A Guide To Tudor Punishment

By Joshua Allen

Tudor Punishment

In the Tudors times there were no police and punishment for some crimes were severe. The soldiers or in other words the Kings army would be the ones to carry out the punishment if you include the axe man as a soldier. The axe man is the one that has to cut off the person’s head you wouldn’t want to get on the bad side of him or you might get a sticky end. On my point of view it is a very very bad job I wouldn’t take it if you gave me one million pound the money would never be worth that.

Methods of execution

Beheading or in other words your head being swiped from your body was a severe punishment. Some heads if they were very lucky would be put on spikes across London bridge.

Hanging from the gallows. Stupid people would be hung from a rope until they stopped breathing if they were caught stealing (even if it was a pig), murdering, rebelling, rioting or committing treason.

Burning women alive at the stake if they were found guilty of treason.

Being pressed (crushed).

Boiled alive in an extremely hot bowl of water if you stupidly attempted to murder a person.

The ducking stool was ridiculously used to check if women were wooden witches (that we know don’t exist) by dunking them in to the local river to see if they floated. If they floated they were burned at the stake if not they died by drowning anyway.

Lesser punishments

Whipping (flogging) is when some towns had a funny thing called a whipping post and the fool who did the crime like stealing bread, would be sent straight to the whipping post to be stripped to the waist then whipped.

The pillory was wooden and it looked like a hammer that was standing up by its self and it had three holes in it too put the thief’s hands in and the middle one for the head it was a smelly business because the people would throw tomatoes and stuff like that at you, my mum would probably have to make me have 9 baths afterwards.

The stocks were used in the same way as the pillory, except one thing, the Tudors would sit with their disgustingly dirty or clean feet bound, (it would be very unlikely that people in the Tudor

times would have clean feet because Tudors only had one bath every year!). People would throw some kinds of rotten food like a horrible mushroom soup being chucked into your face or a green slimy piece of broccoli with gravy.

Branding with a hot iron, hot irons were used to burn letters like m, v and t on to the skin of the murderer or thief the man who did it probably wouldn’t be anybody’s friend.

The brank was used to stop people gossiping by punishing them severely. An iron cage was put over the persons head and it had a sharp metal strip that went into their mouth and caused nasty injuries when they moved their tongue. I really do not like this punishment but luckily I’m not a Tudor girl or a gossip!

Some people who stole things had their limbs cut off. This was an awful punishment in my point of view and if I was in Tudor times, I would definitely never steal anything!

The Drunkard’s Cloak was a punishment for being drunk. This was probably the best punishment the Tudors had even though you shouldn’t get a punishment for that anyway, they were made to put on a barrel like a funny wooden shirt and walk around the town.