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Medieval Torture & Anglo Law (Mutiliation): License to Torture
by John McGuffin
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"Torture, and horrific bodily mutilation as a living
testimony to royal power, and the futility of rebellion,"
----
Barron, William RJ. "The penalties for treason in
medieval life and literature." Journal of medieval
history 7.2 (1981): 187-202.
["Treason appears to have fascinated the Middle Ages. At
the most fundamental felony, it struck at the roots of
feudal society through a complex of crimes: compassing or
plotting the death of the sovereign, betraying his realm
to an enemy, counterfeiting his coinage, or falsifying
his signature, seducing his wife or the wife of his son
and heir. The basis of the felony was the same betrayal
of trust by an attack on the security of the state, its
administrative or economic validity, or the legitimacy of
the succession. Whether directed against the king or some
lesser liege lord, the law made no absolute distinction
between high and petty treason. Both demanded exemplary
punishment, with methods such as drawing, hanging,
emasculation, disemboweling, beheading, and quartering
employed in various combinations. In rare and aggravated
cases, flaying alive seems to have been included. This
paper, though surveying the legal, moral, and symbolic
bases of the penalties for treason, concentrates on the
evidence for flaying, which has largely been ignored. It
reviews and analyzes the legal, historical, and literary
records of this exceptional penalty. The frequency with
which it occurs in literature, and the varied thematic
use made of it to express abhorrence of treason,
illustrates the significance which that crime had for the
Middle Ages."]
Bunn, David. "Morbid curiosities: mutilation, exhumation,
and the fate of colonial painting." Transforming
Anthropology 8.1 2 (1999): 39-53.
Chaney, William A. "Paganism to Christianity in Anglo-
Saxon England." Harvard Theological Review 53.3 (1960):
197-217.
["But heathenism itself continued. In Kent King Eadbald,
son of the converted Aethelberht, returned to the older
faith, leading his people ad priorem vomitum. 5 There is
no evidence that it was outlawed in Kent until A.D. 640,
when King Eorcenberht, Aethel- berht's grandson, "was the
first of the kings of the English who ordered by his
supreme authority that the idols in his whole realm be
abandoned and destroyed." 6 In the last surviving Kentish
law code, dating from the very end of the century, it is
still necessary for King Wihtred to forbid both freemen
and slaves from making offerings to devils."]
Crouch, David. "The troubled deathbeds of Henry I's
servants: death, confession, and secular conduct in the
twelfth century." Albion 34.1 (2002): 24-36.
["The clerics around his bed were thus able to bring home
to him the ultimate consequence of sin and move him to
make restitution where he could. The purpose of this
paper is therefore to talk about conscience and penitence
at the time of Henry I of England in the dim light of the
death chambers of those who served him, and offer some
broad concluding observations about lay life at that
period, which is generally regarded as one of cultural
and intellectual change."]
Fee, Christopher Richard. Torture, text and the
reformulation of spiritual identity in old English
religious verse. Diss. University of Glasgow, 1997.
Granucci, Anthony F. "" Nor Cruel and Unusual Punishments
Inflicted:" The Original Meaning." California Law Review
57.4 (1969): 839-865.
["The histories of the prohibitions of cruel and unusual
punishments found in the English Bill of Rights of 1689
and in the eighth amendment to the United States
Constitution have never been adequately investigated.
Judges and scholars alike have been content to accept the
conclusions of the American framers that the clause was
originally designed to prohibit barbarous methods of
punishment and that it was not, therefore, intended as a
general prohibition on merely excessive penalties. This
Article will attempt to demonstrate that the conclusions
of the American framers were based on a misinterpretation
of the intent of the drafters of the English Bill of
Rights. The Article first analyzes the positions of the
American framers. It then traces the legal developments
which resulted in the English Bill of Rights of 1689. It
concludes with an explanation of the way in which the
American framers misinterpreted English law."]
Halttunen, Karen. "Humanitarianism and the pornography of
pain in Anglo-American culture." The American Historical
Review 100.2 (1995): 303-334.
Harris, George. "Materials for a Domestic History of
England." Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 2
(1873): 142-157.
["Caesar in his Commentaries gives us some account of the
laws and modes of punishment in use among the ancient
Britons, of which burning in huge wicker frames filled
with straw was one. He also informs us that husbands had
the power of life and death over their wives and
children. On the death of a nobleman, if there was any
suspicion against the wives, they were put to the torture
as slaves. If they were thought guilty, after cruel
torments they were burnt to death."]
Heard, Joseph Norman. The Assimilation of Captives on the
American Frontier in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth
Centuries. Louisiana State University and Agricultural &
Mechanical College, 1977.
Hollister, C. Warren. "Royal acts of mutilation: the case
against Henry I." Albion 10.4 (1978): 330-340.
["The subject of mutilations is one I would
cheerfullyhave left to others were it not for its
bearingon the characterof King Henry I. The sources for
his reign disclose a number of instances in which alleged
wrongdoerswere punishedby mutilation,and these
punishments have earned Henry a somber reputationamong
modern historians. ChristopherBrooke calls him a "savage,
ruthless man"; Emma Mason deplores his "reign of
calculated terror"; R.H.C. Davis speaks of his
"reputation for brutality." To Sir Richard Southern,
"Henry's vengeance was terrible and barbaric,"]
Keefe, Thomas K. "King Henry II and the Earls: The Pipe
Roll Evidence." Albion 13.3 (1981): 191-222.
Koffler, Judith S. "Terror and Mutilation in the Golden
Age." Hum. Rts. Q. 5 (1983): 116.
["Bartolome de Las Casas, a Spanish monk whose
inflammatory pamphlet, Brevissima relacion de la
destruccion de las Indias, catalogs the systematic terror
and atrocities which the Spaniards inflicted upon the
native population, estimates that fifteen million Indians
were slaughtered in the first half-century of conquest
alone. The methods rival the horrors of our own century:
mass murders of the defenseless, ingenious techniques of
torture and mutilation, forced labor, death marches, and
starvation. By the infliction of psychological terror,
Indians were driven to suicide, infanticide, and a
phenomenon described simply as a loss of the will to
survive. Las Casas writes of the Spaniards: [They]
immediately behaved like ravening wild beasts, wolves,
tigers, or lions that had been starved for many days. And
Spaniards have behaved in no other way during the past
forty years, down to the present time, for they are still
acting like ravening beasts, killing, terrorizing,
afflicting, torturing and destroying the native peoples,
doing all this with the strangest and most varied new
methods of cruelty, never seen or heard of before, and to
such a degree that this Island of Hispaniola . . .
(having a population | estimated to be more than three
million persons) has now a population of barely two
hundred persons."]
Lowell, A. Lawrence. "The Judicial Use of Torture. Part
I." Harvard Law Review (1897): 220-233.
["Emergency powers have existed in Northern Ireland from
the beginning of the state in 1920.' Northern Ireland
came into being as a result of the partition of Ireland
by the British Parliament, whereby the six north-eastern
counties of Ireland remained an integral part of the
United Kingdom. Following partition one-third of the
population of Northern Ireland were Catholics who were
pre dominately Nationalist or Republican in ideology.' As
a consequence, partition was viewed as a huge gerrymander
and a denial of self-determination of the en closed
Nationalist minority.' Civil unrest has been a recurring
feature in Northern Ireland' and government has been
conducted by the dominant group (Protestant), without
consensus, since 1920."]
Meyer, Barbara Hochstetler. "The first tomb of Henry VII
of England." The Art Bulletin 58.3 (1976): 358-367.
Miller, Andrew G. " Tails of Masculinity: Knights,
Clerics, and the Mutilation of Horses in Medieval
England." Speculum 88.4 (2013): 958-995.
["In the days preceding the murder of Thomas Becket, the
archbishop of Canterbury (29 December 1170), members of
the Broc family servants of King Henry II (r. 1154 89),
who fought with Becket over the Canterbury estates during
his exile (since 1167) invaded the archbishop s park,
butchered his deer, and stole his hunting dogs. On
Christmas Eve, either Robert de Broc or his nephew, John,
went so far as to dock, or cut off the tail of, a horse
(or horses) in Becket s service carrying household
provisions; the horse was brought before the archbishop
for him to see. Contemporaries suggest that Becket
understood the overt message of terror, defamation, and
emasculation that the knights communicated through
attacking his animals."]
Neill, Michael. "Putting History to the Question: An
Episode of Torture at Bantam in Java, 1604." English
Literary Renaissance 25.1 (1995): 45-75.
["If the story seems stupid, that is only because it so
doggedly holds its silence. The shadow whose lack you
feel is there: it is the loss of Friday s tongue. . . .
The story of Friday s tongue is a story unable to be
told, or unable to be told by me. That is to say, many
stories can told of Friday s tongue, but the true story
is buried within Friday, who is mute. The true story will
not be heard till by art we have found a means of giving
voice to Friday."]
O Gorman, Daniel. "Mutilation and spectacle in Anglo-
Saxon legislation." Capital and Corporal Punishment in
Anglo-Saxon England (2014): 149-164.
["This chapter explores a particular type of corporal
punishment, one that has elements unique to later Anglo-
Saxon England. It makes its first appearance in the
Grately code of King thelstan, likely promulgated in the
late 920s. This punishment, which targeted minters who
struck coins in an unauthorized fashion, is found in a
section that appears to have been part of an earlier code
that had been incorporated into the Grately edict.
Denoted as clause 14.1 in its modern edition, the law
states: The same condign justice is directed towards
those minting debased coins in the code now known, rather
misleadingly, as IV thelred, conventionally dated to the
early 990s. Clause 5.3 decrees, with regard to those who
produce coins that are either of impure metal or
deficient weight: And they have ordained that moneyers
shall lose a hand and that it shall be set up over that
mint. In arranging for the display of the severed hand,
these two clauses added a new aspect to an established
form of punishment. Judicially sanctioned mutilation, in
the form of the amputation of a thief s hand, first
appeared in the Anglo-Saxon law codes at the end of the
ninth century in Alfred s domboc, both in his own laws
and in those which he attributes to his predecessor Ine.
Provisions for such mutilations became both more varied
and more frequent in the legislation of the later tenth
and early eleventh centuries, eventually incorporating
the foot, tongue, nose, ears, upper lip, and scalp and
dealing with crimes as varied as swearing falsely,
adultery and, most commonly, theft. A rationale for these
multiple prescriptions for bodily disfigurement is found
in the laws of Cnut, which state: thus one might punish
and at the same time preserve the soul."]
Smith, Gordon. "Lambert Simnel and the King from Dublin."
The Ricardian 10.135 (1996): 498-536.
["In the first weeks of Richard III s reign, a plot was
formed to release Edward V and York from the Tower of
London, but rumours were spread that these little princes
had already been killed by the new king their uncle. The
rumours about this crime spread amongst the rebels
planning to overthrow Richard III, and later abroad. Her
mother, Elizabeth Woodville, was induced to approve the
match, and the plot originally to release the princes
became part of a larger rebellion against Richard III,
led by the king s former ally Henry, Duke of Buckingham.
Buckingham s revolt failed in October 1483, and the duke
was executed."]
Swanton, Michael J. "'Dane-Skins': Excoriation in Early
England." Folklore 87.1 (1976): 21-28.
----
Also see:
[Runaway Slaves]
[Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or
Degrading Treatment or Punishment (CAT)]
[Istanbul Protocol]
[Chthonic Cults]
Runaway Slaves: Disability, Pirates and Fugitives
https://archive.org/details/hunt-kennedy2019/
The Guinea Pigs by John McGuffin: UKUSA Torture & the
Irish Republican Army (IRA)
https://archive.org/details/guinea-pigs_mcguffin1974/
["John Swain, A History of Torture (Tandem Books, 1965).
L.O. Pile, in his History of Crime in England, points out
that a license to torture was found in the Pipe Roll of
34 Henry II."]
[...]
Date Published: 2023-12-23 03:47:39
Identifier: lawful-mutilation-torture-medieval-anglo-code
Item Size: 1055085624
Language: eng
Media Type: texts
# Topics
Dominican Republic
Haiti
Torture
Anglo Law
England
Genocide
Treason
Loyalty
Fielty
Punishment
Mutiliation
Cruelty
Emergency Powers
War Powers
Patriot Act
AUMF
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