d in order to elicit from the culprit
an avowal of his crime, or of that of his accomplices. It was also called
_ordinary_, or _extraordinary_, according to the duration or violence with
which it was inflicted. In some cases the torture lasted five or six
consecutive hours; in others, it rarely exceeded an hour. Hippolyte de
Marsillis, the learned and venerable jurisconsult of Bologna, who lived at
the beginning of the fifteenth century, mentions fourteen ways of
inflicting torture. The compression of the limbs by special instruments,
or by ropes only; injection of water, vinegar, or oil, into the body of
the accused; application of hot pitch, and starvation, were the processes
most in use. Other means, which were more or less applied according to the
fancy of the magistrate and the tormentor or executioner, were remarkable
for their singular atrocities. For instance, placing hot eggs under the
arm-pits; introducing dice between the skin and flesh; tying lighted
candles to the fingers, so that they might be consumed simultaneously with
the wax; letting water trickle drop by drop from a great height on the
stomach; and also the custom, which was, according to writers on criminal
matters, an indescribable torture, of watering the feet with salt water
and allowing goats to lick them. However, every country had special
customs as to the manner of applying torture.

In France, too, the torture varied according to the provinces, or rather
according to the parliaments. For instance, in Brittany the culprit, tied
in an iron chair, was gradually brought near a blazing furnace. In
Normandy, one thumb was squeezed in a screw in the ordinary, and both
thumbs in the extraordinary torture. At Autun, after high boots made of
spongy leather had been placed on the culprit's feet, he was tied on to a
table near a large fire, and a quantity of boiling water was poured on the
boots, which penetrated the leather, ate away the flesh, and even
dissolved the bones of the victim.

At Orleans, for the ordinary torture the accused was stripped half naked,
and his hands were tightly tied behind his back, with a ring fixed between
them. Then by means of a rope fastened to this ring, they raised the poor
man, who had a weight of one hundred and eighty pounds attached to his
feet, a certain height from the ground. For the extraordinary torture,
which then took the name of _estrapade_, they raised the victim, with two
hundred and fifty pounds attached