A few weeks ago when we published our video on beheading we got a request.
Subscriber ‘mostly true’ asked “Can we get one on the Catherine Wheel?” and
who are we to say No?
So ladies and gentlemen here is our guide to the old method of torture and execution
known as “Breaking On The Wheel” So for those of you who are unfamiliar; the
Breaking Wheel or Catherine Wheel, due to its alleged connection to St. Catherine of
Alexandria, is a form of execution so brutal even the English left it well alone.
I know!!!
We have Hanging, Drawing and Quartering but stop short of this.
For this you have to go to continental Europe, particularly the Holy Roman Empire which comprises
much of Central Europe.
And you’ll need to go back to Tudor times for its heyday, although we can get references
to this all the way back to the sixth century.
We don’t have a huge number of primary sources remaining but it does appear in the Sachsenspiegel
or Saxon Mirror, which is the chief law book of the Holy Roman Empire, that part of medieval
Europe which is neither Holy, Roman nor an Empire, but I digress.
From the Sachsenspiegel we learn that this punishment is handed down to murderers and
arsonists but it is also used for street robbers and highwaymen, and execution for this may
sound harsh but remember, as we said in our episode on the Bloody Code, this is a time
before police forces so punishments are very heavy on deterrent.
So how does it work?
Well this is an execution in two parts, and the first part is very much designed so that
you do not die.
No, first, they just break your limbs.
This can be done by dropping a cartwheel on the respective limbs.
This is known as wheeling rather than breaking on the wheel.
Or they could lash the prisoner to a similar cartwheel and then deliver several good hard
whacks to the limbs with an iron bar or a large hammer.
Medieval Germans do like their large hammers.
If that wasn’t crazy enough, the number of strikes, the speed and the rhythm would
all be prescribed in the sentence.
German serial killer Peter Niers was convicted of 544 murders – he received 42 strikes
of the wheel before the rest of his execution was carried out.
FORTY TWO!
And he was still alive afterwards.
Now, however many strikes a sentence prescribed the end result was that the condemned man’s
limbs and plenty of other bones would be broken by the end of part one.
In many cases wooden blocks would be placed beneath the limbs to ensure breakage as we
can see in this picture.
Let’s get a contemporary description with this extract from an Irish eyewitness to a
later French breaking in 1788: “I have been to see a most stressful spectacle,
a man broken alive upon a cross, which they call breaking on the wheel….”
“The multitude beheld the executioner take up an iron bar and begin the tragedy by striking
his victim on the forearm, which being placed immediately over the notches was, by the blow
of the bar, smashed and crushed down onto it.
The next struck one of the legs in the same manner, then a thigh”… and well you get
the idea.
And once the limbs are good and broken it gets worse… we return to Paris in 1788:
“All the limbs of the prisoner being broken, the executioner looked at his watch and let
the prisoner remain in that deplorable state for some minutes according to his sentence”
Wow… but it doesn’t end there..
“On a signal given by the principal executioner they turned a windlass and gave the prisoner
a violent tug such as must have dislocated the vertebrae in the prisoner’s neck.
Then again took up the iron bar and gave the prisoner three most violent blows on the belly
and stomach such as must have burst the arteries, stomach and diaphragm into one mass of blood
and wounds” Ouch, and remember this is just part one of
the sentence, in this case the guy was still alive some fifteen minutes later when they
moved onto stage two.
In Germany the serious offences would be broken from the bottom up, i.e. starting at the lower
limbs and working up the body, more trivial offences would be broken top down, the upper
body blows being more likely to cause an accidental fatality.
Once part one of the sentence had been appropriately administered the shattered, but in many cases
still living, remains of the condemned would be twisted through the spokes of the wheel
before the whole contraption was raised up to the open air like a crucifixion and the
body left to die and decompose as food for the local scavenging animals and a gruesome
display to serve as a warning to others.
Sometimes the executioner was permitted to behead the prisoner as a mercy…
I know, what a treat, but mostly they were just left there.
Details are sketchy but we have an account of a 14th century murderer that not only stayed
alive, but remained conscious for 3 days, and a statement of another man remaining conscious
for 4 days and 4 nights.
Think about that for a moment.
But it’s not all doom and gloom, if the prisoner falls from the wheel alive or the
execution fails at all then that’s God’s judgement and away you go, or at least go
away as far as you can still walk.
In fact on 3rd August 1788, Frenchman Jean Louschart was even rescued from the wheel
when the crowds stormed the scaffold.
We even have medical textbooks of the time devoted to the treatment of injuries for wheel
survivors.
So, as we say, this is not an English method of execution but it has happened in Scotland
in the early 17th Century when it was carried out on servant Robert Weir for the murder
of Lord John Kincaid.
It turned out he had carried out the murder at the behest of Kincaid’s wife.
She was beheaded as a result.
It also happened on a number of occasions in colonial America, mostly as the aftermath
of slave revolts in the 18th Century French Colonies.
The attempted execution of Jean Louschart we mentioned a moment ago saw the end of Breaking
in the Wheel in France as post-revolution, the introduction of the guillotine gave a
more standardised, and much more fool proof method of execution, and within 50 years the
rest of Europe had followed suit.
The last known breaking took place in Prussia in 1841.
So how does it become the “Catherine Wheel”?
Well the story basically goes like this – St. Catherine of Alexandria refused to renounce
her Christian beliefs and was sentenced to be broken upon the wheel and legend states
that when Catherine touched the wheel it shattered into a thousand pieces and she was beheaded
instead.
It is also said that on beheading the wound flowed with milk and not blood.
But that’s her basic association with the wheel.
But there are a couple of problems when we talk about Catherine wheels.
The first being that she wasn’t actually martyred on the wheel, and the second being
that we cannot actually locate any hard evidence that she actually existed as a person.
The cult of Catherine starts in the early 6th Century, some 300 years after her martyrdom,
and there has been no evidence to suggest that breaking on the wheel was ever used as
a punishment in Egypt.
We’ve seen it in France, Germany, Sweden, Scotland, America and India, but never Egypt,
and modern scholars now believe the legend to be an amalgamation of St. Dorothea and
Greek philosopher Hypatia with Christianity replacing Greek paganism in the latter.
So when you light a Catherine Wheel on Guy Fawkes night, or Fourth of July or whatever
reason you have for that firework display – bear in mind that it represents a saint
we cannot evidence, a method of martyrdom that wasn’t used, on a festival that isn’t
about her.
Thanks for watching.