It’s the Middle Ages and times have been tough for a peasant like yourself.
Drought and a subsequent poor harvest have devastated your people and widespread famine
is around the corner.
To make matters worse, taxes have been raised because your rulers are warring with other
rulers.
You’ve had enough of watching on as your children starve, but in the absence of Twitter,
seeking social justice will mean rounding up real people and stating your case.
Before you know it, though, you’ve been reported by someone and have quickly been
suspended from peasant duties.
Your interrogators aren’t interested in malnourished kids and dying crops, and as
they stretch your body on the rack you admit to more than you even did – which was only
get some folks together to talk about unfairness.
You’ve been branded a traitor, treasonous, and the worst is going to happen to you.
So, there you are, a brave warrior of social justice who only wanted some respite from
the demands of high taxes during a very hard time for peasants.
It doesn’t really matter that you didn’t kill anyone or start a riot.
What matters is you’ve been accused of plotting an Occupy the lord's manor movement.
Having been stretched on the rack you admitted to being somewhat disgruntled about watching
your children die in front of you and not being able to get your hands on that most
cherished commodity, bread.
You hardly started a peasants’ revolt, but a mere peasant get-together to discuss the
drawbacks of serfdom really got the nobility all hot and bothered.
They’re all too familiar with peasant revolts of the past, and any kind of insubordination
will be dealt with seriously.
That meant a medley of tried and tested cruel and unusual punishments for you as you informed
your torturers of your guilt and took a few other peeved peasants down with you.
You might be broken, but you’re not dead, and the nobility wants to make an example
of you.
What’s on offer?
Well, as they would like to make an example of you they want to make your death a public
spectacle.
Maybe after seeing you scream, the man in the street will think twice about complaining
about being taxed into starvation.
The nobility have a brainstorming meeting and try and think of some especially gruesome
punishment for you.
“Burned at the stake in full public view,” says one of the wealthy adjudicators.
“So passé,” someone retorts, “Burning is so 13th century…Come on guys, let’s
try and think outside the box.”
Another man puts his hand up and looks like he might have a good answer.
He says, “Hanged, drawn and quartered…but then we eviscerate him and stick his head
on a pike.”
He looks crestfallen when the boss replies, “Gilbert, you know very well we did that
last month.
It’s hardly original now, is it?”
“Ok, I’ve got one,” says a guy sat right at the back.
Without hardly looking up and with a mean glare in his eyes, he says, “We make a box
that looks a bit like a coffin, but shaped like a human.
We fill this with spikes, and when it’s closed all those spikes impale him….and
maybe we’ll leave some gaps where the blood will flow out.
It could look pretty cool.”
The boss rubs his whiskers and thinks for a while.
“Yes, yes, that might just be sufficiently brutal…and I like the streams of blood thing…very
Roman-esque.”
The scenario we have just outlined of course didn’t happen and we don’t need to tell
you that people didn’t speak like that back in the late Middle Ages.
What is true about that conversation is that the Iron Maiden, as well as being the name
of a British heavy metal band who wrote songs with names such as “The Number of the Beast”,
was indeed a box with spikes on the inside.
It looks something like the box an Egyptian mummy would be kept in, something called a
sarcophagus.
You can still find Iron Maidens in museums today (https://www.elitereaders.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/iron-maiden-torture.jpg
Credit: elitereaders.com).
They capture the imagination like no other contraption simply because they look so barbaric.
Any upset peasant who’d even heard about one of these would run to the hills if he
thought the nobles were after him.
The burning question, though, is where and when were they used and on whom were they
used on?
This part has troubled historians for years, but that hasn’t stopped numerous websites
just stating they were used, and including no more information.
First of all, we aren’t doing a show today on something we have just made up or found
on a dubious website that likes to say, “You won’t believe what happened next.”
Iron Maidens exist, and they have been around for quite some time.
A few of them are now artifacts that people can take selfies with in museums.
At the same time, Google Glass and Tmobile exist and no one uses them either.
Ok, so the first time anyone mentioned an iron maiden being used, much like the one
we are talking about today, was when a German philosopher by the name of Johann Philipp
Siebenkees talked about one.
He wrote that in 1515 a coin forger in Nuremberg had gone to bed for eternity inside one.
How did he know this?
He was writing in the late 18th century and no one seems to know how he knew about Iron
Maidens.
Well, he also studied ancient history and stories have been passed down from ancient
times regarding people being put to death in a rather uncomfortable box.
Maybe the philosopher embellished those boxes in his account.
For good reason there are skeptics, because after he wrote about those things people started
making them.
In the 19th century making iron maidens was all the rage, and that’s why there are so
many of them around today in museums.
If you’re from the U.S. you can see one for yourself at the San Diego Museum of Man.
The earliest iteration of the iron maiden was actually made in Nuremberg in 1802, after
Siebenkees’ account.
That one was destroyed in the second world war.
Why would people start inventing them in the 19th century and not using them?
One of the reasons they kept popping up according to scholars was linked to propaganda.
If people in the 19th century were told this is how people were punished in the Middle
Ages, they would think, “Wow, we have it so good today.
Hanging is like a slap on the wrist.”
It’s thought that Siebenkees made the entire thing up and there was no coin forger who
got punctured inside a spike-spangled sarcophagus.
It seems other countries just ran with the lie and also used the iron maiden as a way
to make people realize that the past was brutal and the present was just peachy perfect and
humane.
So, there you go.
In the Middle Ages and after there were methods of torture we find utterly repellent today
and there were gruesome ways people were executed, but the iron maiden was the invention of more
civilized people who wanted to paint their predecessors on planet Earth as savages.
And since you’re definitely not a savage do the civilized thing and watch another great
episode of The Infographics Show.
We’ve picked out two for you so click on this episode here or this one over here!