Okay, without looking, what do you picture when you see the phrase “broken on the wheel,” as in the old-timey medieval execution method?
(WITHOUT LOOKING.)
LIKE SELF, you probably had a general sense of some bejerkined fellow stretched out over a big wheel (possibly the kind of wheel that spins on a water-mill, possibly a big ol’ wagon wheel; either one) and then sort of…somehow…stretched to death? LIKE SELF, your sense of history is unhelpfully vague. But the concept definitely involves being strapped to a wheel, and contorted into all sorts of unhelpful positions; it’s a bizarre and an alien image, right?
WRONG. THAT IS NOT HOW A PERSON IS BROKEN ON THE WHEEL. HERE IS HOW A PERSON IS BROKEN ON THE WHEEL, AND IT IS THE MOST DISAPPOINTING THING I HAVE EVER LEARNED:
This is from The Faithful Executioner, which is easily the greatest book in the world, but I have never been more disappointed than when I saw this sketch of Meister Frantz executing his own brother-in-law “on the wheel” – by simply picking up a big wagon wheel and slamming it into him.
That’s it. That’s the eerie, vaunted, made-much-of medieval torture device. That’s THE WHEEL. They tie you to the ground and some beefy, thatch-headed, doubletted executioner flings a wheel at you until you are dead. It’s just being beaten. They could just as easily fling a large rock at you, or a sturdy antimacassar, were one readily available.
“Fling the wheel on him, lads,” the figures seem to say. “Never mind the misleading turn of phrase ‘breaking on the wheel. Merely fling a wheel at his joints until he dies, PROSAICALLY AND DISAPPOINTINGLY.”
Wikipedia’s even worse:
“Alternatively, the condemned were spreadeagled and broken on a saltire, a cross consisting of two wooden beams nailed in an “X” shape, after which the victim’s mangled body might be displayed on the wheel.”
THAT DOESN’T EVEN INVOLVE A WHEEL UNTIL THE END, THAT’S JUST BEING BURIED ON A WHEEL
“During the execution for parricide of Franz Seuboldt in Nuremberg on 22 September 1589, a wheel was used as a cudgel. The executioner used wooden blocks to raise Seuboldt’s limbs, then broke them by slamming a wagon wheel down onto the limb.”
WHY NOT JUST USE A CUDGEL THEN
“In France, the condemned were placed on a cartwheel with their limbs stretched out along the spokes over two sturdy wooden beams. The wheel was made to revolve slowly, and a large hammer or an iron bar was then applied to the limb over the gap between the beams, breaking the bones. This process was repeated several times per limb. Sometimes it was “mercifully” ordered that the executioner should strike the condemned on the chest and abdomen, blows known as coups de grâce (French: “blows of mercy”), which caused fatal injuries.”
I don’t know. That helps a little, I guess. But knowing that just as often as not, being broken on the wheel just meant getting beaten with one?
Nothing’s any good.
Tags: execution, history, nothing is what it seems, the wheel
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This just means that the practice is ripe for redefining, popularizing our own method. Perhaps in a shirtless, angry lady-mob.
Ooooh! I’ll get the torches.
Some of those portraits of ladies from Mallory’s post should’ve had them attacking with wheels.
WOW THAT SUCKS. man! I thought it was like the rack + waterwheel dunking.
Well I am VERY disappointed. I always imagined someone was strapped to the outside of the wheel, and then they turned the wheel somehow and they got all smooshed. It’s not perfect but it’s better than this! Did they just run out of cudgels one day and the closest heavy thing at hand was a wheel?
This is exactly what I thought!
Yeah, like if your torso was tied to the wheel, but your wrists and ankles were tied to the ground NEXT to the wheel and then they turned it? That makes sense.
Yeah, I thought you were like wrapped around the outside and then rolled down a hill or something. Maybe a rocky hill.
I pretty much thought it was being strapped to a wheel then rolled down a hill where the wheel…smashed? Fell in the river? I don’t know.
That’s what I imagined until I found out about the French version Mallory quotes, which still makes SOME sense – you are on a wheel, and being broken. I never knew it could mean being broken WITH a wheel. What’s the point of that?
My vote was going to be for ‘spun on a big wheel until somehow death occurs.’ I am so sad I was wrong, and uncertain whether my idea of breaking on a wheel would make me a better/more inventive medieval torturer, or just very, very ineffective.
The Princess Bride torture involves a water wheel and I just assumed that’s what it meant. Turns out? 100% fiction, which is disappointing.
AW MAN I really thought it was this! Like, I read terrifying descriptions in Catholic school of St. Catherine’s martyrdom on a spiked wheel and it sounded SO METAL but if she was just beaten with a spiked wheel then that is stupid
https://frankmcandrew.files.wordpress.com/2014/08…
That’s what I always thought it was, too! Only with bigger spikes. I’m so disappointed.
Clearly the absence (under-representation? were there women executioners?) of women in the executioner role inhibited the growth of the whole profession.
OH MY GOSH
this comment just reminded me of reading about executioners and gravedigging and sewer-clearing families and such back in Ye Olden Tymes and how it really was a family affair and women and children were as likely to take part as men (except men were generally stronger and did the hard part of chopping heads off, when you need a nice, swift and sharp slice if possible or else you’re just hacking at the poor prisoner’s neck and no one likes that), and you had executioner family dynasties that intermarried just like the royals did, because no one wanted anything to do with them (and also they were forced to live outside of town).
I wish I remembered where I read it. Maybe it was linked from The Toast?!
I thought it meant being strapped to the edge of the wheel, and then something DROVE AROUND on TOP of you. It’s the only thing that made sense to me, with “breaking”.
Now I know that verbs are so very, very deceiving.
(but I’m a tiny bit glad that Historical People are a tiny bit less sadistic bastards than I thought they were?)
wait like you just hit someone with a wheel
I AM SO DISAPPOINTED
Me too! Some small part of me feels it’s wrong that I could just replicate it now!
SO disappointing. The world is carnage.
I have never been so disappointed IN MY LIFE.
THIS IS INTENSELY DISAPPOINTING AS SOMEONE WHO HAS ZERO INVESMENT IN MEDIEVAL TORTURE.
WHAT NEXT? THE IRON MAIDEN WAS REALLY JUST SOME HOT CHICK STARING AT YOU DISDAINFULLY WHILE STRAIGHTENING HER HAIR? UGH.
Even more disappointing. The Iron Maiden, like chastity belts, was just invented in the nineteenth century for stories. It was never used ever at all. Sorry.
WHAT
I know. On behalf of Europe, I can only apologise.
OH MY GOD EVERYTHING IS LIES
I don’t know whether this will make things better or worse, but some people don’t think the Dark Ages even existed: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phantom_time_hypothe…
http://the-toast.net/2014/05/07/phantom-medieval-…
I missed that post, and now I feel a fool. Thank you.
don’t feel like a fool! you should be like ‘haha, i get to experience this for the first time, this is awesome’
I visited the torture exhibit at my city’s Museum of Man last month and they had both an Iron Maiden and chastity belts on display, with information on how they were used. It said that the chastity belts were mostly used by female travelers as protection against getting raped.
Well, FifthBear, the German medieval punishment and torture museum I visited on Christmas vacation told a different story.
i love this comment, i keep thinking of it and laughing, all my coworkers are looking at me askance
Hmm. I did a seminar in images of martyrdom in medieval art history, and my understanding of breaking someone on the wheel was that the victim was tied to a large wheel and then beaten with clubs until all their limbs broke. Still not SUPER cool, but slightly less pedestrian.
Sounds like the method in the last example Mallory cited. That’s also how it was portrayed in Borgia: Faith & Fear (the Netflix show, not the Showtime show), which is a pretty awesome show for brutal Renaissance era executions (among other things).
SO BRUTAL. The cranky clamp-hat thing? OH GOD OH GOD CAN’T STOP WATCHING MAKE IT STOP.
That was also what I thought.
How did I come up with this idea of all limbs being broken in many places and then woven through the spokes of a wheel and left to an agonizing death, likely involving ravens?
This is all just so wrong.
I have read this exact thing somewhere too. I can’t remember where, of course, but I promise you didn’t make up this extremely disturbing thing to make up.
OKAY THANK YOU. It’s weird that that’s reassuring, but yes, it is certainly reassuring, thank you
oh wait, I just clicked through to the wikipedia article and it looks like this did happen. Eugh.
I just read it in The Hangman’s Daughter!
Tigana?
♫ Some bejerkined felloooow
Murdering a strangerrrrr
Murdering a strangerrrrr
With a stupid wheel ♫
…will be in my head all day now, thanks.
It’s what I do.
♫ And somehow you know
That strange as it seems
The sound of their death-screams
Will ring in your dreams ♫
(Orson Welles furiously applauding .gif)
That’s what I thought too. And isn’t it supposed to recall earlier methods, where the victim would be driven over by a cart, wagon, etc., to be crushed by the wheels?
To be fair, though, it makes St. Catherine of Alexandria’s martyrdom wayyy more cool. Like, “at her touch the wheel broke” or whatever the hell her vita says. I always assumed it meant that as they were tying her to the wheel, it cracked because god has mercy or something.
But this way, it’s like SEE WHAT HAPPENS WHEN YOU HIT ME WITH YOUR WHEEL ASSHOLE? FUCKING DO IT AGAIN I DARE YOU
Don’t forget that part of the official legend is that spokes broke off and impaled some on-lookers.
I hope she sprang up into a ninja pose and shouted “BOOYAH” at that point. That’s what I would do, anyway.
“Go ahead, break a chair on me.” Now I have an image of swole St. Catherine flexing her abs and the enormous wheel just splintering into fragments against her rock-hard muscles. “Ha ha! Try again, Satan!” ::rips off arms of garment, flexes::
So lame. My childhood is ruined.
My only comment that has not already been made is this: I would not like to sit on the chair that on it has the antimacassar that a person could use to beat someone to death!
Mallory, now I’m concerned that you don’t know what antimacassar means.
You probably COULD murder someone with antimacassars, if you shoved them down their throat until they choked.
Maybe it’s steel-plated…? (For caustic hair oil).
It’s a corruption of the original name, referring to its uselessness as a murder weapon, “antimassacre”.
Antimacassar is the best/most disappointing word. It sounds so impressive and then….it’s not.
The etymology of antimacassar will never not be delightful to me. See also “macadamized,” as in macadamized road, so named for a guy called McAdam who invented (you guessed it) a type of pavement. I can only hope one day a bastardized version of my surname will become a semi-obscure verb.
And then you have a tar macadam, which gets you tarmac, right? Words!
Not to be confused with Macadamia Nut Road, which is an actual road here on our island
Weirdly, I knew what antimacassar meant long before I realized what they were for, and hence, why they were named. I have no idea what the hell I was reading as an 8-year-old that had antimacassars in it but no one with explicitly oiled hair.
i learned from one of l.m. montgomery’s books, i think. somebody here probably knows which one it was, it is lost in the mist of my memory
I’m pretty sure it was Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm, actually, because me too.
OK, no, I checked, and although I’m certain Aunt Mirandy would have had antimacassars and plenty of them, that’s not the book I’m thinking of. But I have a clear memory of reading something as a child, with a man (an oily man!) sitting down in somebody’s parlor and someone Mirandy-like fussing because the man’s Macassar oil would ruin the upholstery and thinking, “Ohhhhhh….”
“Em’ly, why did you leave that antimacassar crooked?”
all part of mallory’s plan to make fiber artists mad:
*a painting of someone crocheting a granny square*
oh, you’re talking at me
while i’m looming this antimacassar
that’s
that’s a thing that’s happening
I THOUGHT IT WAS LIKE A DRESSER WHAT THE HECK IS IT??
A doily that goes on the back of a chair to absorb the hair oil worn by unctuous visitors to your pristine parlour.
Because not even your furniture is safe from being aggrieved by male attention.
You could be thinking of a credenza. You could fuck someone up with a credenza.
It had occurred to me that you might be thinking of a chifforobe. I don’t know why that occurred to me, except that they are both odd antiquated words.
Well, you know how she is with the fiber arts…
How disappointing. At least they had the right idea in Zurich; “…The final ninth blow is given at the middle of the spine, so that it breaks. Then, the broken body is woven onto the wheel (i.e. between the spokes), and the wheel is then hammered onto a pole, which is then fastened upright in its other end in the ground. The criminal is then to be left dying “afloat” on the wheel, and be left to rot.”
I refuse to believe this and assert that it refers to being crushed under Fortuna’s wheel. http://www.brown.edu/Departments/Italian_Studies/…
The day that I learned roue meant someone who was broken on the wheel was a happy, happy day.
Please, no one ruin the rack for me.
It’s actually just a clothing rack and you put all your clothes on it and freeze to death in the chilly night. Sorry.
Noooooooooooo
It was a real thing but disappointingly, used very, very rarely…my visit to the torture chamber in the Tower of London was far more boring than you would expect….apparently they weren’t into torture as we’ve all been led to believe, it’s all lies!
Watch the old “Spanish Inquisition” sketch from Monty Python.
Thatch-headed, and also pin-headed. Look, I’m into big forearms as much NAY MORE than the next woman, but dude, your head is TINY.
My dad got me that book for some reason! Which means he saw it, and thought of me.
I have nothing else to say besides it really is awesome, and you all should check it out.
A+ Dadding.
I… I actually like this. Lifting a big assed thing over your head and whomping it down on somebody’s bones HAS TO BE SO SATISFYING, even if it’s a wagon wheel and not an entire tree or some other awesome thing. Assuming they’re hitting them with the edge and not just flailing the flat end at them ineffectively, that’ll hit with a LOT of force, much worse than a club. Wheels are heavy as heck! So the “breaking” part definitely still makes sense.
Imagine Kathy Bates doing this in Misery and your perception of it will improve drastically, I assure you.
I don’t know about “improved,” but the visual is much more … vivid … in my head now so thanks for that
What on earth was going through medieval mens’ minds when they thought “We should beat the condemned with this awkward and heavy contraption meant to move goods across the country, as opposed to the bludgeoning instruments we already have at our disposal.” Is this the 16th century version of hitting a wrestler with a chair in the Octagon?
It really seems like more trouble than it’s worth, honestly.
I’m hearing this in Eddie Izzard’s voice. His stage movements are going to be funny too
Then what exactly was a spiked wheel, like the one saints were killed on? Was it any different, or just a spiky thing to beat people with?
That is the Catherine Wheel, and it’s apparently an artistic device invented by two monks who also were not sure what “breaking someone on the wheel” meant.
EVERYTHING IS THOSE DAMN ARTIST MONKS’ FAULT.
I always assumed it involved being tied/nailed to the outside of a (possibly spiked?) wheel and then ROLLED. Maybe over more spikes.
I thought that too!
It’s gotta be related to the torture involving stuffing people in internally-spiked barrels and rolling them down very steep and rocky hills, because I always thought the two were similar myself!
Anyway friends, all of this talk got me interested to look up Saint Catherine of Saint Catherine’s Wheel, and here is a picture of her marrying baby Jesus.
Missing an opportunity to bust out Parmigianino, the master of weirdly sexual babymarriages: <img src="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/4a/Parmigianino_-_The_Mystic_Marriage_of_Saint_Catherine_-_1527-31.jpg" target='_blank'> ” target=”_blank”>;http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/4…>
whaaaaaat
Baby Jesus totally looks Photoshopped in by someone who doesn’t understand scale.
Guys that’s his foreskin he’s marrying her with you know!!! St. Catherine of Alexandria is my favorite medieval not-really-acknowledged-anymore saint, and I’m the lady mentioned in the intro to this retelling of her story: http://bettermyths.com/saint-catherine-of-alexand… which I would like and reccommend even if I hadn’t requested it. Except now, when I think about the story, instead of her strapped to the wheel, I picture it being chucked at her and then bursting into splinters and flying at everyone, which explains the line in the version I read where it said, “the wheel burst into splinters the moment it touched her skin,” so then not in some isolated torture chamber or something, but like in midair, just before appearing to land. Still visual and thrilling, like all the versions of her crazy story…so this discovery isn’t a universal disappointment is it?
As antiquity got newer one of the guys said, “Look, I don’t want to strap down another one and rotate him and bludgeon his bones as they come around, like it’s carousel Wack-A-Mole or something. Are we advancing toward efficiency or not, as torturers? Let’s just tie him groundwards in a stationary position and take turn launching the wheel ITSELF at his supine form. Let the Internet-enervated ages worry about our grammar. Broken at, broken by, whatever. We got the job done.”
“I can’t be arsed with this right now. Just tie the bugger to the ground and give me the wheel.”
I just came down here to comment about something else but wanted you to know that I love the idea of “antiquity getting newer,” like it was sand in an hourglass marked “antiquity,” and everyone in the period was watching the sand running out like, “okay guys, only a couple more decades of just making stuff up, then we have to settle down and start making inferences based on observation, okay? Just One more absurd superstition okay? Then that’s _it_.”
Ha! Thanks. It’s good to be got.
There are a mix of emotions here. I am shocked and saddened by the pedestrian nature of being “broken on the wheel” in comparison to how I imagined it while also deeply horrified by said sadness. Do I wish people were put to death in an even more grotesque fashion? What does that say about me as a person?
Medieval historian here (trust that I don’t say that boastfully, just to establish a little credibility). The uses of the wheel outlined above are only a few of the variations on this punishment, and not the most barbaric. In the worst version, which was typically reserved for serial killers or those guilty of treason within the Holy Roman Empire, the victim was strapped to a wheel and then the bones were broken with an iron hammer. The article gets that much, but omits that on some occasions the *still-living* victims then had their broken bones “braided” into the spokes. The victim on the wheel could then have been hoisted up onto a pole to slowly die and then rot, on display as a deterrent to other would-be criminals. So yeah, not the best way to go… They found the remains of the a victim of this method of execution in Germany recently: http://www.thehistoryblog.com/archives/30463. Here’s a first-hand account of the punishment from eighteenth century France: http://books.google.com/books?id=I2TF480urGoC&….
Okay so I’d like to introduce the Brazen Bull. http://youtu.be/fBN_3YJKZrY
I highly recommend the Rothenberg aub Der Tauber Torture museum while celebrating Christmas in Germany. It’s where I learned about the cage for drowning “bakers of too small bread,” among other methods of justice.
http://www.history-of-germany.com/?scid=rothenbur…
It always takes me a minute to reorient when people talk about punishments for bakers. I know why bakers were regulated so strictly, and how important bread was, but GOSH punishments were harsh.
I first came across breaking on a wheel in this context . Just in case anyone needs some English establishment versus the Rolling Stones in their afternoon
‘Who breaks a butterfly upon a wheel?”
Or, in a different rock context, “The wheel breaks the butterfly.”
Yeah, I always thought it meant you were stretched along the rim of the wheel until it broke your back. And possibly the wheel had spikes on it.
I am a little crushed to learn this is not the case.
But not as crushed as I might have been upon the wheel.
Ba dum-tish. Or ba dum-crack, as it may be.
I thought it meant they broke most of the bones in your body, then strapped you to a wheel, and as it rotated all your broken bones rubbed together and it was excruciating and horrible and you died?
this whole conversation reminds me that “hoisted on your own petard” has abso-fucking-lutely nothing to do with halberds or spears. :[
Okay this I also did not know, but on the other hand, in video games I’ve been blown up by my own bombs a lot more often than I’ve been stabbed with my own spears, so I’m strangely okay with it.
My only comment that nobody else has already made is that I love/hate hearing “coup de grace”* (finishing blow) mispronounced as “coup de gras”** (I don’t even . . . hitting something/one with fat?).
*grace – pronounce the soft “c”
**gras – “s” is silent
I’m a D&D player, and I’ve been pronouncing it “Coo Day Graw” is that not correct?
It’s Coo Day GRAWs?
I always imagined some kind of spikes were involved? I feel like this is a problem discussed in Catherine, Called Birdy, who didn’t know what it meant either and her patron saint was Catherine, who was supposed to be wheelied to death but who broke the wheel with her magic fingers and then was decapitated instead for being a smartass.
Ah, okay, this actually explains a lot- I forgot she escaped the wheel via Jesus/God and they had to turn to plain ole’ decapitation. Because I’ve been reading this thread all “Bu-bu-but Saint Catherine DEFINITELY went on the wheel” but if I just made that up because I’m a creep…
Also Catherine, Called Birdy! I remember enjoying it and being freaked out by midwifery/childbirth in equal measure.
That’s why a lot of the times in images of Catherine of Alexandria the wheel is broken! She’s one of the ones that only got executed once, and successfully, instead of some of the ones who were beheaded, burned, and stoned etc etc before finally being allowed to shuffle off the mortal coil and into beatification.
I came here to mention Catherine, Called Birdy! There was definitely one scene where they were having some kind of feast and the cooks made some kind of a marzipan/pastry depiction of Saint Catherine on the wheel in Birdy’s honor and paraded it around the hall.
On the one hand, this is incredibly disappointing regarding general medieval torture death.
On the other hand, this makes Pope’s line about breaking a butterfly upon the wheel so much funnier.
Imagine a meadow.
In that meadow is a butterfly.
A naughty one.
A very irritated executioner hefts a large wooden wheel at the butterfly.
It fails to strike the tiny fluttery target.
The executioner glares, grunts with effort, retries.
And retries
And retries.
MOVIES HAVE LIED TO US ALL.
I was thinking being strapped to a wheel (as if the person were a tire) and said wheel was attached to a carriage with people in it, like fancy people who paid big monies for such an honor, 6+ or whatever was the correct amount of people required to stabilize the carriage/provide enough weight, with like 68 horses attached to the carriage and they'd just start RUNNING, and then the tire/person would be fucked and we'd all be entertained.
I definitely imagined a medieval torture device but I thought the "breaking" part was figurative, like, when you give up and finally confess to the stuff they want you to confess to, they've broken you. On the wheel.
I, too, thought it involved more spikes and being rolled down hills, but this has all the class of being whacked over the head with the spare tire from an old Corolla. Why must history keep disappointing us?
I have a very important contribution to this discussion – please find attached a link to a blog post discussing whether or not the Duchess of Cambridge’s hats symbolically represent the wheel of St Catherine. I think they do, the argument’s flawless.
http://starsyncs.blogspot.co.uk/2011/01/kate-midd…
“It is not true that we have never been broken. We have been hit with wheels a lot.”
D: It doesn’t have the same ring to it.
“This furious, brutal, agonising death is far too mundane!” Is this the opinion of a psychologically healthy person?
Mind you, I also thought it meant being stretched out on a wheel, like a mill or a water-wheel, and find the truth disappointing.
Whyyyyyyy is medieval torture fun to talk about and wish it was as gruesome as possible, while modern-day torture is obviously abhorrent and not cool at all? Is it because it happened so long ago, everyone’s dead several times removed? I don’t get this.
I HAVE NO IDEA but it is weirdly fascinating! Possibly because it is horrifying but we have zero obligation to do anything about it? So we can just embrace the horror like it’s fictional?
Or maybe it’s the juxtaposition of those silly-looking-to-us old timey illustrations and S’s that look like F’s with super disturbing events?
I dunno.
Medieval stuff has a kind of personality to it, a creative, unrestrained brutal viciousness.
Modern stuff is kind of … lacking in that regard. It is something thought up by a committee of amoral dudes who don’t really care, and a bunch of lawyers working hard to make the entire thing appear “not-torture, lawl”.
That’s not exactly how I’d describe the process of pureeing food to inject in someone’s asshole, though.
But that’s exactly what it is.
It’s uninspired (just piggybacking on old-timey research developed in medical contexts) and kinda underhanded in a very typical, lawyerly fashion (they specifically piggyback on deprecated medical procedure so that they can plausibly deny they had torture as intention).
Compare with the over-the-top stuff medieval folks came up with. You can’t deny they were more creative about horribly maiming their fellow humans, and they absolutely did not care what a lawyer would think.
I think that you are essentially correct. The foundation is that your bones are so broken that your limbs can be woven in the spokes and then left to die in agony.
Using the wheel to break bones or as a platform could have been an element of imagery, but I believe the horror stems from the job not being done until the bones were broken to the extent they could be woven around the spokes.
The second image shows this being done.
Prepare to be delighted by beautifully illustrated French execution techniques, described in detail and performed by the saddest executioner. http://mangafox.me/manga/innocent_sakamoto_shinic…
If it’s any consolation, Ravaillac (assassin of Henri IV) was executed in 1610 by having each of his limbs tied to one angry horse apiece, which then ripped him apart by pulling. Then he was drowned in boiling sulphur, just in case.
I dunno.
Medieval stuff has a kind of personality to it, a creative, unrestrained brutal viciousness.
Modern stuff is kind of … lacking in that regard. It is something thought up by a committee of amoral dudes who don't really care, and a bunch of lawyers working hard to make the entire thing appear "not-torture, lawl".
But that's exactly what it is.
It's uninspired (just piggybacking on old-timey research developed in medical contexts) and kinda underhanded in a very typical, lawyerly fashion (they specifically piggyback on deprecated medical procedure so that they can plausibly deny they had torture as intention).
Compare with the over-the-top stuff medieval folks came up with. You can't deny they were more creative about horribly maiming their fellow humans, and they absolutely did not care what a lawyer would think.
This is colossal urge imprint it appealing this report is definite useful for me perceives for granting it. fulfill up the bringing system
I thought it was like keelhauling, but with a millwheel, so you bumped and bruised yourself on rocks and spokes and couldn’t breathe and then came back up and then had to sit there and wait while you spun back around.