Free The Big Book of Pain: Torture & Punishment through History by Mark P Donnelly, Daniel Diehl Page B

may now be considered, Viking raids were carefully planned affairs, designed to provide the greatest possible psychological impact. When a Viking war party landed in their terrifying, dragon-headed ships, they swarmed toward their chosen target, killing anyone who put up the least resistance and many who did not. Men were routinely murdered, women were murdered – or raped and murdered – and babies impaled on spear points. When the object of their attention was a monastery, as it so often was, the goal was the plunder of coinage and any church ornament that could be hauled away. But the Vikings also knew that the clergy were part of a political infrastructure, capable of spreading the word that ‘the Vikings are coming and they were not to be trifled with’. The more people feared them, the easier the next conquest was likely to be. It was as clever a campaign of terror as any devised before or since.
    But Vikings were not only raiders. After conquering an area, they generally established a colony and made themselves lords over the local population, imposing harsh punishments and stiff fines on all who ran afoul of Viking law. To make clear that they meant business, when local chieftains or kings were defeated by a Viking army, they could be publicly executed by a method known as the Blood Eagle. This particularly decorative form of butchery involved hacking open the back of the victim with an axe and dragging his lungs through the gaping wound so it looked as though the poor wretch had sprouted a pair of bloody wings. In the words of one of the Viking Sagas: ‘… and [they] made them to carve an eagle on his back with a sword, and cut the ribs all from the backbone, and draw the lungs out there, and gave him to Odin for the victory they had won’. The same punishment was inflicted on any of their new subjects who dared kill a Viking.
    There were, of course, other punishments for other crimes. Murder and robbery were routinely punished by throwing the victim from a cliff and lesser crimes were punished by the imposition of a fine – sometimes as high as confiscation of all of a man’s property. Such fines, including those imposed on neighbouring, non-Viking, political entities to buy-off any possible Viking attack, were known as Wergild. For those petty kings and chieftains who refused to submit to this Dark Age protection racket there was always the option of going to war. In 870, King Edmund of East Anglia (soon to be known as Edmund the Martyr) refused to knuckle-under to these outrageous, pagan demands, took to the field of battle – and lost. As punishment for his effrontery, and for refusing to renounce Christ, the Vikings tied King Edmund to a tree, whipped him mercilessly, shot him full of arrows and hacked off his head.

     
Two men sentenced to death by starvation in a stock inside an isolated cave.
     
    As northern England slowly collapsed under the Viking onslaught, the southern kingdoms, inhabited by the Anglo-Saxons, were making far better progress toward becoming civilised. Curiously, the only crime in Anglo-Saxon England generally punished by death was theft; in this harsh, primitive world stealing a person’s possessions was considered crueller and more malicious than simply killing them. When arson was involved, that is to say when one person deprived another of their home or crops by burning, the culprit himself was burnt. Most other crimes, including murder and rape, were punished by a stiff fine. When a fine did not seem sufficient to the degree of the crime, or when the public demanded some visible punishment, a turn in the pillory (called the healfang , or half-hang) was often added to the sentence. When the miscreant was a woman she might be subjected to the scealding (or scolding) stool; a device similar to the ducking stool of later years, wherein the condemned was tied to a chair and subjected to a good dousing in the local pond. There is no evidence that any of these duckings lasted long