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Email a friendSinister tales of torture in Edinbugh's bloody jail
THESE tales from Edinburgh's town jail, with their litany of inventive torture and execution, might have chilled the marrow in the past, but we know only too well that past ages had no monopoly on human barbarism.
The inmates of the famous prison, ironically on a site abutting St Giles Cathedral in the Royal Mile, included the nobility as well as the workaday smugglers, burglars, murderers and religious apostates.
Even on the scaffold, social class was important.
If you were lucky enough to be aristocratic, then your blue blood was more likely to be shed by the Maiden, a forerunner of the Guillotine, before your head was spiked and limbs were torn off for public display.
The lower orders could expect any of a variety of obscene, often lingering deaths as a relief for their tortured bodies.
Douglas Skelton is an engaging narrator, but no romantic. As he details the gory history of Edinburgh's Tolbooth, which, in many ways encompasses the history of Scotland up to 1817, when it was demolished, he observes that, today, "innocent blood continues to be shed in the name of God or the twin deities of democracy and profit."
GORDON PARSONS