Ah, October, my favorite month. I figure if you're gonna go creepy, might as well go as creepy as possible, right? So today we're taking a look at a particularly chilling form of historical execution: immurement, in which the condemned person was built up inside a room, cave, wall, or some other small area, and left to die. Unlike live burial, where the victim suffocates quickly, immurement doomed its sufferers to a long, slow, painful death from starvation and dehydration. Good times!
Immurement
was used as capital punishment by many societies including the
Greeks, Romans, Chinese, and others. In ancient Rome, Vestal
Virgins who broke their vow of chastity were
immured in caves or catacombs as punishment for their lustful ways.
In the early days of Christianity several saints were said to have
been martyred via immurement, including St.
Oran of Iona, who was entombed not once, but
twice! (Apparently he was only mostly dead.)
The Julio-Claudians were alarmingly fond of this method of execution. According to the historian Cassius Dio, Antonia Minor, widow of Drusus the Elder, locked her adulterous daughter Livilla in a room until she starved to death as punishment for conspiring to murder her uncle Tiberius. The family of Livilla’s brother Germanicus fared even worse: his widow Agrippina the Elder, daughter Julia Livia, and son Drusus Caesar were all executed, likely by immurement in prison, at the hands of Tiberius. (Moral of the story: don’t get on Tiberius’ bad side.)
The Julio-Claudians were alarmingly fond of this method of execution. According to the historian Cassius Dio, Antonia Minor, widow of Drusus the Elder, locked her adulterous daughter Livilla in a room until she starved to death as punishment for conspiring to murder her uncle Tiberius. The family of Livilla’s brother Germanicus fared even worse: his widow Agrippina the Elder, daughter Julia Livia, and son Drusus Caesar were all executed, likely by immurement in prison, at the hands of Tiberius. (Moral of the story: don’t get on Tiberius’ bad side.)
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| Patricia Quinn as the doomed Livilla in I, Claudius |
The
two most famous cases of immurement happened a few centuries later.
When Richard II of England
was deposed in 1399, he was held prisoner in Pontefract Castle until
his death only a few months later; rumors soon circulated that he’d
been shut up in a room and starved to death so his body would show no
marks of violence. (One wonders how an emaciated corpse would attract
no suspicion.) In 1610 Elizabeth Báthory,
the infamous serial killer known as "The Blood Countess",
was sentenced for her crimes to a form of prolonged immurement,
walled inside the tower of her castle with only a tiny slot left open
for food and water. She survived for four years before succumbing to
her fate.
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| Pontefract Castle, where Richard II met his untimely end |
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| Elizabeth Bathory, the "Blood Countess" |
The
terrifying nature of immurement has also made it popular in fiction.
In the ancient Greek play Antigone,
the title character is sentenced to immurement for defying her uncle
the king, though she hangs herself rather than face slow starvation.
Immurement is the murder weapon of choice in Oscar Wilde's The
Canterville Ghost, and Edgar Allan Poe used
it several times, most famously in The Cask of
Amontillado. In The
Adventures of Tom Sawyer, the villain Injun
Joe meets his demise via accidental immurement in a cave. In the
Gothic soap opera Dark Shadows
several characters suffer immurement, including Barnabas Collins, who
is sealed up in the family tomb as an eternal punishment since, being
a vampire, he cannot die. Harsh.
Compared
to other historical methods of execution, immurement falls pretty low
on the scale of spectacle and gore; nobody's going to bring a picnic
lunch to watch someone get bricked up in a wall. The torture of
immurement was inflicted not by weapons, but by time. This was a form
of death for people society wanted to forget. So the next time you
visit a medieval castle or walk over an ancient bridge, step lightly
– you never know what (or who) you might be walking on. Sweet
dreams everyone!
