Red Hot Poker Torture

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King Edward II’s Death – Red-Hot Poker or Red Herring?

The grisly tale of Edward II’s murder may have been nothing more than a medieval con job, argues Ian Mortimer
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#1 Submitted by Anthony Gumbrell on October 10, 2018 - 8:20pm
"the text of a copy of an undated letter purporting to be from a papal notary" doesn't seem to be the strongest link in this chain of evidence. What evidence supports the authenticity of the letter per se?
For centuries, it has been believed that King Edward II met his end in Berkeley Castle in 13. Having been captured by an army led by his queen, Isabella, and her lover, Sir Roger Mortimer, he was forced to abdicate in favour of his underage son, Edward III. He was then imprisoned and, according to those chroniclers most biased against his usurpers, was then subjected to a series of torments, including being starved and thrown into a pit full of rotting corpses.
But it was the final torture that made Edward II’s death arguably the most famous in English royal history: a group of men pinned the deposed king beneath a mattress or table, pushed a horn into his anus, and then inserted a red-hot poker that burned out his internal organs. This grisly execution was supposedly devised to leave no visible mark on the body. Although many historians have long suspected that the red-hot poker story was just medieval propaganda, most agreed that Edward II was indeed murdered in 13.
As a result, the death has a rare status in British history: part of the nation’s consciousness of its bloody heritage and a landmark date in works ranging from the Handbook of British Chronology to the tourist guidebooks to both Berkeley Castle and Gloucester Cathedral, where Edward II is buried. This creates huge problems for the historian who discovers that the murder simply did not happen: Edward II did not die in Berkeley Castle.
That no newly discovered documents or recent forensic tests underpin this claim only increases the difficulties he faces. To challenge popular belief on such grounds is by no means unprecedented, but to challenge the consensus of academic opinion in this way is hardly imaginable.
In fact, the idea that Edward II was not murdered was first mooted in 1877 when a French archivist published the text of a copy of an undated letter purporting to be from a papal notary, Manuele de Fieschi, to Edward III.
This reported how the young king’s father had “escaped” from Berkeley Castle and, via Ireland, France and Germany, arrived in Lombardy. The great historians William Stubbs and Thomas Frederick Tout, writing in 1883 and 1919 respectively, could neither believe nor explain the text.
Years later, though, Pierre Chaplais pointed out that royal accounts dated 1338-39 refer to a “William the Welshman”, who claimed with impunity to be Edward II in the presence of Edward III at Cologne and Antwerp. Other documents were published suggesting Edward II’s survival, including the judgment on his half-brother, the Earl of Kent, who was executed in March 1330 for trying to effect Edward’s release from Corfe Castle, even though the deposed king had supposedly been dead for three years.
Against such evidence stood the chronicle reports stating that Edward II had died in Berkeley Castle. More important, a number of Edward III’s own statements attest to the murder, including records of the prosecution of the supposed murderers in the Parliamentary Rolls. The case seemed rock-solid. But recently, the evidence has been reconsidered from the point of view of the supposed murderers, and an entirely different picture of Edward II’s “death” has emerged.
The key to understanding what happened is knowing how news of the king’s death spread. A message that Edward II had died on September 21 13 was sent from Berkeley Castle to Edward III in Lincoln. A public announcement was made after Parliament broke up on September 29, and the news was accepted in good faith. Three weeks later, Lord Berkeley led the funeral cort ge into Gloucester, and the interment took place in late December. But the corpse could have been anybody’s; before leaving the castle, it had been completely covered in waxed cloth and encased within two coffins. As the only chronicler to mention the event put it: the king’s body was exhibited “superficially”.
The rule of Lord Mortimer was brought to an end in October 1330. He was hanged after being judged guilty of a long list of crimes, including Edward II’s murder. He was not permitted to say anything to Parliament in his defence. But Lord Berkeley was allowed to speak. In reply to the question of how he intended to acquit himself of complicity in Edward’s murder, Berkeley stated that he “had not heard that the man was dead until coming into this present parliament”. Many scholars have wondered what he meant by this. Perhaps they should have wondered a little harder, for the entire traditional narrative of the murder followed Berkeley’s initial message that the king had died. Yet here he was admitting that he had lied.
Furthermore, the Parliamentary Rolls confirm that Berkeley shared responsibility with Sir John Maltravers for making sure that no harm came to Edward II while in their custody. But Maltravers, who escaped capture in 1330, was never charged with failing in this duty. Edward III cannot have been trying to protect Maltravers as he was sentenced in his absence to a traitor’s death for the lesser crime of being an accessory to the judicial execution of the Earl of Kent. As one of the two men equally liable, it follows that the charges brought against Berkeley were groundless. Edward III was forced to bring fictitious charges against his father’s jailer to support his sentence against Mortimer. Subsequently, all charges against Berkeley were dropped.
Faced with a correlation of the perspectives of accuser and accused, one can no longer support the traditional narrative of Edward’s death. Those who wish to do so need to undermine the logic of the arguments concerning Berkeley’s testimony and the failure to charge Maltravers if they wish to continue to participate in the debate. Perhaps most interesting of all, there is no longer any justification for dismissing the Fieschi letter as a forgery, or the accounts of William the Welshman as the antics of an imposter. Rather, we should question the reliability of the chronicles with regard to the death, on whose misinformation so many have placed much trust for so long.
We cannot be certain what happened to Edward II after 1330. If the Fieschi letter is correct - and it seems probable that it broadly outlines the facts of Edward II’s later life as he himself understood them - he was released after the execution of Mortimer. He then travelled to Avignon to see the pope, who persuaded him to give up his attempts to regain the throne. If the revised dating of the Fieschi letter to early 1336 is correct, it would appear that he had settled at a hermitage in Lombardy by the end of 1331. It seems likely that the William the Welshman brought to Edward III at Cologne in 1338 was indeed Edward II; he was with the court at Antwerp just after the birth of Edward III’s second son, Lionel. After this, he disappears from the records. The man who presented William the Welshman to Edward III was paid for some secret business three years later that involved several months abroad, possibly to bring Edward II’s remains back from Italy. It is almost certain that Edward II’s remains were placed in Gloucester Cathedral before his son made a pilgrimage there in 1343.
The importance of this debate is, of course, what it means for those studying Edward III and Mortimer, whose tenure of power may well have relied on his secret custody of Edward II. We will probably not be able to discuss such matters until the controversy of Edward II’s survival has been fully ignited, raged and died down. In the meantime, the challenge to the academic establishment is obvious, as is its responsibility to the public in a matter of national heritage.
Ian Mortimer, former library archivist at Exeter University, is now studying for his PhD. His book The Greatest Traitor: The Life of Sir Roger Mortimer, 1st Earl of March, Ruler of England 13-1330 was published last month by Jonathan Cape (£17.99).
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Facts and Information about the methods, devices and instruments using fire and hot irons tortures in the Medieval period of the Middle Ages
Crimes which warranted the use of Branding and Burning Tortures & Punishments Different types of torture and punishments were used depending on the victim's crime and social status. There were also different punishments and tortures used according to the customs of each country. The punishment was adopted in the Dark and Middle Ages by the Anglo-Saxons. In 1547 the Statute of Vagabonds ruled that vagabonds, gipsies and brawlers were ordered to be branded, the first two with a large V on the breast. the last with F for fighter (brawler). Slaves too who ran away were branded with S on cheek or forehead. This law was repealed in 1636.
Method of inflicting the Branding and Burning Tortures There were various methods and devices used to torture or punishing a victim using branding or burning techniques. The red-hot brazier, which was passed backwards and forwards before the eyes of the culprit, until they were destroyed by the scorching heat. Red hot pokers were applied to various parts of the body. Various marks branded on to the flesh using red hot branding irons. A branding-iron had a long bolt with a wooden handle at one end and a brand with a letter at the other. Two iron loops were used for firmly securing the hands during the excruciating process.
Branding and Burning Tortures Each section of this Middle Ages website addresses all topics and provides interesting facts and information about the events and traditions in bygone Medieval times including Branding and Burning Tortures. The Sitemap provides full details of all of the information and facts provided about this terrible but fascinating subject of the Middle Ages!
Uncover a wealth of facts and information on a variety of subjects produced by the Siteseen network.

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Edward II – still the only English monarch to be subject of his own ‘anal rape narrative’
To be a king and to be murdered – one might say – is no more than a hazard of the job. To be a king and to be murdered in one’s privy, however, is to suffer a considerable indignity. Yet precisely this fate was visited on at least two British royals, if certain sources are believed – and to that number we might add the awful fate of a third king, Edward II, popularly thought to have been done in by means of a red-hot poker forced into his rectum, not to mention the fortunate if malodorous escape of a royal consort, Gerald of Windsor, whose ravishing Welsh wife, Princess Nest, lived an adventurous life early in the twelfth century.
Let us begin our tale with the first of these kings. Edmund Ironside was the son of Æthelred the Unready, the unfortunate Saxon monarch forced from his throne in 1013 by a Danish invasion led by the memorably-named Swein Forkbeard. When Swein died the following year, Æthelred returned from exile to find himself embroiled in a war of succession with another Dane, Swein’s son Cnut – the same ‘King Canute’ renowned in British folklore for his failed attempt to turn back the tides. Æthelred was no soldier, and most of the fighting was done by his son Edmund, whose martial nickname was earned in the course of fighting a series of five battles with the invaders in the summer and autumn of 1016. Although successful enough to have himself crowned king after his father’s death, Edmund was eventually undone at the Battle of Assundun, fought on 18 October 1016 and decided by the betrayal of one of his earls, the infamous Eadric Streona of Mercia , who fled the field with his men at the height of the battle, leaving Cnut victorious.
Edmund Ironside (left) takes on Cnut in single combat. From an old, but far from contemporary, source: the Chronicle Maoira of Matthew Paris
Enough of the background; it’s what happened next that concerns us. Edmund still represented a threat to the Danes, and he and Cnut agreed to divide the kingdom between them, with Edmund retaining the Saxon heartland of Wessex and Cnut taking the north and east of England. This arrangement, known as the Treaty of Alney, can hardly have been agreed much earlier than the end of October, and it lasted less than a month. On 30 November (says the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle ; a 12th century Ely calendar gives the date as the 29th) Edmund died, and the speedy and indubitably convenient nature of his demise soon generated some gruesome accounts of a sticky end at the hands of Cnut. Many histories pass hazily over the precise method employed, but Henry of Huntingdon, writing in the 1120s, was not so coy. His version of events concludes:
King Edmund was treacherously slain a few days afterwards. Thus it happened: one night, this great and powerful king having occasion to retire to the house for receiving the calls of nature, the son of the ealdorman Eadric, by his father’s contrivance, concealed himself in the pit, and stabbed the king twice from beneath with a sharp dagger, and, leaving the weapon fixed in his bowels, made his escape. [Foster p.195]
There are plenty of problems, it must be said, with this story as it stands. For one, how could the killer be sure that the posterior he was stabbing was the king’s? For another, could he have got close enough to use a dagger? Cesspits, after all, were often deep, and the drops to them long, and at least two variant accounts wordlessly address this problem. The first suggests that the assassin employed a spear rather than a dagger; the second, by the French chronicler Gaimar, reports that the murder was carried out by the diabolical contrivance of a ‘spring-bow’ – a deadly sort of booby trap consisting of a loaded crossbow that could be triggered by pressure and was known to the French as li ars qui ne fault , or ‘the bow that does not fail.’ According to this account (it is a late one, dating to about 1137), Edmund was shown into a privy rigged with ‘a drawn bow with the string attached to the seat, so that when the king sat on it the arrow was released and entered his fundament.’ [Bell p.134; Bradbury p.256]
The truth, it is safe to say, will never be known. Several reliable chroniclers, such as William of Malmesbury and John of Worcester, say nothing of any murder. The chroniclers who do are not entirely trustworthy; Gaimar’s romance, for one, was denounced by Warren Hollister as ‘so grossly error-ridden as to be altogether unreliable.’ [Hollister p.103] And there are a number of variants of the murder story; the German chronicler Adam of Bremen, writing in the 1070s, reported that Edmund was poisoned. [Schmeidler p.17] Several modern historians stress that no contemporary source mentions murder, and conclude that Edmund merely died of natural causes. [Lawson p.20]
This may be true, of course; who knows what wounds the king may have picked up in the course of his battles. But the timing of Ironside’s death remains highly suspicious, and I have always thought that it pointed to murder more likely than not, especially when it is remembered that Cnut was far from averse to the odd assassination. In 1017, after all, the Danish king had the treacherous Eadric Streona done to death at a Christmas feast.
(Oddly, this is not the only occasion on which a spring-bow is supposed to have been used to kill a British monarch. John of Fordun – writing in the fourteenth century – reported that the same device was also used to murder Kenneth II, King of Scots (d.995). It formed part of a trap laid for the king by Finella, the daughter of the mormær of Moray, whose son had earlier been assassinated on Kenneth’s orders. Finella’s overcomplicated scheme was to arrange the construction “in a remote cottage a kind of trap never seen before. The trap had attached to it on all sides crossbows, always kept wound up, each with its cord, and fitted with the sharpest bolts and in the middle of them stood a statue like a boy, cunningly attached to the crossbows, so that if any one touched and moved it in any way he should loosen the catches of the crossbows on all sides, and immediately be pierced by the bolts discharged.” Having lured Kenneth into the dwelling, Finella “showed him the statue, which was the lever of the whole trap. Upon his asking what this statue had to do with him, she answered, smiling: ‘My lord king, if any one should touch and move the top of the head of this statue that thou seest, a marvellous and pleasant show will spring from it.’ Wholly ignorant of the hidden treachery, he drew easily towards him with his hand the head of the machine, and loosened the levers and catches of the crossbows; so that he was suddenly pierced from all sides by the bolts released, and died without uttering another word.”)
The cell at Berkeley castle reputed to have held Edward II in 1327
Much the same melange of accusation and confusion surrounds the far better known death of Edward II in 1327. The king, a weak monarch perhaps best remembered for losing the Battle of B
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