Breaking wheel

Next week, as a lead-up to Halloween, Ferrebeekeeper will feature a week’s worth of dark harrowing spooky posts about…um, flowers. However, just in case botany, herblore, and gardening are not ter…

Delve into the grim history of the breaking wheel, a symbol of medieval cruelty and one of the era's most feared torture methods.

The legendary medieval bandit Peter Niers would go down in history as one of Germany's most reviled criminals, raping and pillaging his ...

Looks like just a stupid wheel, right? WRONG. Grim. Seriously. (And I'm totally not referring to the shitty band from the '90s - remember Catherine Wheel?!) Catherine Wheel (n.), also known as the Breaking Wheel, was used primarily during the Middle Ages and even through up to the 19th c. as a highly effective method of torture and execution that ultimately caused death by bludgeoning or shock/dehydration. The poor bastards in question were placed on a cart-wheel with their limbs stretched…

A window in St. George's Collegiate Church in Tübingen, Germany, depicts a medieval execution on the Catherine Wheel. The window is said to have been installed by the Duke of Wuerttemberg as atonement after he mistakenly ordered such an execution of an innocent man. #myt

Here is a 15th-century Wheel of Fortune with a very complex design. The following description is from Mitchell B. Merback's 1999 The Thief...

A metal bull designed to boil victims alive inside it was devised in ancient Greece by Perillus, a bronze worker in Athens and is among other horrifying inventions designed to cause pain.

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It wasn't easy being a farmer in 16th-century Germany. It was even harder when you were accused of being a werewolf who had made a pact with the Devil.