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Torture
(religion, spiritualism, and occult)The vast majority of the evidence obtained during the persecutions—evidence that purportedly showed witchcraft to be aligned with black magic and Satanism—was coerced from the accused through the use of torture. Doreen Valiente put it best when she said, "Were I to tell the full and detailed story of how the supposed followers of the Christian God of Love have smeared their blood-stained hands over the pages of human history, I would be accused of anti-Christian prejudice. Yet every detail of such an accusation could be supported by documentary evidence, in sickening abundance."
Torture was widely employed across continental Europe and also in Scotland. It was not permitted in England, although some witch hunters, including Matthew Hopkins, managed to skirt the regulations on most occasions.
In some trials the judge falsely pronounced that confession was obtained without the aid of torture. In his book Cautio Criminales (1631), Friedrich von Spee said, "I wondered at this and made inquiry and learned that in reality they were tortured, but only in an iron vice with sharp-edged bars over the shins, in which they are pressed like a cake, bringing blood and causing intolerable pain, and this is technically called without torture, deceiving those who do not understand the phrases of the inquisition." Doreen Valiente further commented, "The prisoner was stripped and made ready. Women prisoners were supposed to be stripped by respectable matrons; but in practice they were roughly handled and sometimes raped by the torturer's assistants. Then some preliminary taste of torture was inflicted on them, such as whipping, or an application of the thumb-screws. This preparatory examination was not officially reckoned as torture; so those who confessed anything under it were stated in the court records to have confessed voluntarily, without torture."
Heinrich Kramer and Jakob Sprenger's infamous Malleus Maleficarum of 1486 emphasized the appropriateness of torture, stating that only confessions obtained under such extremes might be considered genuine and valid. The two monks said, "Some are so soft-hearted and feeble-minded that at the least torture they will confess anything, whether it be true or not [author's italics]. Others are so stubborn that, however much they are tortured, the truth is not to be had from them. There are others who, having been tortured before, are the better able to endure it a second time, since their arms have become accomodated to the stretchings and twistings involved; whereas the effect on others is to make them weaker, so that they can the less easily endure torture."
Malleus Maleficarum prescribed first-degree tortures and second-degree, or "Final," tortures. Those of the first degree included being stripped and flogged, being placed on the rack, and being subjected to the "Spanish Boots," named from their use during the Spanish Inquisition. There were two types of boot: one was adjustable, like a vise, to crush the feet and legs; the other was a large metal device into which boiling water or oil could be poured. The second-degree tortures included the strappado, thumbscrews, squassation, and breaking on the wheel. In the city of Offenburg, Germany, the accused were strapped into an iron chair with a seat studded with iron spikes and a fire lit beneath it.
Accusors considered confession by the witch herself to be the best way to prove witchcraft and especially the Pact with the Devil. They believed that torture was necessary to obtain that confession. Many of the tortures applied are illustrated in contemporary engravings. One such illustration shows thirty people imprisoned in a small room, chained together in pairs. Deprived of food, they eventually became delirious through hunger and began tearing each other to pieces. Other illustrations show people stripped naked and dragged along a tightly-drawn rope which, acting like a saw, would cut the body in two. Some were tied to stakes with fires lit a short distance away, so that they would burn very slowly. Other methods included disemboweling, eye-gouging, flogging, burning, stretching on a rack, and pouring water into the stomach until it swelled and burst, as well as squassation and the use of ovens and red-hot pincers. One ingenious torture involved trapping dormice on the victim's stomach, with a bowl over them. A fire was then kindled on top of the bowl, prompting the dormice to burrow into the stomach in an attempt to escape the heat. This particular cruelty was committed in the Gueux, Holland (pictured in Theatrum Crudelitatum nostri Temporis, Antwerp, 1587).
A common torture was the strappado, from the Latin strappare, "to pull," which involved pulling the victim's limbs from the sockets. His or her hands were tied behind the back and then a rope passed over a pulley in the ceiling. Hauling on the rope, the torturers lifted the victim off the floor, then tied weights to the feet until the arms separated from their sockets. Additionally, the person was often raised to near the ceiling, then allowed to fall but stopped just short of the ground. Pregnant women were allowed to land on their belly.
Other extreme tortures included the cutting off of hands and ears, immersion in scalding baths laced with lime, and the searing of the flesh with red-hot pincers. If an accused witch later recanted his or her confession, he or she was immediately returned to the torture chamber. In 1630, in Bamberg, Germany, Barbara Schwartz was tortured eight times.
Age was no barrier to torture. The elderly and the very young were all subjected to the same atrocities. In Bamberg, in 1614, a woman of seventy-four died under torture, while in Catton, in Suffolk, England, an eighty-year-old woman was repeatedly forced to sit on a chair studded with the points of knives. In 1617, at Castletown on the Isle of Man, Margaretine Quane and her ten-year-old son were both burned alive at the stake. At Rintel, in 1689, a nine-year-old girl was flogged while watching her grandmother burn at the stake, and at Würzburg, Germany, in 1628, two eleven-year-old girls were burned.
Over the years authorites changed and with them, so did the methods of torture. In Alsace, France, in 1573, a woman was accused by the Protestants and found not guilty. Four years later she was again accused, this time by the Catholics. They tortured her seven times before obtaining a "confession," then found her guilty and burned her at the stake. Sir John Fortescue (In Praise of the Laws of England, 1468) commented on the French laws: "They choose rather to put the accused themselves to the rack till they confess their guilt. . . . Some are extended on the rack till their very sinews crack, and the veins gush out in streams of blood: others have weights hung to their feet till their limbs are almost torn asunder and the whole body distorted: some have their mouths gagged to such a wideness for such a long time, whereat such quantities of water are poured in that their bellies swell to a prodigious degree, and then being pierced by a faucet, spigot, or other instrument for the purpose, the water spouts out in great abundance, like the whale. . . . To describe the inhumanity of such exquisite tortures affects me with too real a concern, and the varieties of them are not to be recounted in a large volume."