Scotland's Chronicles of Blood

This text recounts the grisly days of hanging, beheading, burning, drowning and torture in Scotland. Criminals in the past were sentenced to die on the gallows, in the drowning pit, or beheaded by one of three instruments: the axe, the two-handed sword, and "the Maiden", a crude machine used in Edinburgh and Aberdeen two centuries before the French guillotine. In medieval times there was hardly a town without its ghastly exhibition of severed heads and limbs. The common hangman, also known as the "lockman", "hangie", "commoune burreour" and "staffman", was much feared. The book also looks at the executioners themselves. There was Andrew Finnie, the Edinburgh hangsman, John Justice, who burned the Aberdeen witches, the mystery hangman of Dundee, Glasgow's famous Tom Young, and John Murdoch, Britain's oldest hangman, who ascended the steps of the scaffold with the aid of a walking stick. Public executioners also used the thumbikins to crush flesh and bones, the cashielaws for roasting flesh, and the torkas - red-hot pincers for tearing out fingernails. They also practised branding, whipping and humiliation of their victims by placing them in the ducking stool, jougs or branks. After the demise of the burgh hangman in Scotland, English "finishers of the law" such as William Calcroft and William Marwood executed Scottish criminals, with the last public hanging taking place at Dumfries in 1868.