From this it would appear safe to conclude that this is a limitation on a pre-existing, more general use of torture.
[1833] Jardine, p. 65.
[1834] Lecky, Hist. of Rationalism, Am. ed. I. 122.—In his very interesting work, Mr. Lecky mentions a case, occurring under the Commonwealth, of an aged clergyman named Lowes, who, after an irreproachable pastorate of fifty years, fell under suspicion. “The unhappy old man was kept awake for several successive nights, and persecuted ‘till he was weary of his life, and was scarcely sensible of what he said or did.’ He was then thrown into the water, condemned, and hung.”—Ibid. p. 126.
[1835] Cobbett’s State Trials, VI. 686.—Although ostensibly not used to extort confession, this pricking was practically regarded as a torture. Thus in 1677 the Privy Council of Scotland “found that they (i. e., the inferior magistracy) might not use any torture by pricking or by withholding them from sleep” (loc. cit.).
[1836] Spottiswoode Miscellany, Edinburgh, 1845, II. 67.
[1837] Rogers’s Scotland, Social and Domestic, p. 266.
[1838] Statut. Roberti III. cap. xvi. (Skene).
[1839] Lecky, op. cit. I. 145-6.—Rogers, op. cit. pp. 267-300.
[1840] I quote from Mr. Lecky (p. 147), who gives as his authority “Pitcairn’s Criminal Trials of Scotland.”
“But others and perhaps worse trials were in reserve. The three principal that were habitually applied were the penniwinkis, the boots, and the caschielawis. The first was a kind of thumbscrew; the second was a frame in which the leg was inserted, and in which it was broken by wedges driven in by a hammer; the third was also an iron frame for the leg, which was from time to time heated over a brazier. Fire matches were sometimes applied to the body of the victim. We read, in a contemporary legal register, of one man who was kept for forty-eight hours in ‘vehement tortour’ in the caschielawis; and of another who remained in the same frightful machine for eleven days and eleven nights, whose legs were broken daily for fourteen days in the boots, and who was so scourged that the whole skin was torn from his body.” These cases occurred in 1596.