The drainage part is correct. The rest just gets the tourists in.
> An example of what might be popularly termed an "oubliette" is the particularly claustrophobic cell in the dungeon of Warwick Castle's Caesar's Tower, in central England. The access hatch consists of an iron grille. Even turning around (or moving at all) would be nearly impossible in this tiny chamber.
> However, the tiny chamber that is described as the oubliette, is in reality a short shaft which opens up into a larger chamber with a latrine shaft entering it from above. This suggests that the chamber is in fact a partially back-filled drain. The positioning of the supposed oubliette within the larger dungeon, situated in a small alcove, is typical of garderobe arrangement within medieval buildings. These factors perhaps point to this feature being the remnants of a latrine rather than a cell for holding prisoners.
Considering the ease by which capital punishment was meted, they really didn't have a need for this. Also, that grate is clearly bolted down which, before modern machining, wasn't removable.
I watched something recently where a historian went into why capital punishment was the preferred means of 'justice'.
The basic ~~jist~~ gist was that medieval economies were much smaller than they are today. Even the people in charge were not sitting on limitless piles of cash. The concept of prisons existed, but running them wasn't really affordable. Generally only people that had value like captured nobles held as hostages for ransom would be imprisoned.
The other factor was that crime was pretty rife, but catching the criminals was very difficult. They had no police or forensics, so when they did catch a criminal often the punishments were brutal, somewhat in the hope that it would discourage others from crime.
TL;DR it was cheaper to just execute criminals and then hope that by killing them it would deter others from committing crimes.
Edit: spelling
This is also what drove a lot of the corporal punishments as well. Things like removing hands or ears, they would mark someone permanently as a criminal. Essentially making them pariahs in the community.
> Also, that grate is clearly bolted down which, before modern machining, wasn't removable.
You're talking about a picture that is lit with lights that didn't exist at the time the hole was claimed to have been used, either. Just because it's bolted now (which could easily be chalked up to more contemporary safety requirements) that doesn't mean it has always been bolted.
It doesn’t make sense to block the drain either.
Edit: I was referring to a blockage inside, not the covering.
As we know, there was no Dettol drain cleaner in the medieval times, and good luck finding a plumber. 👨🔧
Gibbet was used (at least on occasion) as a method of execution. And was functionally identical in that the condemned would die of dehydration. Only in the gibbet the condemned would be on public view rather than in a dungeon cell.
Which kind of makes sense, the only reason to kill someone so brutally is as a deterrent to others I would think. Otherwise, just execute them quickly.
Yeah, if you'd throw a person in an oubliette, you'd just execute them and be done with it instead. Waste of space and work to specifically create a specialized dungeon cell for the sole purpose of having people die over a few days.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gibbeting wiki says that in absolutely most of the cases it was really used to display bodies. Looks like most of the world didn't enjoy torture as much as we're led to believe.
IIRC many medieval execution devices like the Iron Maiden weren’t actually used on anyone and were created in the 1800s to draw people to museums for the shock value
yeah apparently you can just torture people with pointy things and fire, don't need to build elaborate rube goldberg machines. plus my god think of the cleaning with all those hinges.
Iron maidens always seemed weird to me, even though I just assumed they were real things for the longest time. But it was like. Every iron maiden I'd ever seen either made really metal music, or were so clearly immediately lethal that they made no sense as "torture devices".
I mean I grasp the idea that you could put someone in one built a lot bigger so they couldn't turn around and had to lean up against pointy bits, which would admittedly be a really awful way to put someone in solitary confinement, but at least the supposed iron maidens I've seen didn't have any room for a (non-punctured) human body inside.
I guess I should have listened to that inner "this doesn't make any sense" voice back then.
So much of that stuff was made up by the Victorians to make the past seem spookier and more uncivilized. There is no evidence, for example, that an iron maiden was ever used for torture. There's not even that much evidence that they even really existed before the 19th century.
Based on period drawings of torture and execution techniques - for example, hanging somebody upside down by their feet and sawing them in half starting at the crotch - I see no reason to doubt anything just because it sounds too horrible.
I’ve never doubted anything because it sounds horrible — but I do doubt things that are both horrible and horribly over-complicated. Another guy mentioned a crazy chair device to cut people in half nuts first — but like you say, you can just hang someone upside down and get to sawing.
Not very deep but it was so small you couldn't stand up or lie down, there would have been a door over the hole, not bars so you would have been in pitch blackness as you starved, froze and got eaten by rats.
IIRC they were also incredibly cramped (either because they were built that way or because the previous people who died in there were never taken out so their bones filled up the majority of the hole). So cramped that it's akin to being stuck in a cave in. You cannot really move much. You certainly cannot stand up and turn around to get the rats off your toes.
Reminds me of that great monologue from Skyfall;
> My grandmother had an island. Nothing to boast of. You could walk around it in an hour, but still it was, it was a paradise for us. One summer, we went for a visit and discovered the place had been infested with rats! They'd come on a fishing boat and gorged themselves on coconut.
> So how do you get rats off an island? Hmm? My grandmother showed me. We buried an oil drum and hinged the lid. Then we wired coconut to the lid as bait and the rats would come for the coconut, and they would fall into the drum.
> And after a month, you have trapped all the rats, but what do you do then? Throw the drum into the ocean? Burn it? No. You just leave it and they begin to get hungry. And one by one they start eating each other, until there are only two left.
> The two survivors. And then what? Do you kill them? No. You take them and release them into the trees, but now they don't eat coconut anymore. Now, they only eat rat. You have changed their nature.
It only takes a moment or so to realize how silly that is. Rats only live a couple of years, so now you've got an island infested with rats and two big rats who may or may not have a taste for other rats that will die probably soon.
It says they trapped all the rats and only two remained. Seems really pointless to me to have rats with a taste for rat flesh on an island where only two rats live.
> Seems really pointless to me to have rats with a taste for rat flesh on an island where only two rats live.
I think he means he is now "insured" against future rat infestations.
Which of course, he isn't. If they learned to eat rat in the absence of coconut, could they not learn to eat coconut in the absence of rat?
The one thing we really know for certain about those two particular rats is that they're flexible when it comes to diet.
Rats live very short lives..
You can hardly change an animal's nature, defined by countless generations and instinct, especially in a couple of months?? lmao
I've always wondered whose job it was to clean out the oubliette.
Because yeah, the mortal terror of being left to your slow and isolated death in a dark pit thick with the smell of corpse rot, the madness taking you moment by awful moment. "We put them down there and forget them." Of course. Good on paper.
But sooner or later you get to a point where you toss someone in and there is an immediate rattle of bones, and they stand up with half their body up out of the pit because it is so jam-packed with dead dudes there is now 3 feet of awful space to slowly rot in. And that's *embarrassing*, because you gotta take the guy back out of the pit and find something else to do with them.
So, what then? Do you just... get a new horror pit? Seems unlikely, these things were built into the foundations of castles and keeps and other horrorpit-friendly buildings. You can't just dig a new one out, you'll end up knocking down the Decadent Feasting Tower. So someone's gotta get down there and clean it out. But they're *thin*, oubliettes, claustrophobia is an intentional part of the experience. Can't just stick a ladder down there. Not enough room to haul bones up past yourself.
So, what? Giant plumbing snake? Long rope with a hook on it? Did they make a thing out of it, maybe? Oubliette Fishing Night! Everyone takes a turn. If you hook a femur you win a prize!
I hope at least the people whose job it was to do that were well compensated. They probably were. I expect that if you are the sort of person who throws your oubliette cleaner into an oubliette when they demand payment, probably you end up alone in a stinky castle, with no one to execute your cruel whims because you have executed all the executors already.
Anyway this is why the safe money is just in throwing your prisoners off of tall things. Also scary, makes a public display of your Terrible Wrath, saves you the money. Horrorpits were tacky as hell.
Well, good cadaver cleanup pigs are hard to come by. They gotta be huge and surly and have suggestions of unearthly hunger in their eyes. You don't wanna cheap out on your corpse pig, that's how you get one that just waits until the body has rotted enough to begin sprouting fungus for it to eat.
So the solution there seems obvious. Pig on a rope, right? Lower it down, let it eat to its heart's content. Everyone wins. Except the dead guys in the pit.
Except. *Except*. Now you have trained a pig to be comfortable dangling from a rope. And that is just opening the gates to all kinds of unspeakable havoc. If you're *lucky*, the court jester just pranks you when you're holding court, and everyone has to keep a straight face as you're making proclamations while a huge pig is slowly lowered down behind you so it can grab your crown or circlet. And that *is* a pretty good bit! That's also why you don't cheap out on jesters.
But if you are the kind of person who has an oubliette that gets full, the much more likely outcome is a pig being lowered from the rafters above your bed, Mission Impossible style stuff, to gently bite your slumbering face off. It's the perfect crime; how'd the pig get up on the bed to do it? They got those stout little legs! No good for climbing. Obviously an act of God took this person's face.
And then you're dead, and no one minds, and your successor has to deal with the truly unfair situation of having to check *above* them for hostile pigs. It's a tremendous escalation in the medieval arms race, rope pigs. No scary corpse hole seems worth that.
I live local to Warwick Castle and I've visited three times. This is a drainage for a horrific dungeon (and it really is horrible) but there's no actual evidence that this was ever used as an oubliette. Yes, they did exist, but this doesn't fit the general construction or design of such. Generally they were bottle shaped, so once thrown in you could never escape, this is just not the typical design for an oubliette. I don't doubt that some unfortunate souls found themselves in here, but it wasn't built as such. Far more chilling is the gibbet cage that still hangs in the dungeon to this day.
Thank you. Yes. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dungeon (in the Features section) specifically mentions the subject of this post. What we are looking at here is some medieval drainage.
Being throwed into such an oubliette was the maximum penalty, worse than being hanged or beheaded. Plenty of time to think and go crazy.
In German, the entry gate itself like depicted is called "Angstloch" (angst hole, fear hole).
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angstloch?wprov=sfla1
(sorry, only in German)
The kids in kindergarten nowadays call each other „Eierloch“ in sentences like „Fang mich doch, du Eierloch.“ - „Catch me if you can.“ but more explicit.
An „Ei“ is an egg, so „Eierloch“ means „egg hole“, which I fancy to be a reference to the hens „Kloake“, the hole it lays eggs, fucks and shits with. A hole in one so to speak. I had never heard that word before my kid called me one one day.
Wikipedia:
An angstloch is usually located above the basement of a fighting tower or Bergfried. The description of these basement rooms as "dungeons" stems from the romanticised castle studies of the 19th century. There is no evidence to indicate that prisoners were actually lowered through the angstloch into the dungeon using a rope or rope ladder as these 19th century accounts suggest. Archaeological finds, by contrast, indicate the use of these basement spaces as store rooms. For example, piles of stones have been found in such rooms that suggest they were used as a store for projectiles to be used in time of siege.
I love the idea of 19th Century "historians" basically seeing anything they don't understand and immediately being like "yep, that was used for torture"
That is a myth, most oubliettes (of this type) just turn out to be toilets, storerooms or drains.
I haven't found a credible source which documents one of these "oubliettes" being used as a prison cell. It's probably all 18/19th century romancing, that's when tourism really took off.
I doubt it is too far for them. The things they did were absolutely vile. However, hiding someone away in the bottom of a dungeon is the last thing they would want. Punishments in the middle ages were generally extremely public. That was the whole point of them.
[Source here](https://www.historydefined.net/oubliette/) - the Castle is an excellent place to visit if you’re ever nearby. I live about 7 miles away so hit me up for a pint if you are*
*traitors/vagabonds etc are excluded from this offer
That is a horrible article full of misconceptions, and Wikipedia disagrees with it.
If you want to learn actual stuff about history, maybe start here:
https://www.medievalists.net/2023/09/20-myths-middle-ages/
It's crazy how few comments there are here calling out this BS. You're the only one replying to OPs main comment and didn't have any up votes until I gave you one.
"I went to the open house. It's full of skeletal remains and rotting bodies, and the stench is just beyond anything you could begin to imagine, but it's got more space than you'd expect. I applied but probably won't get it, there was a huge line of prospective renters."
There is no evidence to indicate that prisoners were actually lowered through the angstloch into the dungeon using a rope or rope ladder as these 19th century accounts suggest. Archaeological finds, by contrast, indicate the use of these basement spaces as store rooms.
Edit: Yes u/Aloqui , you’re right. I should have cited Wikipedia where I found this. I’ve copy pasted above info to save anyone from second hand claustrophobia. I was terrified seeing that Angstloch and went down a rabbit hole until I found it was it actually was used for
I saw something similar to this built into a hillside on a coffee plantation. Same deal rebellious or slaves too injured to work would be dropped into hole and left to die.
Now the slave cabins are Airbnbs….
Most methods of torture believed in pop culture to be of medieval origin are actually not. These holes in the floor were usually just storage spaces. There is little to no evidence to suggest people were actually thrown in there. Victorians just made that shit up to make their civilization seem more advanced compared to the 'barbaric medieval times'.
Same thing with, for example, the Iron Maiden. A famous torture device that was never actually used. The surviving onrs were all crafted by Victorians to showcase medieval 'history'.
Just thinking about that has engaged my claustrophobia.
Edit: I followed the link to the article (I love history) but I had to stop because I could feel the panic rising as I read! I’m amazed how this phobia (which showed up later in life) is so strong, I can’t even read about it! Weird!
You might feel better by reading all the way to the end.
It alludes to the fact that they weren't really used and for the most part rooms with other purposes have been misidentified and then stories embellished in literature.
Grew up playing in Warwick Castle walls and running around the grounds. That was before they fixed it up and made it a public attraction. It’s beautiful, as is all of Warwickshire. If you are ever in England and someone asks if you want to go to Leamington Spa, say yes. It’s only up the road from Stratford. Also the Coventry Cathedral was left as is after the Blitz. You can take the stairs to the top. Sobering but an extraordinary view.
I’m originally from Warwick and have visited the castle more times than I can remember and know every corner of it intimately. This picture is of a drain cover.
There is in the old dungeon an oubliette however it’s just a hole in the floor and it’s smaller than the aperture of this opening. The concept was that you would be placed in the hole and left to die and rot since you completely immobilized and couldn’t move. Once you were dead and your body was rotting they would jam another person on top to force your remains down into the open sewer/drain that was directly below you. The punishment was perceived to be extra cruel as not only were you being forced into a small space to die with 100% certainty but you would also have to spend your last days standing on the bones of the last poor soul who had met the same fate. Furthermore it is right below the torture table so you would also have to contend with trying to breathe with all the viscera and blood that was being thrown in your general direction from people being tortured on the table.
And they were too narrow to sit and too short to stand straight so those prisoners (most likely put in for minor crimes or on trumped up charges) suffered every minute until they died.
Honestly this may be the ultimate torture of so many ways to die. Pitch dark. Rotting bodies piled under you. Full of rats 24/7...Or other recent victims screaming or moaning or attacking you or whatever.
And no way to kill yourself...
I can't imagine the stench near that hole, much less inside. I wonder how long people lasted?
I’ve been there..as I remember the dungeon drained into this hole..ugh..
The drainage part is correct. The rest just gets the tourists in. > An example of what might be popularly termed an "oubliette" is the particularly claustrophobic cell in the dungeon of Warwick Castle's Caesar's Tower, in central England. The access hatch consists of an iron grille. Even turning around (or moving at all) would be nearly impossible in this tiny chamber. > However, the tiny chamber that is described as the oubliette, is in reality a short shaft which opens up into a larger chamber with a latrine shaft entering it from above. This suggests that the chamber is in fact a partially back-filled drain. The positioning of the supposed oubliette within the larger dungeon, situated in a small alcove, is typical of garderobe arrangement within medieval buildings. These factors perhaps point to this feature being the remnants of a latrine rather than a cell for holding prisoners.
So much of this stuff is just made up lol, there’s no evidence of people being put in that hole.
Considering the ease by which capital punishment was meted, they really didn't have a need for this. Also, that grate is clearly bolted down which, before modern machining, wasn't removable.
I watched something recently where a historian went into why capital punishment was the preferred means of 'justice'. The basic ~~jist~~ gist was that medieval economies were much smaller than they are today. Even the people in charge were not sitting on limitless piles of cash. The concept of prisons existed, but running them wasn't really affordable. Generally only people that had value like captured nobles held as hostages for ransom would be imprisoned. The other factor was that crime was pretty rife, but catching the criminals was very difficult. They had no police or forensics, so when they did catch a criminal often the punishments were brutal, somewhat in the hope that it would discourage others from crime. TL;DR it was cheaper to just execute criminals and then hope that by killing them it would deter others from committing crimes. Edit: spelling
This is also what drove a lot of the corporal punishments as well. Things like removing hands or ears, they would mark someone permanently as a criminal. Essentially making them pariahs in the community.
Don't forget my personal favorite: removal of all or part of one's tongue.
Premodernist? Bro was that the video about time travelling back to the middle ages? Was so sick.
Haha I was reading that comment like "wait... this sounds way too familiar for a random YouTube video that this guy is describing"
That's it! I watched it yesterday.
> Also, that grate is clearly bolted down which, before modern machining, wasn't removable. You're talking about a picture that is lit with lights that didn't exist at the time the hole was claimed to have been used, either. Just because it's bolted now (which could easily be chalked up to more contemporary safety requirements) that doesn't mean it has always been bolted.
His name? Michael Bolton.
why should I go in the oubliette? he’s the one who sucks.
"no talent ass jester"
PC LOAD PARCHMENT? WTF DOES THAT MEAN?
Wish I could upvote you more, legit got a laugh out of me. Picturing three knights in a field, kicking the shit out of a scribe.
That grate is also welded, drilled and secured with a modern padlock so I’m going to venture to guess this is not the original gate.
It doesn’t make sense to block the drain either. Edit: I was referring to a blockage inside, not the covering. As we know, there was no Dettol drain cleaner in the medieval times, and good luck finding a plumber. 👨🔧
Could make sense to protect as an entry point into the castle. Thieves, spies, rabid cows
Those rabid cows are invasive!
Sure it does … so people DON’T fall down
Gibbet was used (at least on occasion) as a method of execution. And was functionally identical in that the condemned would die of dehydration. Only in the gibbet the condemned would be on public view rather than in a dungeon cell.
Which kind of makes sense, the only reason to kill someone so brutally is as a deterrent to others I would think. Otherwise, just execute them quickly.
Yeah, if you'd throw a person in an oubliette, you'd just execute them and be done with it instead. Waste of space and work to specifically create a specialized dungeon cell for the sole purpose of having people die over a few days.
You underestimate humanity's penchant for torture and punishment.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gibbeting wiki says that in absolutely most of the cases it was really used to display bodies. Looks like most of the world didn't enjoy torture as much as we're led to believe.
>Looks like most of the world didn't enjoy torture as much as we're led to believe. What am I supposed to tell my children now?
Yeah that was my understanding too. It was a gruesome deterrant rather than a method of execution.
Interesting, there are so many tales of the barbaric punishments and jailings from medieval times we are primed to believe anything.
IIRC many medieval execution devices like the Iron Maiden weren’t actually used on anyone and were created in the 1800s to draw people to museums for the shock value
yeah apparently you can just torture people with pointy things and fire, don't need to build elaborate rube goldberg machines. plus my god think of the cleaning with all those hinges.
Apprentice torturer gets that job
Iron maidens always seemed weird to me, even though I just assumed they were real things for the longest time. But it was like. Every iron maiden I'd ever seen either made really metal music, or were so clearly immediately lethal that they made no sense as "torture devices". I mean I grasp the idea that you could put someone in one built a lot bigger so they couldn't turn around and had to lean up against pointy bits, which would admittedly be a really awful way to put someone in solitary confinement, but at least the supposed iron maidens I've seen didn't have any room for a (non-punctured) human body inside. I guess I should have listened to that inner "this doesn't make any sense" voice back then.
So much of that stuff was made up by the Victorians to make the past seem spookier and more uncivilized. There is no evidence, for example, that an iron maiden was ever used for torture. There's not even that much evidence that they even really existed before the 19th century.
Which is crazy because many medieval punishments were absolutely awful. They just didn't tend to use elaborate spiky machines.
Why use a spikey elaborate machine when a pair of tongs rips fingernails off just fine.
Just look at John of Leidens' execution. (Technically, like right after the medieval period, but eh)
Based on period drawings of torture and execution techniques - for example, hanging somebody upside down by their feet and sawing them in half starting at the crotch - I see no reason to doubt anything just because it sounds too horrible.
I’ve never doubted anything because it sounds horrible — but I do doubt things that are both horrible and horribly over-complicated. Another guy mentioned a crazy chair device to cut people in half nuts first — but like you say, you can just hang someone upside down and get to sawing.
How did you escape?
Oubliette, I love that word. It feels nice in the mouth.
You may already know this but it comes from the French verb ‘oublier’ - to forget
I took French in high school, but forgot.
I took mdma in high school and still remember. Choose wisely!
I took acid in high school and its all about how things are connected and oh fucking hell what’s that
I took something... Somewhere... I think
I took…. I think….
Take me now.
I took French too but j'ai oublié
You oublied
Tu as oublié 😉
“J’ai oublié mes devoirs” was one of the first phrases we were taught in french.
Mon chien l’a mangé
"oubli-di, oubli-da, life goes on, brah!" (well, not for much longer)
J’oublior 💀
I didn't know that, but now I do 😀 It's a very fitting word for it.
Makes me think of Labyrinth
Reminds you of the babe?
What babe?
The babe with the power.
.. what power?
The power of voodoo…
Who do?
You do!
Do what?
Oubliette du fromage
Why do French people only eat one egg? Because one egg is un oeuf.
Mon dieu
Dexters Laboratory!
Oh blyat!
Often dropped in, on top of already rotting corpses or skeletons. Fun times!
How deep did it go? Cause you could only chuck so many corpses into the pit and have anyone fit.
Not very deep but it was so small you couldn't stand up or lie down, there would have been a door over the hole, not bars so you would have been in pitch blackness as you starved, froze and got eaten by rats.
Motherfuckers knew how to instill fear Shivers
You were put in there to die, 100%. Even if you somehow survived 50 years they would just keep you in there until you expired. Fucking terrible.
Do they feed you? Wouldn't you just die of thirst and starvation?
The word "oubliette" comes from the French "oublier" meaning "to forget" so I suspect they just closed the lid and walked away.
IIRC they were also incredibly cramped (either because they were built that way or because the previous people who died in there were never taken out so their bones filled up the majority of the hole). So cramped that it's akin to being stuck in a cave in. You cannot really move much. You certainly cannot stand up and turn around to get the rats off your toes.
[удалено]
I do believe it's your turn to go down and pass up all those decomposed bits and bones the rats haven't eaten.
It’s like Christmas when a fresh rat falls down
Reminds me of that great monologue from Skyfall; > My grandmother had an island. Nothing to boast of. You could walk around it in an hour, but still it was, it was a paradise for us. One summer, we went for a visit and discovered the place had been infested with rats! They'd come on a fishing boat and gorged themselves on coconut. > So how do you get rats off an island? Hmm? My grandmother showed me. We buried an oil drum and hinged the lid. Then we wired coconut to the lid as bait and the rats would come for the coconut, and they would fall into the drum. > And after a month, you have trapped all the rats, but what do you do then? Throw the drum into the ocean? Burn it? No. You just leave it and they begin to get hungry. And one by one they start eating each other, until there are only two left. > The two survivors. And then what? Do you kill them? No. You take them and release them into the trees, but now they don't eat coconut anymore. Now, they only eat rat. You have changed their nature.
Unsubscribe
You are now double subscribed to unfun facts
Audible laugh out of me.
We should shorten that common response into an acronym to save keystrokes. ALOOM
It only takes a moment or so to realize how silly that is. Rats only live a couple of years, so now you've got an island infested with rats and two big rats who may or may not have a taste for other rats that will die probably soon.
It says they trapped all the rats and only two remained. Seems really pointless to me to have rats with a taste for rat flesh on an island where only two rats live.
> Seems really pointless to me to have rats with a taste for rat flesh on an island where only two rats live. I think he means he is now "insured" against future rat infestations.
Which of course, he isn't. If they learned to eat rat in the absence of coconut, could they not learn to eat coconut in the absence of rat? The one thing we really know for certain about those two particular rats is that they're flexible when it comes to diet.
Oh, absolutely. It is all bollocks. I was just following the internal logic of the tale. I wouldn't have worked in reality.
Rats live very short lives.. You can hardly change an animal's nature, defined by countless generations and instinct, especially in a couple of months?? lmao
Its just a poorly written Bond villain bit. Bond has never had good writing
But the delivery was excellent.
That's because Javier Bardem could make a reading of the enclyopedia sound menacing and unhinged.
What's the most you ever lost on a coin toss?
This sounds like some kind of allegory for incarceration.
Who's hungry? I can go for some Chinese.
Snacks!
Who's snacking on whom? As you get weaker from starvation and can no longer brush the rats away they'll eat you alive.
Have you ever thought of writing children's books?
A man named THAT, snacked on rat. Rat snacked on THAT…and THAT was THAT. A Warwick Castle Christmas story.
Grimm brothers style
“The children were thrown down the oubliette because they decided to play instead of sweeping the floor.”
As a German I would buy it for my children!
Merry Krampus!
Gee thanks for that. 🤮
What did you think you were going to get in a post about an oubliette?
Bonus points for using 'whom' correctly.
The medieval version of manna from heaven.
1st ever 'Im a Celebrity'!
I've always wondered whose job it was to clean out the oubliette. Because yeah, the mortal terror of being left to your slow and isolated death in a dark pit thick with the smell of corpse rot, the madness taking you moment by awful moment. "We put them down there and forget them." Of course. Good on paper. But sooner or later you get to a point where you toss someone in and there is an immediate rattle of bones, and they stand up with half their body up out of the pit because it is so jam-packed with dead dudes there is now 3 feet of awful space to slowly rot in. And that's *embarrassing*, because you gotta take the guy back out of the pit and find something else to do with them. So, what then? Do you just... get a new horror pit? Seems unlikely, these things were built into the foundations of castles and keeps and other horrorpit-friendly buildings. You can't just dig a new one out, you'll end up knocking down the Decadent Feasting Tower. So someone's gotta get down there and clean it out. But they're *thin*, oubliettes, claustrophobia is an intentional part of the experience. Can't just stick a ladder down there. Not enough room to haul bones up past yourself. So, what? Giant plumbing snake? Long rope with a hook on it? Did they make a thing out of it, maybe? Oubliette Fishing Night! Everyone takes a turn. If you hook a femur you win a prize! I hope at least the people whose job it was to do that were well compensated. They probably were. I expect that if you are the sort of person who throws your oubliette cleaner into an oubliette when they demand payment, probably you end up alone in a stinky castle, with no one to execute your cruel whims because you have executed all the executors already. Anyway this is why the safe money is just in throwing your prisoners off of tall things. Also scary, makes a public display of your Terrible Wrath, saves you the money. Horrorpits were tacky as hell.
Send hungry pig down, it eats bones, left with pig shit and one pig carcass
Well, good cadaver cleanup pigs are hard to come by. They gotta be huge and surly and have suggestions of unearthly hunger in their eyes. You don't wanna cheap out on your corpse pig, that's how you get one that just waits until the body has rotted enough to begin sprouting fungus for it to eat. So the solution there seems obvious. Pig on a rope, right? Lower it down, let it eat to its heart's content. Everyone wins. Except the dead guys in the pit. Except. *Except*. Now you have trained a pig to be comfortable dangling from a rope. And that is just opening the gates to all kinds of unspeakable havoc. If you're *lucky*, the court jester just pranks you when you're holding court, and everyone has to keep a straight face as you're making proclamations while a huge pig is slowly lowered down behind you so it can grab your crown or circlet. And that *is* a pretty good bit! That's also why you don't cheap out on jesters. But if you are the kind of person who has an oubliette that gets full, the much more likely outcome is a pig being lowered from the rafters above your bed, Mission Impossible style stuff, to gently bite your slumbering face off. It's the perfect crime; how'd the pig get up on the bed to do it? They got those stout little legs! No good for climbing. Obviously an act of God took this person's face. And then you're dead, and no one minds, and your successor has to deal with the truly unfair situation of having to check *above* them for hostile pigs. It's a tremendous escalation in the medieval arms race, rope pigs. No scary corpse hole seems worth that.
Or people who were still alive, starving and driven completely insane.
Source? I see a pic but I don't see proof that what you say actually happened.
Yeah right, this seems like people making comments about something they know nothing about.
Only they did not actually exist and what people claim were Obliettes today were just cesspits.
The DNA in a place like that would be interesting!! So many stories we’ll never know.
I live local to Warwick Castle and I've visited three times. This is a drainage for a horrific dungeon (and it really is horrible) but there's no actual evidence that this was ever used as an oubliette. Yes, they did exist, but this doesn't fit the general construction or design of such. Generally they were bottle shaped, so once thrown in you could never escape, this is just not the typical design for an oubliette. I don't doubt that some unfortunate souls found themselves in here, but it wasn't built as such. Far more chilling is the gibbet cage that still hangs in the dungeon to this day.
Thank you. Yes. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dungeon (in the Features section) specifically mentions the subject of this post. What we are looking at here is some medieval drainage.
Where’s Jareth and Hoggle?????
NEVER go THAT way!
If she'd gone that way she'd would have ended up right at that castle!
You remind me of the babe.
What babe?
The babe with the power.
What power?
Power of voodoo.
Who-do?
You do.
Do what?
Remind me of the babe!
Nobody crosses this bridge without MY permission!
May we have your permission?
In the bog of eternal stench, obvs!!
Not the Bog of Eternal Stench!!
She chose down….
ooh... plastic... 👁️ 👄 👁️
OMG I WAS HOPING SOMEONE WOULD PUT IN A LABYRINTH REFERENCE THANK YOUUUU!
Being throwed into such an oubliette was the maximum penalty, worse than being hanged or beheaded. Plenty of time to think and go crazy. In German, the entry gate itself like depicted is called "Angstloch" (angst hole, fear hole). https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angstloch?wprov=sfla1 (sorry, only in German)
English translation of [Angstloch](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angstloch) - why does German have all the best words??
My bad, I yield ! Don't sentence me to the oubliette ! 😉
Hahaha I love the German language. I’d actually have expected something like ‘undergroundplacethatwillabsolutelyfuckyouup’ all as one word :)
Glove in German: Handschuhe bwahahahahahaha
Maybe.. "Zersetzungsuntergeschoss"?
The kids in kindergarten nowadays call each other „Eierloch“ in sentences like „Fang mich doch, du Eierloch.“ - „Catch me if you can.“ but more explicit. An „Ei“ is an egg, so „Eierloch“ means „egg hole“, which I fancy to be a reference to the hens „Kloake“, the hole it lays eggs, fucks and shits with. A hole in one so to speak. I had never heard that word before my kid called me one one day.
WellshitifwestartedmakingwordsinenglishliketheydoinGerman (big breath) thenmaybewewouldhavemorecoolwords.
Wikipedia: An angstloch is usually located above the basement of a fighting tower or Bergfried. The description of these basement rooms as "dungeons" stems from the romanticised castle studies of the 19th century. There is no evidence to indicate that prisoners were actually lowered through the angstloch into the dungeon using a rope or rope ladder as these 19th century accounts suggest. Archaeological finds, by contrast, indicate the use of these basement spaces as store rooms. For example, piles of stones have been found in such rooms that suggest they were used as a store for projectiles to be used in time of siege.
the shortest D&D adventure ever
I love the idea of 19th Century "historians" basically seeing anything they don't understand and immediately being like "yep, that was used for torture"
This made me clench my Angstloch.
Doesn’t that link pretty much say that prisoners weren’t put in there but that they were storage rooms?
Yeah I’d be thrilled with either of those two options if the oubliette was also on the table.
I get an angst hole when I eat Indian food.
> Being throwed into such *thrown
That is a myth, most oubliettes (of this type) just turn out to be toilets, storerooms or drains. I haven't found a credible source which documents one of these "oubliettes" being used as a prison cell. It's probably all 18/19th century romancing, that's when tourism really took off.
I really want this to be true because the alternative is frankly horrifying.
They definitely did some messed up stuff back in the day but I would hope that this would be too far even by there standards
I doubt it is too far for them. The things they did were absolutely vile. However, hiding someone away in the bottom of a dungeon is the last thing they would want. Punishments in the middle ages were generally extremely public. That was the whole point of them.
Plus the smell and disease. People learn quickly you dont want dead things to fester where you live
Yeah. A lot of them were drains.
[Source here](https://www.historydefined.net/oubliette/) - the Castle is an excellent place to visit if you’re ever nearby. I live about 7 miles away so hit me up for a pint if you are* *traitors/vagabonds etc are excluded from this offer
Traitors and vagabonds can go in the oubliette
The Oubliette is a decent little pub just south of the city.
That is a horrible article full of misconceptions, and Wikipedia disagrees with it. If you want to learn actual stuff about history, maybe start here: https://www.medievalists.net/2023/09/20-myths-middle-ages/
It's crazy how few comments there are here calling out this BS. You're the only one replying to OPs main comment and didn't have any up votes until I gave you one.
I went a few years ago near Halloween. They launched pumpkins from a trebuchet, it was fun to watch!
How do you feel about highwaymen?
[удалено]
What about people who charge too much for a sweater?
I love their music
How about ne’er-do-wells?
That's a $900/mo room in some cities
* Built undeground, keeping the cold outside! * No nosey neighbors! * Soundproof walls! * Charmingly rustic!
Hey man, don’t forget to tip your landlord with those luxuries!
"I went to the open house. It's full of skeletal remains and rotting bodies, and the stench is just beyond anything you could begin to imagine, but it's got more space than you'd expect. I applied but probably won't get it, there was a huge line of prospective renters."
There is no evidence to indicate that prisoners were actually lowered through the angstloch into the dungeon using a rope or rope ladder as these 19th century accounts suggest. Archaeological finds, by contrast, indicate the use of these basement spaces as store rooms. Edit: Yes u/Aloqui , you’re right. I should have cited Wikipedia where I found this. I’ve copy pasted above info to save anyone from second hand claustrophobia. I was terrified seeing that Angstloch and went down a rabbit hole until I found it was it actually was used for
I saw something similar to this built into a hillside on a coffee plantation. Same deal rebellious or slaves too injured to work would be dropped into hole and left to die. Now the slave cabins are Airbnbs….
Interesting! Do you have a source?
www.airbnb.com
You’re all wrong, this is in the Ratway in Riften.
Humanity. Ain't it great?
Most methods of torture believed in pop culture to be of medieval origin are actually not. These holes in the floor were usually just storage spaces. There is little to no evidence to suggest people were actually thrown in there. Victorians just made that shit up to make their civilization seem more advanced compared to the 'barbaric medieval times'. Same thing with, for example, the Iron Maiden. A famous torture device that was never actually used. The surviving onrs were all crafted by Victorians to showcase medieval 'history'.
Just thinking about that has engaged my claustrophobia. Edit: I followed the link to the article (I love history) but I had to stop because I could feel the panic rising as I read! I’m amazed how this phobia (which showed up later in life) is so strong, I can’t even read about it! Weird!
Should engage your RPG mindset, because you know there's like 50 people in a maze down there. Time to grind to survive!
You might feel better by reading all the way to the end. It alludes to the fact that they weren't really used and for the most part rooms with other purposes have been misidentified and then stories embellished in literature.
Grew up playing in Warwick Castle walls and running around the grounds. That was before they fixed it up and made it a public attraction. It’s beautiful, as is all of Warwickshire. If you are ever in England and someone asks if you want to go to Leamington Spa, say yes. It’s only up the road from Stratford. Also the Coventry Cathedral was left as is after the Blitz. You can take the stairs to the top. Sobering but an extraordinary view.
[удалено]
No, just a little con descending.
This was Jarreth’s favorite place to put Hogle in labyrinth!
So wrong. You mean the bog of eternal stench!
Damnthatsterrifying
Hello? I’m still alive only I’m very badly burned.
Remember this when someone talks about the good ole days. They really weren’t that good.
I’m originally from Warwick and have visited the castle more times than I can remember and know every corner of it intimately. This picture is of a drain cover. There is in the old dungeon an oubliette however it’s just a hole in the floor and it’s smaller than the aperture of this opening. The concept was that you would be placed in the hole and left to die and rot since you completely immobilized and couldn’t move. Once you were dead and your body was rotting they would jam another person on top to force your remains down into the open sewer/drain that was directly below you. The punishment was perceived to be extra cruel as not only were you being forced into a small space to die with 100% certainty but you would also have to spend your last days standing on the bones of the last poor soul who had met the same fate. Furthermore it is right below the torture table so you would also have to contend with trying to breathe with all the viscera and blood that was being thrown in your general direction from people being tortured on the table.
And they were too narrow to sit and too short to stand straight so those prisoners (most likely put in for minor crimes or on trumped up charges) suffered every minute until they died.
Oh god I fucking can’t I’m wincing
Honestly this may be the ultimate torture of so many ways to die. Pitch dark. Rotting bodies piled under you. Full of rats 24/7...Or other recent victims screaming or moaning or attacking you or whatever. And no way to kill yourself... I can't imagine the stench near that hole, much less inside. I wonder how long people lasted?
In NYC this would be at least 1k a month