*boiled alive*

Boiling to death was legal punishment in the olden time, though instances of its exercise were not so frequent in the annals of crime as some of the other modes of execution. In the year 1531, when Henry VIII was King, an Act was passed for boiling prisoners to death. The Act details the case of one Richard Roose, or Coke, a cook in the diocese of the Bishop of Rochester, who had, by putting poison in the food of several persons, occasioned the death of two, and the serious illness of others. He was found guilty of treason, and sentenced to be boiled to death without the benefit of clergy; that is, that no abatement of sentence was to be made on account of his eccesiastical connection, nor to be allowed any indemnity such as was commonly the privelege of clerical offenders. He was brought to punishment at Smithfield, on the 15th of April, 1532; and the Act ordained that all manner of prisoners should meet with the same doom henceforth. A maid-servant, in 1531, was boiled to death in the market-place of King's Lynn, for the crime of poisoning her mistress. Margaret Davy, a maid-servant, for poisoning persons with whom she had lived, perished at Smithfield on March 28th, 1542. The Act was repealed in the year 1547.
The punishment had been common both in England and on the Continent before its precise enforcement by Henry's Act. It has frequent mention as a punishment for coining. The "Chronicle of the Grey Friars of London" (published by the Camden Society) has an account of a case at Smithfield, in which a man was fastened to a chain and let down into boiling water several times until he was dead.

Boiled Alive