boiling

boiling, in the history of punishment, a method of execution commonly involving a large container of heated liquid such as water, oil, molten lead, wax, tallow, or wine, into which a convicted prisoner was placed until he died.

During the reign of the Roman emperor Nero, thousands of Christians were boiled in oil. In the Chronicle of the Grey Friars of London (1852), a history of London from the late 12th to the mid-16th century, a poisoner is said to have met his death by being lowered on a chain into boiling water at Smithfield in 1522. However, the only extant legislative notice of boiling in England occurred in an Act passed in 1531 during the reign of Henry VIII, the preamble of which made poisoning a form of petty treason (i.e., killing one’s husband or master), the penalty for which would be boiling to death. The statute also named Richard Rouse (or Cook), a cook who, by putting poisoned yeast in porridge prepared for the household of the Bishop of Rochester and the poor of Lambeth parish, sickened 17 people and killed a man and a woman. He was found guilty of petty treason and publicly boiled at Smithfield. Some months later a maidservant was boiled at King’s Lynn for poisoning her mistress, and in 1542 Margaret Davy or Dawes, a servant, was boiled at Smithfield for poisoning her employer.

That method of execution was also imposed in France and Germany from the 13th to the 16th century for “coining” or “clipping” (the scraping of fragments from coins that were then melted and cast into new coins). The practice ceased when authorities minted coins with milled edges, thereby making any damaged coin immediately evident.