9 MORE BIZARRE, BRUTAL AND ABSOLUTELY BARMY PUNISHMENTS FROM HISTORY

In this third helping of history’s most bizarre and brutal punishments, we serve up nine more shocking, unusual, and downright weird methods of castigation from antiquity to the 20th century.

The execution of Scottish national hero William Wallace was in reality even more lurid and brutal than depicted in Mel Gibson’s famous 1995 biopic.

After he was convicted of high treason at Westminster Hall on 23rd August 1305, Wallace was taken outside, stripped naked, attached horizontally to a wooden hurdle, and ‘drawn’ by two horses across the cobbled streets to his place of execution at Smithfield. Along the route, the masses of rowdy Londoners didn’t just throw excrement and pigswill at Wallace as he passed by, oh no – they also cruelly battered him with heavy sticks, lashed him with whips, and got the boot in where they could.

Next, Wallace had a large, deep opening carved across his stomach. The executioner reached in and pulled out his guts for all to see, before chucking those onto a bonfire. Each organ was removed one by one and shown to the cheering crowd. Wallace would have been alive through much of this process. He was then beheaded and his body cut into four pieces, the bloodied bits being displayed around Britain.

The last person to receive the full horror of this ancient punishment, in use in England from the time of the Normans, was convicted spy David Tyrie in 1782.

During the War of 1812, American officer Henry Dearborn was the commander of an army barracks in Albany, New York. Of the myriad measures he employed for discipline among his men was a bizarre punishment called ‘riding the whirligig’. One source says its origins lie in ‘military antiquities’, though doesn’t say when exactly this is.

This whirligig was a large cage that was attached through the centre to a post in the ground. The post was made to turn and would spin the cage at incredible speed. It was intended to humiliate the guilty person, and the carrying out of the sentence never failed to draw a large crowd of soldiers and camp followers. Typical injuries suffered included dislocated bones, cuts and bruises, and unconsciousness from the spinning. In many cases, severe mental illness resulted from prolonged rides of the whirligig.

In 17th and 18th-century Jamaica, Dead Man’s Cay (later renamed Rackham's Cay) was something of a suntrap – in a quite literal and sinister way.

Convicted pirates unfortunate enough to suffer this form of execution were taken to a tiny island, locked into an iron cage, and suspended high on a post. Left here in the fierce Caribbean sun without food or water, they never lasted long. The cage would be tight enough to keep their skeleton in place after the body had rotted down.