There are not many impressions more false than this in history, and it is entirely due to the ignorance of the date of a number of historical events which are sometimes massed together as mediaeval or at least not modern, modern history being supposed to begin as a rule with the discovery of America. As a matter of fact, the refinements of torture all came after Columbus' Century. The Virgin of Nuremberg, the iron boots into which wedges were driven for torture purposes, the iron gauntlets in which the hands of living {189} people were roasted and many other of the hideous contrivances that rightly find a prominent place in history were made in the later sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and not in Columbus' time nor during the mediaeval period. The worst refinements of legal torture nearly all were devised in the course of the witchcraft delusion which swept over Europe in the later sixteenth and during the seventeenth century. There was comparatively little witch baiting and witch hunting and very few witches put to death during the earlier centuries. Witchcraft was a post-Reformation delusion. The Encyclopedia Britannica (Ninth Edition), in its article on torture, emphasizes particularly the fact that: "It is the boast of the common law of England that it never recognized torture as legal. Instances of torture as a means of obtaining evidence were invariably ordered by the Crown or Council, or by some tribunal of extraordinary authority such as the Star Chamber, not professing to be bound by the rules of the common law." "The infliction of torture became more common under the Tudor monarchs," this article continues. "Under Henry VIII it appears to have been in frequent use." May I add that its frequency is an incident of the end of his reign after the religious difficulties began. "Only two cases are recorded under Edward VI and eight under Mary. The reign of Elizabeth was its culminating point. In the words of Hallam, 'the rack stood seldom idle in the tower for all the latter part of Elizabeth's reign.' The varieties of torture used at this period are fully described by Lingard, and consisted of the rack, the scavenger's daughter, the iron gauntlets or bilboes, and the cell called 'little ease.' The registers of the council during the Tudor and early Stuart reigns are full of entries as to the use of torture, both for state and for ordinary offences." Under Elizabeth and the Stuarts, and even later, there were cases fully recognized by the English common law which differed from torture only in name. To quote the Encyclopedia Britannica again: