How common was torture in the Middle Ages?

Do want actual torture (strappado, water boarding) or obscene punishment (what everyone usually means when they say torture)?

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>>2080309
What's the distinction?

>>2080364
"minor" torture was fairly common, especially to force confessions.
"obscene" torture was rare and reserved for special cases.

>>2080415
They also did pretty gruesome shit for executions. Like French revolution gets shit for decapitating thousands but fuck it was quick clean death at least. The shit they did under monarchy was way worse.

>>2080499
Like what?

>>2080545

I forget the official term for it but the English monarchy in the early middle ages would completely dismember a person accused of treason and send various body parts to different parts of the country.

>>2080659
>I forget the official term for it but the English monarchy in the early middle ages would completely dismember a person accused of treason and send various body parts to different parts of the country.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simon_de_Montfort,_6th_Earl_of_Leicester#Fall_from_power_and_death

Not that bad, but also pretty much the first example of this ever happening.

Fetched from his prison cell on the morning of 28 March 1757, Damiens allegedly said "La journée sera rude" ("The day will be hard"). He was first subjected to a torture in which his legs were painfully compressed by devices called "boots." He was then tortured with red-hot pincers; the hand with which he had held the knife during the attempted assassination was burned using sulphur; molten wax, molten lead, and boiling oil were poured into his wounds. He was then remanded to the royal executioner, Charles Henri Sanson, who harnessed horses to his arms and legs to be dismembered. But Damiens' limbs did not separate easily: the officiants ordered Sanson to cut Damiens' tendons, and once that was done the horses were able to perform the dismemberment. Once Damiens was dismembered, to the applause of the crowd, his reportedly still-living torso was burnt at the stake. (Some accounts say he died when his last remaining arm was removed.)

>>2080763

Didn't Foucault write that the crown actually turned and started to take Damiens' side when they saw his courage in the face of excruciating torture?

>>2080800
The king apparently appealed that the punishment wouldn't be so cruel but got denied. Kind of bonkers seeing as he was the one getting stabbed.

>>2080253
Very

thousands of innocents were tortured and brutally murdered by the bloodthirsty inquisitors every Saturday for hundreds of years

>>2080253

In the actual middle ages? Surprisingly rare. They liked grisly executions but torture doesn't really crop up until the renaissance. Medieval courts do actually seem to care about finding out the truth, rather than pinning the crime on some patsy and torturing him to a convenient confession.

>>2081350

Oh look, it's this shithead coming to wipe dung all over yet another perfectly good thread.

>>2081409
back to your rape dungeons, Torquemada

>>2080253
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8SoOK8N5ZV0

>>2080253

Torture being common is not the fucked up part, its that random folks would gather, watch, and applaud some messed up shit.

>>2081404
And even the Renaissance useage was fairly restrained, at least Spain and Italy (can't say much about the rest of Europe since I don't actually know how closely they followed Roman Law). Roman law dictated that torture was allowed only once on any given suspect and that they must repeat the confession while not under duress.

>>2081471

It was probably part spectacle and part wanting to see justice being done.

"Wow they're hanging those three rapists the watch caught in the act last month" "good, fuck those bastards, let's go watch them swing".

If they were going to hang Ian Brady live on BBC ONE tomorrow, they would probably get a massive audience too.

>>2080253
Fairly common.

Prisons were a rarity, so for crimes not worth of death or banishment, corporal punishment was common. Beatings, branding, mutilation, being put in the stocks, dunking, etc. were all used for moderately seriously offenses.

>>2081488

I definitely agree with you. It is probably an innately human reaction.

But I think that hangings are a bit different than being drawn and quartered, or some of the equally messed up stuff.

>>2081404
This.

It should be considered that societies were a lot more microcosmic at that time and people generally knew each other and had ties to each other in some way. While crime certainly happened, it was usually "family business" in some way and agreements were usually reached in somehow.
This changed in the late middle ages, when vagrants became more common and people became more urbanised. Finding out about guilt became more important because people didn't know whom they could trust any more with more foreigners around who had no ties to local families and thus nobody to vouch for the integrity of their word.