Tools used for Prisoner Torture for the 17th Century

Shakespeare uses the word torment more than forty times in his plays. 

For modern listeners, torment often feels internal — guilt, grief, jealousy, remorse. But in Shakespeare's England, torment could also be something far more literal. It could be inflicted physically, through instruments specifically designed to extract confessions, enforce obedience, or punish those accused of crimes against the Crown. 

From the gibbet — referenced in Henry IV, Part 1 alongside dead bodies — to threats of racking, scolding tongues, and even Richard Plantagenet's "strange tortures" in Henry VI, Shakespeare's works are filled with language that assumes his audience understood the machinery of punishment. 

We might be tempted to dismiss these images as dramatic devices — grisly inventions suited to the stage. But the surviving artifacts housed in the collections of the Royal Armouries in London tell a different story. Torture in the 16th century was indeed brutal, but it was also astonishingly real. 

This week, I'm joined by Malcolm Mercer, Curator of Tower Armouries at the Royal Armouries at the Tower of London. Together, we'll examine seven specific objects from the Armouries' collections — including devices like the Scavenger's Daughter, the gibbet, the scold's bridle, and more— that serve as surviving testaments to how individuals in Shakespeare's England could, and were, be tortured and submitted to torment for crimes against King and Country.