We are all famlliar with the idea of some poor accused woman being sent to the steak to be burned. It is perhaps one of the most comon icons associated with witches and witchcraft, and the most widely known execution method for the witch.
There are countless images of women bond to a stake screaming in agony as the flames begin to lick at her feet and spread up her legs. Such images also appear within movies, but they are somewhat misleading, they do make a far more dramatic appeal.
Though it is true, as displayed earlier, there were tremendously horrible things done to men and women alike within privacy, but the last thing the Inqusition or the Church wanted was for these heretics, devil worhsipers, witches, to be made into some sort of martyr, for the crowd to actually feel any sympathy for them, so the idea of being burned alive is misleading. Of course I cannost say that it never happend, but it was not in fact standard practice.
Burning was indeed one of the most widely used methods of execution of witch’s but truth be told, the women were killed before the flames acutally began to touch thier flesh through a method of strgalation with the use of a garotte.
Either the executioner would use a rope, or he would use an instrument like the one pictured here.
At first, the garotte was simply hanging by another name. However, during Medieval times, “executioners began to refine the use of rope until it became as feared and as vile as any punishment of that dark era. European executioners first used the garotte to end the suffering of men broken on the wheel, but by the turn of the 18th century the seed of an idea involving slow strangulation was planted in the minds of Europe’s law-makers.”
At first, garottes were nothing more than an upright post with a hole bored through. The victim would stand or sit on a seat in front of the post, and a rope was looped around his or her neck. The ends of the cors were fed through the hole in the post. The executioner would pull on both ends of the cord, slowly strangling the victim.
The modified design we see here drove a spike into the back of the victim’s neck, parting the vertebrae as it strangled. Sometimes a knife was used instead of the spike.
