Once they’d reached his naval they withdrew to begin cutting from the head. Apparently Melec asked for a drink of water at this point (he must have been a pretty robust kind of guy) but his friends turned him down, they thought it better to get the job over with as quickly as possible. He was eventually sawed entirely in half. Chunks of flesh were torn out by the saw’s teeth and there was a liberal amount of blood splattered far and wide.

To wrap up the day’s entertainment a further 300 co-conspirators were impaled and another 20 had various limbs sawed off before being left to bleed out in the market. Nice.

Other reports of execution by saw have come from Vietnam, Burma, Spain, Russia and of course China. Thankfully it doesn’t seem that this was carried out as often as other execution methods, and even more thankfully it doesn’t happen any more. We certainly were a bloody bunch back in the day weren’t we?

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