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the head to kill them quickly. Incredibly, one person that was left to succumb from the damage inflicted survived for a staggering four days after his appearance on the Breaking Wheel.
 
    Another variation of the breaking wheel was a much quicker affair, but nevertheless brutal. A person would have their back broken and then would be laid face up along the curve of the outside of the wheel. An executioner would then come along with a huge hammer and hit them with one hard blow to their stomach, completely obliterating all of their internal org ans and killing them instantly.
 
    Both methods seem pretty disturbing in my opinion!
 
    Eventually, the Breaking Wheel was deemed to be too barbaric a method of execution; the idea wasn’t completely abandoned, but rather used posthumously as a form of humiliation to the condemned.

 
     
     
     
     
    6 – Sawing

 
    Sawing is the rather unimaginative name given to the act of sawing a living person in half as a method of execution. This is done, disturbingly, along the length of the person’s body rather than across it. This was a very archaic punishment, but one that was used in countries all over the world. It is most commonly associated with Europe, and, in particular, the Roman Empire.
 
    The person was tied upside down with their legs apart, often in a public setting. A large saw was then used to cut through a person’s flesh and bones, starting at the groin. The saw cut all the way down the body, through the torso, where it destroyed all the vital organs, before finally cutting the skull in two. As the person was held upside down, the blood would rush to the persons head, supposedly keeping that person alive for as long as possible. Cutting through the person was often such a difficult job that it would take two executioners, one either side of the condemned, to saw him in half.
 
    The teeth of the saw would have to be incredibly big and sharp to cut through the flesh and bone, and huge chunks of flesh were ripped from the body, with blood oozing everywhere. This made sawing one of the most difficult methods of execution to watch.
 
    If several prisoners were sentenced to death by this method, they would save the ringleader for last, forcing him to watch his friends receive their execution, whilst also being a form of mental torture as he would get to see first-hand the pain and suffering he would be forced to endure during his own execution.
 
    Initially, sawing was performed from the head down to the groin; however, it was argued that this result ed in the death being too quick and that the person should suffer more for their crimes; therefore, it was switched to start at the groin. There are reports that some people were sawn in half horizontally, just below the ribcage. With all these different methods, the executioner really was spoiled for choice!
 
    There are some that dispute the legitimacy of sawing as a method of execution; however, due to the large numbers of eye-witness accounts (and from different areas of the world) it seems this practice was employed at least somewhere.

 
     
     
     
     
    5 – Rats

 
    In Medieval England, most famously at the Tower of London, rats were incorporated into the administering of capital punishment, in the most grotesque way imaginable.
 
    Of course, these weren’t the cute (surprisingly clean) rats that we keep as pets, oh no! These were city rats: filthy and diseased. At the lower levels of the tower, the rooms were at around the water levels of the River Thames: this was where the rats thrived. By leaving out small amounts of food, hundreds of rats would swarm inside the tower, where they were collected up and starved, ready to be used in the execution.
 
    On the day of the execution, the condemned prisoner would be brought into the execution cell and strapped, naked, to the table, whilst on his back. A small group of rats would be placed onto his stomach with a small cage (about the size of his torso)