goddess Vesta who had broken the vow of celibacy.

It was important to immure a woman in the city limits, which was forbidden by the laws of Rome at that time. However, a way to bypass this restriction was invented – a woman was left in a confined space with a small supply of food and water, which formally could not be considered a burial anymore. In addition, religion forbade the spilling of their blood, and hence this was the only way to carry out the death penalty.
People were entombed not only in the walls but also in specially assembled wooden boxes and coffins. Even scaphism was considered a kind of immurement. Like many other tortures and executions, this type of torture received its greatest expansion in the Middle Ages. It was mainly used by the Christian church to punish monks who broke their vows or questioned the scriptures of the church.
Echoes of these times are often found in castles, fortresses, and ancient temples. People were placed in specially created chambers to be entombed in the walls of buildings or in dungeons, leaving them a small supply of food and water and then blocking the only way to freedom with bricks or masonry. This made the cell of the condemned invisible, subjecting the prisoner to a slow, painful death in complete solitude and darkness.
As you have already realized, this video will focus on the most horrific types of punishment in the history of mankind. We’re going to tell you what it’s like to be shot out of a cannon, why people were boiled alive in England, and how pirates were executed. If you’ve boiled meat, you’ve probably seen what happens to it when put in boiling water.
We’re very lucky in the 21st century to only witness this while cooking because 400 years ago, city dwellers often watched live people being boiled in giant cauldrons in England. But do not think of this as a way to be eaten; it was simply a way of execution in 16th-century England. Just imagine what it is like to be sentenced to this execution: you are brought to a giant vat full of boiling water, and then you hear that you are sentenced to death by boiling alive.
You have no chance to escape or appeal your sentence. All that remains is to accept your fate of being subjected to one of the most terrible deaths. This execution was used in Kyiv, Russia, Germany, France, Egypt, and Japan. Most often, it was inflicted on counterfeiters or traitors. But as we have already said, this execution was especially popular in England thanks to the monarch Henry VIII.
This monarch gained a reputation as a rather cruel king. He severed all ties with the Roman Catholic Church, proclaiming himself head of the Church of England, which gave him the right to freely interpret God’s laws and subject people to the most horrific torture. Henry was obsessed with the dream of a successor son, a dream that never came true and which deeply unsettled him.
As a result, he even had members of his family executed, like Anne Boleyn, his second wife. The king had her and her brother beheaded for alleged treason, although the real reason was that she could not bear him a son. Henry had little pity for his courtiers, and he treated people outside his circle even more harsher.
During his reign, the Tower of London became a torture chamber, executions and torture became commonplace, with more than 70,000 people subjected to them, and one of the king’s decrees imposed the boiling alive punishment for poisoners. One of the most famous, and also the first manifestations of this execution in England, was the case of Richard Roose, the cook of Bishop John Fisher.
Richard was accused of attempting to poison the bishop. Proof of the crime was the death of two of Fisher’s guests. After his arrest, Roose pleaded guilty, but only for wanting to have some fun and put laxatives in the food, not for trying to kill anyone. No one believed the cook, and he was sentenced to be boiled alive.
Roose was not simply thrown into the cauldron and left to die. The executioners wanted to stretch out his execution as long as possible, so Richard was lowered into the cauldron and brought back up again. The torture was so terrible that even the spectators, used to such shows, fainted from Roose’s screams.
Are you familiar with the concept of a human cannonball? Maybe you associate it with the circus, with people in colorful clothes, who, after the shot, land safely on the stretched net or a mattress. Actually, the idea to put a man and a cannon together originally occurred to the Portuguese colonizers in the 16th century as a method of punishment for rebels in Ceylon, Mozambique, and Brazil.
This method of execution is most strongly associated with the British colonizers in India, as they most often used it during the Indian Rebellion of 1857 against deserters or rebels. The execution consisted of tying the condemned person to the muzzle of a cannon and then shooting him. Usually, blank cartridges or grapeshot were used for such execution, but sometimes the gun was loaded with a classic cannonball.
Though this execution was not less cruel than being bricked up or boiled alive, it often gave the condemned a quick death without any unnecessary agony. One might say that it served rather as an example to those around them, for such executions were always attended by an audience consisting of both military and civilian men.
This execution had the same effect on the audience as the ones already mentioned. When the shot was fired, the insides of the condemned were literally thrown several hundred meters away, leaving only their hands in place, which were sometimes even blown off the cannon together with the rope. There were also cases when the execution affected not only the convict but also the executioners and the audience.
Thus, there is a case in history when according to the plan, all the cannons were to be loaded with blanks, but some were loaded with buckshot. The consequence of this was that the observers standing in front of the guns were seriously wounded. In addition to this, some soldiers were wounded by bone fragments.
The most striking way of execution was by the Turks. In Istanbul, in 1596, the condemned was literally put into the cannon and shot. Also, there was a similar way of execution in Turkey – tying people to rockets and launching them into the sky. For humans as social creatures, the worst thing that can happen is being ignored, don’t you agree? It’s so infuriating when someone reads your posts but doesn’t respond to them.
The Middle Ages built an execution around ignoring. It was a type of immurement. The condemned was placed in a closed room or in the bottom of a well with a mandatory condition – the place of his imprisonment should be in the castle or near it so that the prisoner could hear cheerful conversations of guests and smell food during feasts and celebrations.
Neither sunlight nor the light of torches should enter the room. The guards and servants were strictly forbidden to have any contact with the prisoner. Conditions in the place of confinement were as horrible as possible. After all, it was reusable, and no one cleaned it. This meant that the convict literally lived on the bones of his predecessors.
And not only that, the place of confinement was often chosen as a cesspit, meaning that various cesspools, including human waste, were poured there every day. At the same time, no one fed or gave water to the condemned because the main purpose of imprisonment was to drive the person to death from exhaustion.
The purpose of imprisonment was to starve a prisoner to death. Though, sometimes, if the owner of the castle was in a good mood, the remnants of food after a feast could be thrown to a prisoner in the form of nibbled bones. The gallows were a fairly common form of punishment in the Middle Ages. It was often used as a light punishment for crimes like theft.
It involved leaving a person hanging in plain sight for a bit and then letting them go. It was also used as the death penalty for murderers, traitors to the crown, or pirates. This method of torture was used in Germany, the Netherlands, England, Iran, Malta, and even in the United States during the colonial era.
The execution devices had wide varieties: the simplest ones were one wooden post buried in the ground and a bar fastened perpendicularly on which the condemned was suspended by the hands and feet with the help of ropes. More complicated constructions included an iron or wooden cage for the offender. Also, instead of cages, there could be steel plates used to gird the prisoner or “iron suits”, which were like a human body and had separate trousers and sleeves for the limbs.

The gallows was convenient as a method of torture because it allowed for the punishment of the guilty or obtainment of a confession from the suspect without needing an executioner. For the same reason, it was often used as a method of capital punishment because it was quite a demonstrative and bloodless way to carry out the execution of a criminal or traitor.
Sometimes additional measures were applied to prisoners in the form of burning parts of the body with red-hot rods or stoning. Those convicted of minor crimes could be held from a few hours to a couple of days. On the other hand, those convicted of serious crimes were left in these cages until they died of hunger or thirst.

The bodies of the executed could even hang for several years. History knows the case when the body of a murderer hung in a cage for 20 years. The last recorded case of this execution happened in Afghanistan in 1921 and was even captured by National Geographic magazine. Which of these torture cases do you think is the fairest, and do such punishments deserve to exist? Leave your opinion in the comments.