The Role Of Torture In Elizabethan England

“Queen Elizabeth was queen of England from 1558 until her death in 1603. Her reign is often called the Golden Age or the Elizabethan Age because it was a time of great achievement in England (Elizabeth 1).” Although a time of great achievement, many people of England were forced to turn to a life of crime, either because their peers shunned them or they were fortuneless. Many offenses were petty, but a lot of them were extreme. There were three main things that were most alluring of all, minor offenses and consequences, large-scale crime, and instruments for torture. Many of the trifling crimes were punishable by public shaming or manual labor. “ Justice had power to impose fines, and to consign an offender for a limited time to the house of correction at Bridgewell to labor on the treadmill, grinding corn for the poor, or to pick oakum for the use of the Navy (Liza Picard).” Examples of subsidiary crimes included gossip, wandering the streets inebriated, and cheating a customer. Cheating a customer would result in the finger pillory, which is a type of restraint that holds the finger at a bent angle that is very unpleasant. Minor punishments were not the end of the world, but they were very intrusive to
“Instruments and means of torture, for unproven crime, included the following: the rack, the scavenger’s daughter, the collar, the iron maiden, branding irons, assorted instruments designed to inflict intense pain (Elizabethan Crime and Punishment).” You could also expect a few other things, like The Pit, a 20 foot deep hole, The Rack, which tears off limbs, and The Little Ease, a small cave that is to small to stand up in. If an offense were worse enough, people would be hanged, decapitated, and even burned. If the executioner were feeling sympathetic he would then sprinkle gunpowder all over the ground before he lit the person. The gunpowder would then explode making an easier way out for the