The Boot: Money Shot

What happens when someone decides that the best way to get a confession is to slowly smash your feet?

In this episode of Torture: A Dark History, Kevin Young and Dan Hourigan explore the brutal history of the Boot, a family of torture devices designed to crush, break, burn, and otherwise make the victim very interested in confessing.

We’ll begin in 17th century Scotland with James Mitchell, whose attempted assassination of Archbishop James Sharp led to repeated sessions with the infamous Scottish Boot. From there, we’ll travel across Europe and beyond, looking at the different variations of the device, including the foot press, the Spanish Boot, the French brodequin, and the terrifying practice of roasting someone’s feet inside a heated boot.

We’ll also meet Archbishop Dermot O’Hurley, whose refusal to abandon Catholicism led to a particularly horrific interrogation, and Urbain Grandier, the controversial French priest whose alleged involvement in witchcraft accusations would eventually bring him face to face with the brodequin.

Then we’ll look even further back, including Chinese variations of foot crushing torture, British reports of torture in colonial India, and the strange possibility that similar devices appeared in other parts of the world under remarkably similar names.

And because this is Torture: A Dark History, Kevin and Dan bring their usual dark and twisted humor to an episode that proves the phrase “Give 'em the boot” can be considerably more horrifying than you might think.

If you’re interested in the Boot, Spanish Boot, Scottish Boot, brodequin, foot torture, James Mitchell, Dermot O’Hurley, Urbain Grandier, the Spanish Inquisition, witch trials, medieval torture, and the wonderfully terrible ways humans have found to destroy someone’s feet, this episode is going to hurt.

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