15. To be hanged, drawn, and quartered was not merely a legal prescription for execution but a carefully designed sequence of tortures with which to end a convicted person’s life.
Another historic method of execution which served as a form of torture in its own right, the punishment of being hung, drawn, and quartered originated in England during the Middle Ages. Instituted as the legal penalty for men convicted of high treason in 1352, although existing unofficially since the reign of Henry III, the condemned man would suffer a litany of successive violations, humiliations, and pains before his eventual death. Starting with the dragging of the individual, fastened to a hurdle drawn by horse, from the site of imprisonment to their place of execution, along the route he would be pelted with rotten food and excrement by the public.
Upon reaching the location, he would be hung almost to the moment of death. Revived, castrated, disemboweled, before being finally beheaded, his body would subsequently be chopped into four pieces and displayed at prominent locales. With the practice gradually watered down due to public opposition to its brutality, it was eventually abolished entirely in 1870. During the American Revolutionary War, both Loyalists and Patriots were recorded as inflicting the punishment upon their opponents. The passage of the Eighth Amendment to the United States Constitution in 1791, prohibiting “cruel and unusual punishments”, was a direct response to this wartime practice and an attempt to prevent any further applications in the fledgling nation.