A woman is dragged from her house in a little hamlet in rural Germany.
A crowd of people stands in the mud shouting, “Witch, witch, witch!”
As she is tied to a post, a hooded figure appears, looking something like a medieval
painter and decorator.
He aint no painter.
If you’ve been watching our punishment series of shows over the last few years you’ll
know that the past was pretty grim for a lot of people accused of crimes, but it should
be said that sometimes the horrors of history were exaggerated or even made up.
Still, did the Romans have elephants squash people for fun?
Yes.
Did the ancient Chinese flay a woman’s face over a conspiracy in a harem?
Yes, they did.
Did the British open up a man’s stomach, pull out his guts, chop off his manhood, and
remove his limbs, all in the name of justice?
Yes, and what’s more, the crowd loved it just as many Americans today love Super Bowl
Sunday.
Punishments back then were often public events.
That’s why they usually took place in the town square or close to a market.
If you were a trader or even a purveyor of your own body, execution or torture days were
good for business.
Witches really drummed up a crowd.
People would travel for miles to see a witch being punished in the town square.
Usually when there was a witch weekend the punishment for the accused woman would be
to be put in the pillory.
When women, or men, were pilloried, often the crowd would come and throw mud or feces
at them.
Sometimes stones were used.
That would rearrange a person’s face or kill them.
All this is documented.
You have absolutely no reason to disbelieve stories that contain information about people
being brutalized in the past by the authorities or the dumb mobs.
Still, when we tell you about a torturer that used lawn tool from hell, you’d probably
be skeptical.
Let’s investigate the matter.
If it existed, the spiked hare could come in a couple of forms.
One form was the stationary spiked hare and the other was a handy transportable spiked
hare that a torturer could take with him to the market square to get a witch to admit
she’d turned her neighbor into a slug.
It was basically a roller attached to a stick.
The roller was covered with spikes.
If you’ve ever worked in the landscaping business, you might have seen a similar tool
called a “Lawn Spike Aerator.”
Instead of popping holes in the grass, the spiked hare would put holes in a person’s
skin.
If this device was rolled over the victim a number of times, it could lead to an infection
and death, especially given the fact torture devices weren’t generally sterilized during
the medieval period.
The second version of the punishment was the stationary one.
Now the rollers were on top of some boards, kind of like a conveyer belt.
The person could just be pulled over the top of the rollers, or in some cases, the machine
would also work as a stretching rack.
In that case, a person’s limbs could be dislocated while their skin was also shredded.
All that for just telling a bunch of friends in the tavern that you thought the king had
a rather big nose.
Very gruesome indeed, but in a world with breast rippers and head crushers, the spiked
hare was no more out of place than the sound of roosters crowing in the morning.
Nonetheless, what we need is proof it was used.
That’s actually hard to come by.
It gets a mention in a book we found.
That was a 1767 dictionary written by a German guy named Johann Theodor Jablonski.
The dictionary was called, “General Lexicon of Arts and Sciences.”
In it, the spiked hare punishment is described, except the translation from German is “pecked”
hare.
According to the dictionary: “It is a roller with small, pointed pegs
stuck around it.
This is placed under the patient's back when he is stretched out on the bench and pulled
back and forth.”
The reason the device was called the spiked hare was that people when would cook a hare
over a fire they would often stab it to make little holes so it would cook throughout.
A person who’d been rolled with the torture device would end up looking like a spiked
hare.
It isn’t mentioned in too many texts, but we found another book that mentions it.
The book was written in 1859 and was called “The Witch Trials of the Two Cities of Braunsberg.”
The author, Jacob Aloys von Lilienthal, writes (translated from German), “Spanish boots,
spiked rabbits and similar designations of the tools of torture, if not to mockery, but
rather to a cruel joke that was allowed against the unfortunate victims.
“ In the book, “The Witch Hunt in Freiburg.
4th episode: From the torture of torture to a valid confession,” spiked hare devices
with iron spikes are discussed, although that book suggests that the stationary versions
of the device were the most in vogue.
In a book titled, “Torture: Persuasion at its Most Gruesome,” it is written that victims
of torture would sometimes be strapped into what was called “The German Chair.”
The author writes that the chair itself, being studded with spikes, was painful enough, but
if this bed of nails did not prove sufficient to extract a confession from the victim, then
the spiked hair was pulled out.
Another book, “History of the German People at the Close of the Middle Ages,” echoed
that statement, stating that the rolling pin of pain was used when other tortures had not
produced results.
The book says, “With instruments of this sort for extorting confessions, it is no wonder
that many quite innocent people should have pleaded guilty in order to escape the agonies
of torture.”
The book refers to a case in 1570 in the German city of Frankfurt on the Main.
The victim apparently went through all the various tortures the authorities had in their
arsenal, but he refused to admit to being part of any crime.
The last resort for the torturers was using a live rat that was placed under a bowl on
the victim’s flesh so that the creature would eat into the man’s wounds.
The author doesn’t say what happened after that.
The book cites a writer of the time named John Grevius, who wrote, “There are nowadays
more kinds of torture than there are limbs to the human body.”
With that in mind, while there aren’t too many historical sources talking about the
spiked hare, there’s no doubt the authorities, at least in Germany, could have resorted to
using such a thing.
Now you need to watch “Waterboarding - Worst Punishment in the History of Mankind.”
Or, have a look at...