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death with iron clubs, others being first stamped on by guards wearing wooden shoes.
    In Bengal thieves and trespassers were beaten to death, while in Natal, South Africa, in March 1824 a hundred and fifty witch-finders ‘smelt out’ over 300 tribesmen, declaring them all guilty of smearing the Royal kraal, the palace, with blood. However, Shaka, the ruler, declared them all to be innocent, stating that he had smeared the kraal himself to test the powers of the diviners. He then sentenced all the witch-finders to be executed, and this was carried out, they being skewered or clubbed to death.
     

BOILED ALIVE
    ‘Should a coiner be caught in the act, then let him be stewed in a pan, or in a cauldron half an ell deep for the body… and thus he shall be made to stew in oil and wine.’
    A minor scald is painful enough, but the agony of being totally immersed in boiling liquid is unimaginable. Yet this method was employed for centuries in countries ranging from Europe to the Far East. Mercifully short-lived in England, as were its victims, at least three people met their deaths in this manner, all for the crime of poisoning, and doubtless there would have been many more had that type of murder been detectable in those early centuries. So the causes must have been obvious when a maidservant was found guilty of killing her husband ‘by means of toxic substances’, and she was boiled to death at King’s Lynn, Norfolk, in 1531. Eleven years later Margaret Davey or Dawes perished in the cauldron at Smithfield in London for poisoning the family for whom she worked.
    This penalty was authorised in 1531 in the reign of Henry VIII by a Parliamentary act which, unusually, included the name of the individual against whom punishment was to be levied, instead of being couched in more general terms. A cook, Richard Rouse, was employed in the household of John Fisher, Bishop of Rochester (who, incidentally, was beheaded at the Tower of London four years later for refusing to acknowledge the king as the supreme head of the Church). At his residence at Lambeth, London, the bishop provided sustenance for the local poor, and the alarm was raised when some of these, together with members of the cleric’s family, were taken seriously ill, two of them failing to recover.
    Investigation revealed poison in the yeast used in much of the food that had been prepared, and blame fell on the cook, Richard Rouse. So appalling was this type of murder regarded by the authorities that a Special Act of Parliament was passed:

‘The King’s Royal Majesty, calling to his most blessed rememberance that the making of good and wholesome laws, and due execution of the same against the offenders thereof, is the only cause that good obedience has been preserved in this realm; and his Highness having the most tender zeal for the same, considering that man’s life above all things is chiefly to be favoured, and voluntary murder most highly to be detected and abhorred; and specially all kinds of murder by poisoning, which in this realm hitherto, our Lord be thanked, hath been most rare and seldom committed or practised; and now, in the time of this present Parliament, that is to say, on the eighteenth day of February, in the twenty-second year of his most victorious reign, one Richard Rouse, late of Rochester, in the county of Kent, cook, otherwise called Richard Cook, of his most wicked and damnable disposition, did cast a certain venom or poison into a vessel replenished with yeast or balm, standing in the kitchen of the reverend father in God, John, Bishop of Rochester, at his palace in Lambeth Marsh; with which yeast or balm, and other things convenient, porridge or gruel was forthwith made for his family, there being; whereby not only the number of seventeen persons of his said family, which did eat of that porridge, were mortally infected or poisoned, and one of them, that is to say, Bennet Curwan, gentleman, is thereof deceased; but also certain poor people