12708. History Facts

At banquets, the Gauls used to award the legs of roast animals to the bravest warriors. Sometimes fights to the death resulted from the squabbles over who should get them.

12709. History Facts

Long ago, criminals would be hanged in a metal cage called a gibbet, or in chains, near the scene of their crime ‘until their bones rotted to nothing'.

12710. History Facts

In 1577, an outbreak of typhus in an Oxford jail killed 300 people – the judges, jury, witnesses and spectators at criminal trials.The prisoners, used to living in filthy conditions, all survived.

12711. History Facts

Vlad the Impaler used to entertain guests to dinner surrounded by the bodies of people he had executed, impaled on spikes.

12712. History Facts

During the French Revolution, large crowds watched public executions by guillotine and people would rush forward to try to collect blood dripping from the heads lifted to show the crowd. They would keep bloody handkerchieves as souvenirs of the outing.

12713. History Facts

In 1857, a group of Indian people who rebelled against the ruling British were strapped across the mouths of live cannons and blown to bits when cannon balls were shot through them.

12714. History Facts

People who killed themselves used to be buried at a cross-roads with a stake through their heart. It was thought that they couldn't go to heaven, and the cross-roads would confuse their ghost so that it couldn't find the way home to haunt anyone.

12715. History Facts

A trusted servant of William of Orange, a Dutch king of England, spent money the king had given him for clothes on pistols, which he used to shoot the king. As punishment, he had his flesh pulled off with red-hot pincers, his guts pulled out and his body cut into pieces.

12716. History Facts

In 1685, a wolf that terrorized a village near Ansbach in Germany was sentenced to be dressed in human clothing and hanged.

12717. History Facts

The first person to be found guilty of a crime on the basis of finger print evidence was an Argentinian woman who murdered her children in 1892. Her fingerprints were found in blood on a door frame.

12718. History Facts

In Ancient Babylon, a doctor who accidentally killed a patient had his hands cut off.

12719. History Facts

A punishment for an English woman who nagged her husband or gossiped too much was to wear a metal cage over her head called a ‘scold's bridle'. It had a spiked plate inside her mouth that would cut her tongue if she moved it to speak.

12720. History Facts

Inca women washed their hair in week-old urine, braided it, and then used more old urine to keep it in place.

12721. History Facts

The Chinchorro people of Chile mummified their dead 8,000 years ago.They cut off the arms and legs, removed and smoked the skin, strapped sticks to the bones and replaced all the soft parts with grass and ashes, then put the whole body back together and painted it.

12722. History Facts

During excavations at a circle of standing stones in Avebury, England, in 1938, archaeologists found the body of a man who had been crushed under a falling stone in the 1320s when villagers tried to bury the stones.

12723. History Facts

Over 100,000 people have been tried for witchcraft in Europe since 1100, most of them tortured and eventually executed.

12724. History Facts

It is reported that during Napoleon's invasion of Russia in 1812 some soldiers cut open dead horses and sheltered inside them to avoid freezing to death.

12725. History Facts

Some Stone-Age people believed the spirit could only escape when the flesh had gone from the body, so they left corpses to rot or be eaten by wild animals, or hacked off the flesh, before burying them.

12726. History Facts

As well as people, the ancient Egyptians mummified all kinds of animals including cats, crocodiles, birds – even fish and dung beetles.

12727. History Facts

At the Aztec festival celebrating Xipe Totec – the Aztec god of spring – prisoners of war were flayed alive.Their skins were then worn ceremonially by priests to represent the renewal of earth and the start of new life in spring.

Fact
Koala Bears are not bears.      .. More >>