Vikings were some twisted motherfuckers. According to some of their poems and sagas they used a totally tweaked form of execution they liked to call the “Blood Eagle“. The shape of an eagle would be carved into the back of the condemned and his ribs would be severed close to the spine and pulled back so they resembled wings or feathers. Salt would be rubbed into the wound and finally, the lungs would be pulled out through the opening.

From the Orkneyinga saga:

“There they found Halfdan Long-leg, and Einar made them carve an eagle on his back with a sword, and cut the ribs all from the backbone, and draw the lungs there out, and gave him to Odin for the victory he had won…”

Whether the Blood Eagle was real or not or whether the method described above was the de facto way to do it is not really known for sure. I’d like to think it was real. Vikings rule!

Edward II was King of England from 1307 until he was booted from the throne. He was widely despised as incompetent, weak and homosexual, given to inappropriate and politically dangerous affairs. Instead of jousting and doing manly medieval dude things, he enjoyed the theater, boating, gardening and hanging out with a certain swishy French knight named Piers Gaveston, lavishing him with attention, money, gifts and an earldom. This kind of pissed of the other English nobles. So, they had Gaveston killed by running him through with a sword and then beheading him as he lay dying on the ground

Soon after, King Eddie took up with Hugh the Despenser, a man the British nobility really hated. When Edward broke the law of the land by seizing the title of the Lord of Gower and giving it to Hugh, the British Barons had had enough. They took up arms against the Despenser family and got his ass banished. Edward, understandably pissed by this, decided to show some nuts. He had some ass kicked, some heads removed and got Hugh back. He then passed a statute dissolving any limitations on his power and freeing him from any control by Parliament, the House of Lords, Prelates and Commons. Edward was sick and tired of people coming between him and his dude.

After this, things really started to go downhill for Edward and Hugh. England was invaded and they both fled London, being captured shortly after. Edward was imprisoned and Hugh was executed.

“Immediately after the trial, [Hugh] was dragged behind four horses to his place of execution, where a great fire was lit. He was hanged from a gallows fifty feet high, but cut down before he could choke to death and tied to a ladder, in full view of the crowd. A man climbed up beside him, and sliced off his penis and testicles which were then burnt before him, while he was still alive and conscious. Subsequently, the executioner plunged his knife into his abdomen, and cut out his entrails and heart, which were likewise burnt before the delighted crowd. Finally, he was beheaded, and his body cut into four pieces, and his head was mounted on the gates of London.

Edward was deposed in a ceremony where, dressed in black and weeping, his crown was taken from him and the steward of his household broke his staff of office.

Settling into a life of misery, imprisoned in a damp cell above a smelly morgue, Edward wore moldy clothes and ate rotted food. When he wanted to shave, he was given nasty, stagnant moat water. A far cry from his days as King.

Finally, in 1327, Edward was murdered in a spectacular fashion.

“On the night of October 11, while lying in on a bed [the king] was suddenly seized and, while a great mattress… weighed him down and suffocated him, a plumber’s iron, heated intensely hot, was introduced through a tube into his secret parts so that it burned the inner portions beyond the intestines.”

Or, as they say in Latin, “Cum veru ignito inter celanda confossus ignominiose peremptus est” which means, “He was ignominiously slain with a red-hot spit thrust into the anus.”

The tube was likely used to prevent burning to any visible exterior part of his ass, thus making it look like he had possibly died of natural causes. Awesome.

Julius Obsequens, a Roman writer living in the 4th century, wrote in his book, “Liber de prodigiis“, a chronicle of wondrous occurrences and omens, that in the year 91 B.C., a strange thing was seen in the sky:

“At Aenariae, while Livius Troso was promulgating the laws at the beginning of the Italian war, at sunrise, there came a terrific noise in the sky, and a globe of fire appeared burning in the north. In the territory of Spoletum, a globe of fire, of golden color, fell to the earth gyrating. It then seemed to increase in size, rose from the earth and ascended into the sky, where it obscured the sun with its brilliance. It revolved toward the eastern quadrant of the sky.”

This morning, I’ve been reading a bit about the Battle of Chalons, where of Attila and his army of Huns fought and lost against a combined force of Romans and Visigoths in the year 451. Considered one of the bloodiest battles in history, with one contemporary historian reporting the tally of dead at 165,000 and another recording that it was a whopping 300,000. Romans, barbarians and Huns. Spears, arrows, axes and swords. Blood, guts, dismemberment, grevious wounds and death. A king, trampled under the hooves of his own men’s horses. The field, “piled high with corpses”. They just don’t fight battles like they used to these days. Pussies.

Entirely truthful or not, I absolutely love this description by the historian Jordanes of the sheer volume of gore:

“For, if we may believe our elders, a brook flowing between low banks through the plain was greatly increased by blood of the slain. It was not flooded by showers, as brooks usually rise, but was swollen by a strange stream and turned into a torrent by the increase of blood. Those whose wounds drove them to slake their parching thirst drank water mingled in gore. In their wretched plight they were forced to drink what they thought was the blood they had poured from their own wounds.” [Link]

This one, by Damascius, while fanciful, is kind of cool as well:

“…[The fighting was so severe] that no one survived except only the leaders on either side and a few followers: but the ghosts of those who fell continued the struggle for three whole days and nights as violently as if they had been alive; the clash of their arms was clearly audible.”

It could be said that King Charles VI of France was not your most mentally stable of monarchs. Given to such bizarre behavior such as roaming around, howling like a wolf; not bathing for months and believing he was made from glass; at times he would forget his own name or that he was king, fleeing from his wife in terror. He once killed one of his own knights in a fit of psychosis, believing the man was an enemy sent to assassinate him.

Yeah…crazy dude who lived a privileged, weird, French existence. Anyway, one thing about his life that grabbed my attention was something I remembered reading about as a kid called the “Bal des Sauvages” (later known as the “Bal des Ardents”) or the “Ball of the Wild (or Burning) Men”.

The King’s wife, Isabeau of Bavaria threw a party to celebrate the marriage of one of her ladies-in-waiting. For giggles (or perhaps because he was shit-slappin’ crazy), Charles and five other lords dressed up as Woodwose (mythical, hairy-covered, wild men of the forests), “in costumes of linen cloth sewn onto their bodies and soaked in resinous wax or pitch to hold a covering of frazzled hemp, ’so that they appeared shaggy and hairy from head to foot’”. This concoction of a costume was seriously flammable, so all torches were banned from the room. Much ribaldry ensued.

However, the Duke of Orleans (who died after having both his arms amputated in an assassination, incidentally), being kind of a dick, took a torch into the room and under the auspices of trying to locate his brother Charles (others say he was teasing the dancers), one of the Woodwose dancers caught aflame. The men, being chained together and covered with extremely flammable gunk, all lit up like a bonfire. Hilarity and panic galore.

Charles barely escaped with his life, being saved by the Duchess of Berry, (whom he had been flirting with prior to becoming human kindling) who covered him with her skirts, keeping him from burning alive. Four of the other men died.