12705. History Facts

King Henry VIII of England, employed the death penalty more than any other English king in history.

12706. History Facts

A punishment used in China in the old days was for a prisoner to be kept in an iron cage with his head sticking out the top.The cage was too tall to sit in, and too short to stand up. Some prisoners were left to starve to death inside.

12707. History Facts

A common test for the guilt of a person accused of witchcraft was to throw them in a pond. If they floated, they were guilty and were executed. If they sank, they were innocent – but probably drowned.

12708. History Facts

At banquets, the Gauls used to award the legs of roast animals to the bravest warriors. Sometimes fights to the death resulted from the squabbles over who should get them.

12709. History Facts

Long ago, criminals would be hanged in a metal cage called a gibbet, or in chains, near the scene of their crime ‘until their bones rotted to nothing'.

12710. History Facts

In 1577, an outbreak of typhus in an Oxford jail killed 300 people – the judges, jury, witnesses and spectators at criminal trials.The prisoners, used to living in filthy conditions, all survived.

12711. History Facts

Vlad the Impaler used to entertain guests to dinner surrounded by the bodies of people he had executed, impaled on spikes.

12712. History Facts

During the French Revolution, large crowds watched public executions by guillotine and people would rush forward to try to collect blood dripping from the heads lifted to show the crowd. They would keep bloody handkerchieves as souvenirs of the outing.

12713. History Facts

In 1857, a group of Indian people who rebelled against the ruling British were strapped across the mouths of live cannons and blown to bits when cannon balls were shot through them.

12714. History Facts

People who killed themselves used to be buried at a cross-roads with a stake through their heart. It was thought that they couldn't go to heaven, and the cross-roads would confuse their ghost so that it couldn't find the way home to haunt anyone.

12715. History Facts

A trusted servant of William of Orange, a Dutch king of England, spent money the king had given him for clothes on pistols, which he used to shoot the king. As punishment, he had his flesh pulled off with red-hot pincers, his guts pulled out and his body cut into pieces.

12716. History Facts

In 1685, a wolf that terrorized a village near Ansbach in Germany was sentenced to be dressed in human clothing and hanged.

12717. History Facts

The first person to be found guilty of a crime on the basis of finger print evidence was an Argentinian woman who murdered her children in 1892. Her fingerprints were found in blood on a door frame.

12718. History Facts

In Ancient Babylon, a doctor who accidentally killed a patient had his hands cut off.

12719. History Facts

A punishment for an English woman who nagged her husband or gossiped too much was to wear a metal cage over her head called a ‘scold's bridle'. It had a spiked plate inside her mouth that would cut her tongue if she moved it to speak.

12720. History Facts

Inca women washed their hair in week-old urine, braided it, and then used more old urine to keep it in place.

12721. History Facts

The Chinchorro people of Chile mummified their dead 8,000 years ago.They cut off the arms and legs, removed and smoked the skin, strapped sticks to the bones and replaced all the soft parts with grass and ashes, then put the whole body back together and painted it.

12722. History Facts

During excavations at a circle of standing stones in Avebury, England, in 1938, archaeologists found the body of a man who had been crushed under a falling stone in the 1320s when villagers tried to bury the stones.

12723. History Facts

Over 100,000 people have been tried for witchcraft in Europe since 1100, most of them tortured and eventually executed.

12724. History Facts

It is reported that during Napoleon's invasion of Russia in 1812 some soldiers cut open dead horses and sheltered inside them to avoid freezing to death.

12725. History Facts

Some Stone-Age people believed the spirit could only escape when the flesh had gone from the body, so they left corpses to rot or be eaten by wild animals, or hacked off the flesh, before burying them.

12726. History Facts

As well as people, the ancient Egyptians mummified all kinds of animals including cats, crocodiles, birds – even fish and dung beetles.

12727. History Facts

At the Aztec festival celebrating Xipe Totec – the Aztec god of spring – prisoners of war were flayed alive.Their skins were then worn ceremonially by priests to represent the renewal of earth and the start of new life in spring.

12728. History Facts

People of the North American Sioux tribe used to make an amulet of their own, dried umbilical cord – the cord which connects the unborn baby to its mother's body – which they thought guaranteed a long life.

12729. History Facts

A 1,000-year-old grave in England was found to contain a rich woman in a coffin beneath a poor woman pinned down by a big stone. She was probably a slave, buried alive to serve the rich woman after death.

12730. History Facts

In the 1700s, the penalty for wearing tartan or playing the bagpipes in Britain was death.

12731. History Facts

The ancient Britons used to practise euthanasia by jumping off cliffs to their deaths. If individuals were too elderly to jump they would be pushed!

12732. History Facts

Anglo-Saxon parents were allowed to sell children up to the age of seven to be slaves ‘if they needed to do so'.

12733. History Facts

A lhasa apso dog was once imprisoned and kept on death row in a prison in Washington, USA, for over eight years for biting.

12734. History Facts

For nearly 1,000 years, Chinese women had their feet bound to keep them small. The toes were bent underneath, breaking all the bones, and the feet were kept tightly bandaged from childhood until death. The practice was banned in 1911.

12735. History Facts

Apart from the heart, an Egyptian mummy doesn't have any internal organs left inside the body.The others were removed and put into separate canopic jars that were buried with it.

12736. History Facts

British schools used to keep at least two types of standard cane for hitting naughty children. Children over 15 years of age could be hit with the senior cane, which was longer and thicker than that used on younger children.

12737. History Facts

People used to believe that smearing their clothes with fat from a dead pig would keep away fleas.

12738. History Facts

The Jivaros in the Andes shrunk the heads of enemies killed in battle. They skinned the head, then stitched up the eyes and mouth and stewed the skin for a couple of hours with herbs. Then they dried it, stuffed it with hot stones and sand and polished it.

12739. History Facts

In the War of the Pacific (1879–1884), Chile fought against Bolivia and Peru over who was allowed to collect bird faeces and whether they should have to pay a tax on them.

12740. History Facts

Before modern plumbing, a gong scourer was a boy who was sent into cess pits to scoop and scrape all the muck into buckets and remove it. The job was so horrible it was done at night so that people wouldn't have to see it happening.

12741. History Facts

When King Philip of Spain died in 1560, his devastated wife would not allow him to be buried, but had his coffin accompany her everywhere.

12742. History Facts

Csar Peter III of Russia was crowned 34 years after he died. His coffin was opened so that the crown could be put on his head.

12743. History Facts

The body of William the Conqueror was too big for his coffin, so two soldiers jumped up and down on him to try to squish him in. This broke his back and made his stomach explode.

12744. History Facts

Before the days of lipstick, women used to colour their lips red with cochineal, a paste made from crushed beetles.

12745. History Facts

The law system drawn up by the Roman emperor Draco made every crime a capital offence – one for which the criminal could be executed.

12746. History Facts

In the Middle Ages, the boys who looked after dogs used for hunting had to sleep in the kennels with them.

12747. History Facts

Before the invention of real footballs, kids used to stuff a pig's bladder with peas to kick around.

12748. History Facts

Ancient Romans used to make themselves sick during a banquet so that they could eat more after they were full. A special slave had the job of clearing up the mess.

12749. History Facts

In England, suicide used to be illegal.The punishment for trying to kill yourself was death.

12750. History Facts

In medieval France, a cockerel that was found sitting on an egg (which only hens normally do) was found guilty of being a devil and was burned at the stake.

12751. History Facts

In 1808, Tommy Otter was hanged for killing his girlfriend. His body was left chained in a tree and a year later a pair of blue tits made a nest in his skull and reared eight chicks.

12752. History Facts

To honour the goddess Teteoinnan at the time of harvest, the Aztecs skinned a woman as a sacrifice. Her skin was then worn by a priest at a harvest festival.

12753. History Facts

In the 1800s, Mongolian prisoners were fastened into a wooden box little larger than a coffin where they were left to die. Some were given food for years, but never allowed out.

12754. History Facts

Houses in many parts of the world have been made from a mixture called wattle and daub – horse manure and straw.

Fact
A diet high in fat is said to impede memory      .. More >>