Aaron Mahnke

You have been stripped naked, chained at the neck, and dragged into an arena where thousands of eager spectators scream for your death.

And then suddenly, across the stadium, a trap door swings open, someone steps into the ring, but it's not someone, it's something.

A monster.

And the monster is hungry.

And while this may sound like a blend between the Hunger Games and Hopper's storyline in Stranger Things 4, I assure you that it is all too real.

Romans imported lions, tigers, wild boars, bears, elephants, and leopards, all for the single purpose of tearing condemned men and women apart in front of a cheering crowd.

And unlike the gladiatorial fights, those poor saps weren't given a single weapon for protection.

Now, while the Romans were making sport of death, the Brits were keeping things pretty simple.

During the 5th century BCE, the go-to appeared to tossing criminals into a bog.

Pretty straightforward, I know.

By the 10th century AD, they had upgraded to the gallows, with a smidge of drawing and quartering tossed in for good measure.

Not to mention beheading and burning at the stake.

By the Middle Ages, torture was all the rage.

In comparison, bog death must have felt like a spa day.

And while I would rather do literally anything other than list medieval torture methods for all of you, I should mention that in the 1530s, boiling alive was added to the mix, which could take up to two hours.

Now, what would earn you one of these delightful afternoons exactly?

Well, in the 1700s, crimes punishable by death in Britain included murder, arson, forging currency, cutting down a tree, stealing a rabbit warren, destroying a fish pond, and

being out at night with a blackened face, just to name a few.

Luckily, in the 1800s, courts started to feel a little squeamish about executing someone for, say, counterfeiting stamps, and they started to rein it in.

By this point, hanging had become the standard penalty, with burning at the stake having been abolished in the late 1700s.