Browse by theme

• Executions through history206Documented executions across eight centuries — the scaffolds, blocks and firing squads, and what happened when the machinery did not work as intended.
• Kings, queens and the courts around them146Power at close range: the executions, poisonings, imprisonments and disgraces that happened inside royal courts rather than on battlefields.
• Murder and crime134Killings, poisonings and criminal careers from the historical record, including the cases that changed how crimes were investigated.
• War and battle118Sieges, massacres, last stands and the aftermath that official accounts tend to pass over quickly.
• Torture and punishment103The instruments and sentences the law once considered reasonable, and what the records say they actually did to people.
• Mysteries and unsolved cases100Deaths, disappearances and discoveries the record never closed — what the evidence actually supports, and where the guessing begins.
• Martyrs and the Church75Heresy trials, burnings, reformations and counter-reformations — people killed over doctrine, and the institutions that killed them.
• Bodies, relics and early medicine41Anatomy, grave-robbing, preserved remains and venerated relics — what was done with the dead, and why.
• Prisons and asylums28Institutions built to hold people out of sight — gaols, lunatic asylums and the regimes inside them, from the records they kept.
• Pirates and the sea21Piracy, mutiny, shipwreck and execution dock — maritime crime and disaster, and the trials that followed survivors ashore.
• Witchcraft and the occult20Witch trials, cunning folk, cursed objects and occult panics — the accusations, the courts and the people who died of them.

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