Useless Facts on Executions throughout History
People condemned to the guillotine in France during the French revolution had the top of their head shaved. Two long locks of hair were left hanging at the temples.
Those condemned to die by the axe in medieval and Renaissance England were obliged to tip their executioner to ensure that he would complete the job in one blow. In some executions, notably that of Mary, Queen of Scots, it took fifteen whacks of the blade before the head was severed.
In the Middle Ages, animals were tried and publicly executed. Birds, wolves, insects, all were tried by ecclesiastical courts as witches and heretics, and suffered excommunication, torture, and death. The last such trial took place in 1740, when a French judge found a cow guilty of sorcery and ordered it hanged by the neck until dead. In 1386 at Falaise a judge ordered a pig to have its legs mutilated and then be hanged for killing a little girl. The pig was dressed up in the child's jacket and dragged to the town square with all the ceremony due a first-rate criminal. The execution, it is recorded, cost 6 sous plus a pair of gloves for the executioner so that he might carry out the killing with clean hands.
During the French revolution, a magistrate named Jean Baptiste Carrier, commissioner of the National Convention at Nantes, dispatched a number of boatloads of political prisoners into the Loire River. When the boat was in mid-stream he ordered a trap door in the bottom of the boat opened, sending an entire group of prisoners to their death. From his merciless methods of extermination the word noyade, meaning “mass drownings,” was coined.
Until recent times, prisoners condemned to death in Mongolia were nailed into wooden boxes and left on the plains to die of exposure and starvation.
The Nazis used the guillotine to execute prisoners during World War II. Their version of the punishment had the condemned person lying on his back with his eyes forced open so that he had to watch the blade as it descended.