Rats scurry around in the corner of the dungeon of Warwick castle, England, circa 1640. A man
in a hood, the chief torturer, removes a pair of red hot pincers from a fire. As he approaches the
prisoner, two men force open the man’s mouth and, with some difficulty, grab his tongue.
This is going to be very ugly…But before we explain the true horrors of the Oubliette,
we need to talk about dungeons in general. Some of the worst things that have ever
happened on this fine planet of ours have taken place underground in the places we
call dungeons, as well as a certain type of dungeon we’ll describe soon
called the oubliette. We’d like to tell you that such places of horror no longer exist,
but then a man named Geoffrey Portway might say, “Hold My Beer.”
This British man was arrested in the US in 2012. The media explained how he was planning to kidnap,
torture, and finally eat people in the soundproof dungeon he’d built under his
house. Police found a homemade coffin down there, steel restraints, scalpels,
a cabinet freezer, and what they described as “butchering kits.”
Thankfully, no one ever ended up being imprisoned in his dungeon.
A historian might tell you that this guy wasn’t much different from some of the past fiends that
have graced our planet. Being locked in a dark room is a fear that will never leave humans,
which is why it’s been a popular form of punishment since the beginning of history.
Nonetheless, imprisoning people in large numbers was not very common in the past. What seemed to
tickle the ancients' fancies was what you might call the spectacle of fear. That’s
when the authorities did things to criminals that were so atrociously violent that the
people watching thought maybe crime doesn’t pay. The Romans sometimes had people ripped apart by
wild animals in an arena. The Chinese had people flayed. Centuries later, the Brits,
by law, could have had a person boiled alive or eviscerated and chopped into pieces.
If someone committed a lesser crime in the Medieval era and beyond,
perhaps for something as benign as vagrancy, they could have well ended up being put in the stocks.
This was a form of humiliation more than anything else. For the victim, it often
consisted of neighbors visiting them with a bag full of cow poop to smear on their face. In 1351,
it was written in England's Statute of Laborers that a person could receive this punishment
if they were merely “unruly artisans.” The stocks might be compared to getting
a ticket these days or ending up blocked out of your Twitter account for a while.
Back then, being forced into the stocks was a walk in the park, sometimes literally but
also sometimes figuratively. The dungeon was another level of pain.
It was often the halfway house before people met their death on the scaffold,
but sometimes these places were absolutely designed to prolong someone’s torment.
Let’s face it; if you’re a sadist, you can have a lot of fun with a dungeon.
The imprisoned person might also have been useful if still alive,
being used as a bargaining chip. Sometimes it made more sense to keep a prisoner rather than have him
disemboweled, and his head stuck on a bridge. A now-famous example of this was the keep that
was built at Corfe Castle in the south of England sometime in the 11th century.
One of the kings who made good use of the keep was King John,
who historians often say had a very cruel side. Some academics have gone as far as to say John
suffered from “royal schizophrenia.” Still, in John’s defense, he was working in an era where
all royalty had to be constantly on guard since so many people were liable to rebel against them.
John saw threats everywhere, but his fear wasn’t irrational. This is why he sometimes
locked people up in his keep, so they could not challenge his authority. One of them was Eleanor,
Fair Maid of Brittany, who was put under house arrest for decades.
When Eleanor was first sent to his castle, she was accompanied by 25 of her knights, who were
also imprisoned. It seems John wasn’t as nice to those guys as he was to the women he kept. One
historian noted, “He kept his prisoners in such a horrible manner and in such abject confinement
that it seemed an indignity and a disgrace to all those with him who witnessed his cruelty.”
John had 22 of those knights starved to death. He locked them up, threw away the key, and had no
food sent to them. Starvation is a wretched way to die, and anyway, nobles doing that to other nobles
was frowned upon even back then. After a mass starvation episode at the bequest of John, let’s
just say his reputation wasn’t all that great. This is partly why some historians have said
John had a sadistic side, but it’s just one of many horrifying tales involving
this king. It’s also said that he starved a noblewoman to death. She was Maud de Braose,
wife of the powerful baron, William de Braose. It seems that even though William and John were
friends, Maud annoyed the king when she accused him of killing his nephew. He had her imprisoned
with William and their son at Corfe Castle. According to the book “History of the Dukes
of Normandy and Kings of England,” John threw them some oats and raw bacon and then slammed the door.
The story goes that when that door was opened again, the dead son was slumped
between his dead mother’s knees. It’s said that she had taken a bite out of her son’s cheek in
what was presumed to be an effort to survive. This news spread and shocked the people enough
that when John was forced to sign the Magna Carta in 1215, it contained a clause related to his own
behavior. That clause was numbered 39 and went: “No man shall be taken, imprisoned, outlawed,
banished, or in any way destroyed, nor will we proceed against or prosecute him,
except by the lawful judgment of his peers or by the law of the land.”
Dungeons became all the rage all over Europe, but as we said, sometimes they were underground holes
with hardly any light, and sometimes they were more like castle apartments with very
thick stone walls. The hole in the ground type could be accessed through a trapdoor, although
historians aren’t always sure if these places were used to keep people or just to store food.
These might be referred to as an “oubliette,” a French word that means “to forget.” No doubt
you’ve all seen such places in movies like The Count of Monte Cristo, where men are thrown
through a trapdoor into a very dark place. Such chambers could have been so small that
it was difficult to move around, making a stay there as hellish a punishment as was possible.
England’s Chillingham Castle had one. If you go there today, you can still see the
names of people scratched into the walls. As the rooms get smaller and smaller, you
eventually arrive at an iron grate in the ground where, according to the castle administrators,
the bones lying below are from an imprisoned person who was sent there centuries ago.
The castle is also home to some instruments of torture, including a rack to stretch people and
a wheel on which to break bones. It’s said that during the 13th and 14th centuries,
Scottish soldiers working on the side of the revolutionary William Wallace were
interrogated and killed in those dungeons. One of the men who was responsible for much
of this violence was named John Sage. He is said to be the man who designed the torture
chambers where possibly thousands of men, women, and children were interrogated. That’s
why under King Edward I, Sage acquired the epithet “The Butcher of the Scots.”
It’s hard to say if some online resources exaggerate how much violence was perpetrated
by Sage, as such resources do tend to get carried away at times. For instance, some say Sage used
the "Iron Maiden torture device,” but medieval historians will tell you that no such device
was ever used. They were probably created many years after they were supposedly used.
Did Sage really walk around with a black hood made from the skin of his victims? Did he torture
around 50 people weekly over a period of years? Is it true that Sage was making love on his torture
rack when his lover died? And was her father so powerful that he made sure Sage was hanged by
the neck, and while he was still breathing, the people of the town slit off his fingers, toes,
genitals, ears, and nose? They obviously didn’t much like their local butcher.
You could do a castle tour of Europe and find that torture devices were
most likely employed at some point in many of the places you visit. Such devices were
used for breaking the bones of people’s feet. Heating feet over flames. Busting thumbs with
thumbscrews. Pulling people to the point of breaking on the rack. It all happened,
and we imagine a lot of the worst things that went down in dungeons were done so in secret.
If the authorities could rip people apart in public, they certainly had it in them to do
worse behind closed doors. Let’s remember the fate of William Wallace under King Edward I.
If you want to know anything about the life of Wallace, for God’s sake,
don’t look to the movie Braveheart as a place to form an opinion.
It’s about as true to reality as Tom and Jerry is to feline and rodent historical struggles, but
the English did indeed capture Wallace, and they made a meal out of his execution. He was dragged
through the streets naked, pulled along by horses as he was pelted with rotten fruit and whatever
else was on hand. He was later disemboweled and was likely able to see his intestines with his
own eyes, but he died soon after. His head ended up on a spike on London Bridge, having previously
been dipped in tar first so it would survive some months of that terrible British weather.
So, yes, we have every reason to believe that some extremely horrible things happened in
those European dungeons. When we tell you that at Chillingham, there were pots that
may have been used to boil people alive, you can believe it. Did the eye gougers get used,
or did people really have cages filled with starving rats placed on their bellies,
so the rats ate into an open wound? Yeah, we think that could have happened. Should
we believe the rumors that people thrown down into the oubliette fed on other prisoners’ flesh? Well,
we won’t say it couldn’t have happened, given the brutality of the times.
During the 16th and 17th centuries in the Tower of London, screams rang out from the dungeons
when certain VIP guests were there. The three main tools used by guards and interrogators
back then were the rack, the manacles, and something called the Scavenger’s Daughter.
That was a pretty cool name for what was a metal frame in which a person could
have his or her body bent into some really uncomfortable positions. Historians now say
that the very sight of something like the rack was enough to make people squeal. After all,
they were likely going to get burned alive or ripped apart anyway, so there was no point in
unnecessarily going through even more pain. The English were also quite aware that a person would
tell you anything, truth or lies when their joints were about to be pulled apart. Torture
wasn't always optimal for getting to the truth. Still, very bad things happened in those dungeons,
as Shakespeare wrote in Richard III about Pontefract Castle. This was fiction, of course,
but based on reality. Some of the lines go: “O Pomfret, Pomfret! O thou bloody prison!
Fatal and ominous to noble peers! Within the guilty closure of thy walls
Richard the Second here was hack’d to death.” And this brings us back to the start and the
infamous Warwick Castle, where tourists have been throwing up their breakfasts of
black pudding and fried white bread for years when hearing about the tales of past prisoners
there. We kid you not. Recently, the British press reported that the castle had to temper
its tours because they upset people too much. The Telegraph newspaper reported, “In the first
month since the dungeon opened, 15 people have fainted, and another four have vomited,
apparently due to fear…Guides demonstrate how prisoners used to have their tongues ripped out.”
Cool. We’d be up for a bit of that! There are plenty of stories to tell
since the castle was built for William the Conqueror in 1068. It was almost immediately
used as a place to sequester enemies, and in the 1640s, during the English Civil War,
the place was packed with imprisoned Royalists. It, too, had different types of dungeons over the
years, from a keep built on top of the grounds to an oubliette which was a fate worse than death.
A person’s experience as a prisoner there could differ greatly, as we’ve already explained
about other places. Some reports suggest folks had their tongues torn out there.
Lingual mutilation was certainly a thing in medieval times, a punishment perhaps
for people who had spoken out of turn. One of the torture instruments at Warwick is
pincers that could have been heated up and then clamped onto someone’s tongue. Alternatively,
a kind of metal mask might have been put on a person’s head,
which sometimes consisted of their tongue being pierced. These were called the branks.
Having your tongue pierced or your body stretched or just hanging from the walls
by manacles was pretty standard, so Warwick wasn’t any worse than other castles. It seems
this castle just puts on a more gruesome tour than some of the others, and of course,
anyone who has looked in the entrance of the oubliette will not forget that in a
hurry. This is how one person described his visit to Warwick’s oubliette back in 1973:
“I stood smelling the damp, cool, slightly fetid air rising from it. I thought,
with horror, of the people lowered into it and left to die. Left in the cold,
the dark, with the vermin from previous occupants crawling over them…Guards lowered a prisoner onto
the shaft. There was no room to sit, or lie, or squat, and sometimes no room to even turn around.”
If that were the case, we imagine the occupant of the oubliette would have wished they’d just
get it over and done with and killed him. Now you need to watch “Evil Punishments
Designed to be Worse Than Death.” Or, have a look at “How the British Royals Actually Make Money.”