anging, but crimes of
special heinousness, such as poisoning, were visited with burning or
boiling to death. The numerous laws against treason and heresy have
already been described. Lesser punishments included flogging, pillory,
branding, the stocks, clipping ears, piercing tongues, and imprisonment
in dungeons made purposely as horrible as possible, dark, noisome dens
without furniture or conveniences, often too small for a man to stand
upright or to lie at full length.

[Sidenote: Number of executions]

With such laws it is not surprising that 72,000 men were hanged under
Henry VIII, an average of nearly 2,000 a year. The number at present,
when the population of England and Wales has swollen to tenfold of what
it was then, is negligible. Only nine men were hanged in the United
Kingdom in the years 1901-3; about 5,000 are now on the average
annually convicted of felony. If anything, the punishments were
harsher on the Continent than in Britain. The only refuge of the
criminal was the greed of his judges. At Rome it was easy and regular
to pay a price for every crime, and at other places bribery was more or
less prevalent.

[Sidenote: Cruel trial methods]

The methods of trying criminals were as cruel as their punishments. On
the Continent the presumption was held to be against the accused, and
the rack and its ghastly retinue of instruments of pain were freely
used to procure confession. Calvin's hard saying that when men felt
the pain they spoke the truth merely {482} expressed the current
delusion, for legislators and judges, their hearts hardened in part by
the example of the church, concurred in his opinion. The exceptional
protest of Montaigne deserves to be quoted for its humanity: "All that
exceeds simple death is absolute cruelty, nor can our laws expect that
he whom the fear of decapitation or hanging will not restrain should be
awed by imagining the horrors of a slow fire, burning pincers or
breaking on the wheel."

The spirit of the English law was against the use of torture, which,
however, made progress, especially in state trials, under the Tudors.
A man who refused to plead in an English court was subjected to the
_peine forte et dure_, which consisted in piling weights on his chest
until he either spoke or was crushed to death. To enforce the laws
there was a constabulary in the country, supplemented by the regular
army, and a police force in the cities. That of Paris consisted of 24