I think you can get an idea how bad being burned at the stake was by reading Foxe’s Book of Martyrs between the lines. Notice how the Protestant martyrs in the book go bravely to their deaths, while the Catholics go cowardly to theirs, shrieking and weeping from the pain.
Probable truth: they all went shrieking and weeping. Part of the reason both religious sides went in for public burnings is because it was public torture. They really wanted to make an example of their victims. I didn’t do enough study on the burnings of Catholic martyrs, but the Marian government went out of their way to make sure their burnings were seen by large crowds. Heretics were supposed to be punished in their parish but some executions were moved to larger urban centers to ensure more attendees. That wouldn’t have happened if the Marian church officials hadn’t wanted the burnings to be public spectacle.
Church officials knew they couldn’t burn every heretic in England. The purpose of the burning was pour l’encourager les autres. And in the 16th century there was nothing to encourage someone like the threat of painful, fiery death.
Recently, there was a thread on the Dope asking about the most horrible videos people have seen. Once was of the burning of witches in Kenya. Curiosity got the better of me and I decided to seek out the link. What surprised me most (and this was the burning of a handful of witches, not just one) is that every single one of them, that I remember, went rather stoically. They just kind of sat there like the burning Buddhist monk, waiting for the fire to consume them. No screaming, no convulsing, no writhing. That’s just made it all the more disturbing.
IIRC, in Norway, witches were often given a pitcher of wine before they were tortured and burned. The ladder method was thought to be quicker and more humane than burning at the stake.
Executioners could also be bribed to strangle the condemed as they were tying them to the stake.
It wasn’t just witchs and heretics that were burned. In England if a woman was convicted of treason she was condemed to burning (unlike men who’d be drawn & quartered). One reason for the difference I’ve heard was that it was to “protect her modesty” (since drawing & quartering involved being stripped naked). :dubious: Of wouldn’t her dress burn away first exposing her skin to the crowd, or would the smole & flames cover everything up?
to add to what toodlepip said, there was also the old Russian way of burning people inside “house”, or maybe better described as a specially built shack. Unfortunately I cannot find English articles about it, on Russian wikipedia it is “sozhzhenie v srube”. Before 18th century it was used to execute people for witchcraft and for heresy, including belonging to the (perfectly orthodox but distasteful to the government) Old Believers sect.
In one of Rick Atkinson’s books on WWII, he mentions that the Sherman tank was often referred to as a “Zippo” since they caught fire easily when hit, and that the screams from inside the tanks often lasted as much as ten minutes.
In Carl Sagan’s The Demon Haunted World he quotes an unnamed historian that when Joan of Arc was being burned, the executioner put the fire out after her clothing had burned away “…that the onlookers might see all that pertaineth, or ought to pertain, to a woman…”
30 years ago, my English History professor claimed that the fires were actually quite small in order to give the condemned ample time to confess. Not that it would do them any good.
Sorry, no link, but I read something similar. In fact, it was actually quite ghastly - describing how, “if done properly”, the feet would burn away first, then the legs, then the hands (tied behind), etc. The pain must have been unimaginable.
Isn’t there some research or experience that, if a trauma is severe enough, the brain simply stops registering pain at all? Perhaps the victims simply shut down at that point.
American tank crews were told that they had the best tanks in the world during training. Then they were shipped over to Europe where they found out that the Sherman couldn’t even penetrate the front armor of a German Tiger tank. The Tiger, on the other hand, could put a shell in through the front and out through the back of a Sherman. The Shermans also had a tendency to catch fire when hit by German high velocity rounds.
The British started calling the Shermans by the name “Ronson” which was a brand of cigarette lighter with the advertising slogan “Lights the first time, every time!”
Some Shermans were called Zippos, but that nickname was usually reserved for Shermans that had the flame thrower on the front of them.
Wow. Learn something new every day. I knew that Old Believers certainly committed mass suicide by burning themselves in buildings (dramatized at the end of Mussorgsky’s opera "Khovanshchina), but my impression was that the occasional Russian execution by burning was your standard stake, and I would have assumed that “srub” meant something like framework.
But no, I see that at least occasionally they did burn people up in huts. Good to know.
In Hilary Mantel’s wonderful novel “Wolf Hall” a character describes a Spanish device with a counterweight that allows you to dip the heretic into the flames and then pull him out. That sounds like a slow and especially nasty way to go.
In Salem the witches were hanged. I think that was standard practice in England, but after being shown wrong on pre-Petrine methods of burning people, I’ll defer to those with better knowledge.
St. Lawrence of Rome was burned in 258, not on a stake but on a gridiron (basically a grill over an open flame). His response was “This side’s done, turn me over and have a bite!” Now he’s the patron saint of comedians
In Scotland, witches were burned. In Wales, witches were accepted as healers and “wise women”, and only a small number of witches were tried. Ireland largely escaped the witch hunt, too.
Perhaps this is directly related, perhaps not. In the 1475 painting St. Dominic Presiding over an Auto da Fethe two victims (Jews, I think) have distinct erections, their penises surrounded by some sort of nasty looking cage. I’ve often wondered what’s going on in this image. (Other clothed victims are awaiting their turn, as soon as the branches near them get lit.)
