Torture was certainly widespread across the medieval world. Public exhibitions of torture and punishment being exacted were also common, but were not just gruesome displays intended to titillate and horrify: Sean McGlynn has suggested that they acted as ‘reassurance that justice was being served to protect society’.
Physicus means what in medieval europe skin#
Other medieval torture methods included stress positions – a method approved of in 2003 by Donald Rumsfeld – and flaying, which was most commonly associated with martyrs such as St Bartholomew (the patron saint of parchment-makers, bookbinders and other trades reliant on the removal of skin from flesh). Due to its illegality in England, Edward II was very resistant to papal orders for the investigation of the Knights Templar for heresy and ultimately they were tortured according to ‘ecclesiastical law’ rather than English law.įire was used in various forms, in burning feet, or in heating iron boots or devices such as bars to be held. At times it aimed to follow the Classical model in practicalities as well as ideology: Aristotle believed that confessions withdrawn by torture were unreliable – understandably – and so very often the goal was to stop the torture before confessions were made, or if that were not possible, to allow the victim to recover before re-confessing. While illegal in England, torture was still used on the Continent as a means of extracting proof. The death penalty could be applied without the need for the confessional evidence torture might provide.
Physicus means what in medieval europe trial#
Under trial by jury, torture was rendered unnecessary. Until the 13th century, torturous methods had been used by the state and the church in the pursuit of justice: ordeals by fire or by water under supervision of a priest were used to determine guilt. For example, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle describes Stephen’s rebelling barons in the 12th century torturing people for money, but English common law in the later medieval period made it illegal to mistreat a prisoner before they had been found guilty. While blood-eagling may have been a myth, torture was certainly a fact of the medieval period although its legality and application varied widely across Europe. Despite a lack of evidence to support it, the myth has persisted from the 12th century until today, in large part because it so perfectly emblemises our perception of that time as violent, lawless and needlessly brutal. Despite appearing in multiple sources such as Saxo’s Gesta Danorum and sagas of Ragnar Loðbrok, blood-eagling is most probably a misreading of poetic metaphor. It was at this point that the berserker myth also took hold. The myth has been around since the 12th century when an antiquarian revival in north-western Europe popularised the legend of the vicious Vikings. The English kings Ælla and Edmund were said to have been victims, among others. This phenomenon is encapsulated in the mythical rite of blood-eagling, the ritualistic killing of an enemy by splitting their ribs and spreading them to look like eagles’ wings. Medieval men of letters, like their modern counterparts, could sometimes be over-eager to recover the colourful rites and leafy folk beliefs of their pagan ancestors. The ‘othering’ of a group or a period is by no means a modern phenomenon: barbarian, regardless of whether or not its origin is a joke at the expense of foreign-language speakers (bar-bar-bar), has been used derogatively in Sanskrit, Greek, Latin and English to distance a community from its neighbours and, to the Anglo-Saxons, wealh meant both a foreigner (now ‘Welsh’) and ‘slave’. It is an act of distancing, a separation of ‘us’ from ‘them’, that removes them from our current definition of humanity and society, and exculpates us from any kind of association with their actions. As Clare Monagle and Louise D’Arcens have said, ‘When commentators and politicians describe Islamic State as "medieval" they are placing the organisation opportunely outside of modernity, in a sphere of irrationality’. That is, the creating of an ‘other' to contrast with one's own identity (the modern versus the medieval, or ‘West' versus ‘East’), and, through that contrast, to celebrate our perceived progress or difference in a way that is often also exoticising. The use of medieval in this way has been widely discussed, and is not dissimilar to Orientalism. In particular the recent actions of ISIS and their treatment of prisoners have been called 'medieval’ by journalists, commentators and bloggers alike. The word medieval is often treated as synonymous with filth, lawlessness and brutality.