It’s the 16th century in England and you are the cook at the house of a nobleman.
That wealthy man has invited a lot of his friends around for dinner and you are responsible
for preparing it.
The elite at this time are incredibly cautious when it comes to eating, and often food-tasters
are employed.
On this night no one will do this frightening job.
17 of the people who eat your food become violently ill and some of them die.
You are accused of putting something lethal in the food.
Poisoning is viewed as the most heinous of crimes, and so you are sentenced to death
by boiling.
When that finally happens, spectators will be nauseated and shocked by what they see.
Even for this era, boiling someone alive was seen as over-the-top.
The true story we have just told you involved a cook named Richard Roose and he was accused
of trying to kill the man he worked for, who was the Bishop of Rochester.
The Bishop didn’t end up eating the food, but some of his guests did as well as some
of the servants in the house.
This was the time of King Henry VIII, and he was known to fear being poisoned like no
one else, which is likely why such a harsh sentence was passed down.
Even in those days, being boiled alive was stomach-churning to most people.
That’s why the English didn’t do it much.
Because so many elites feared their food being tainted often a food-taster would be hired,
but that wasn’t always because of poison.
Back in those days the food could not be refrigerated, so eating something rotten was very possible.
In view of this, just being a cook was quite a dangerous job.
In the case of Roose, he was tortured to extract a confession.
He was stretched on the rack, so you might think he’d say anything after that.
He admitted that he had put a certain white powder into the food, but said he thought
it was some kind of laxative and he had done it as a prank.
Yep, pranking goes back down the centuries.
He said he had been given the package by a stranger.
Some people thought the King himself could have been behind it, seeing as the Bishop
was one of his critics.
In the end Henry would order the Bishop’s death and it was the dreaded hanged, drawn
and quartered kind of execution.
Some other people believed it was someone related to the King in some way who got that
poison to the cook.
Roose was likely a pawn in a game he knew nothing about, and so the fact he was boiled
alive is sad to say the least.
The event was talked about for many years after.
Shakespeare alluded to it, writing: “What studied torments, tyrant, hast for
me?
What wheels, racks, fires?
What flaying?
Boiling In leads or oils?
What old or newer torture Must I receive..”
So, how did Roose’s boiling go?
His execution happened in London on 15 April, 1532.
The Chronicle of the Grey Friars of London described how the whole thing lasted about
two hours.
First Roose was tied in chains, and then he was hung up on a kind of scaffold above a
large boiling pot of water.
He wasn’t just sunk in and left there, rather he was lowered into the pot on three occasions,
with the order to do that “tyll he was dede.”
Bystanders said he “roared mighty loud” and some women who observed the event were
sick to their stomachs.
In England this method of execution would only happen one more time, again for poisoning.
In 1547, Edward VI put an end to it.
Prior to the English boiling people the death, the Romans had done the same to thousands
of Christians, but on occasions oil was used, or wax, or even wine.
The Roman emperor Nero was particularly fond of handing out this kind of punishment.
In the 13th, 14th and 15th centuries, people were thrown to the kettle, the cauldron, and
the pot, for all kinds of things, and it happened from Scotland to France to Germany and other
parts of Europe.
In the 14th century a nobleman in Scotland named William II de Soules was boiled alive
after he was accused of sorcery, although there are other takes on what happened to
him.
Unlike some of the punishments we have talked about in other videos, there is plenty of
written evidence that boiling happened and it happened quite a lot, especially to people
in the Middle Ages who had been accused of being counterfeiters and coin forgers.
It’s hardly a very creative way to kill someone and so you won’t be surprised that
boiling someone to death happened all over the world.
In 16th century Japan an outlaw-hero named Ishikawa Goemon went that way.
The stories of this man are part mythology, seeing as he was said to be a ninja with devastating
combat skills.
Goemon had tried to assassinate a despotic warlord but he failed, and his punishment
was to be boiled to death with his son.
We can’t vouch for the veracity of what happened next, but the story goes that the
son died first.
Goemon stood for a while longer holding up his son, and then he died.
In Asia there is also the case of a Sikh martyr who was put to the pot when he refused to
accept Islam.
These executions all happened a long time ago and we would like to think that in this
day and age no one anywhere on this planet is being boiled to death, although U.S. intelligence
in 2004 told us that two men in Uzbekistan were killed this way for being enemies of
the state.
Human Rights Watch wrote that the men’s injuries pointed to the fact they had been
boiled.
As for how this punishment might feel, well, you already know one man was recorded as howling
in pain.
It won’t be quick, and it will take some time for the organs to boil.
If the water is already boiling, as soon as the person is dumped into it their skin, flesh
and then their fat will cook.
That won’t kill them right away, unless they go into shock.
What will kill them is when their heart, liver, brain, stomach and everything else inside
start to cook.
We know more about this because people have accidentally been boiled to death when they
fell into boiling water.
In 1981 in the USA a man jumped into a hot spring to save a dog.
He was told not to go in, and he shouted at the shocked bystanders, “Like hell I won’t”.
He actually dived in.
He was pulled out and was still conscious, although he had sustained terrible injuries.
He told onlookers, “That was stupid.
How bad am I?
That was a stupid thing I did.”
He died the next day.
This just shows that a person can survive being boiled for some time, so all in all,
even for this series of shows, boiling is unbelievably brutal when it comes to terrible
punishments.
After that grizzly story we think you might need to hear some incredible survival stories,
so take your pick, “Insane Way A Man Survived 76 Days Lost At Sea” or “I Was Trapped
Underwater For 3 Days” both are really awesome and you won’t regret watching them!
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See you next time!