BOOT, BOOTS, or BooTiKtsr, an instrument of judicial torture, formerly used in Scot land to force confessions from persons accused of crimes, or answers from unwilling or suspected witnesses. Bishop Burnet in the Ilistory of hie Own Time, and sir Walter Scott in his Old Mortality, speak of the B. as made of iron; but the rev. Thomas Morer in his Short Account of Scotland, written from personal observation of the country at a time when the B. was still in use, describes it as " made of four pieces of narrow boards nailed together, of a competent length for the leg, not unlike those short cases we use to guard young trees from the rabbits." One or both legs of the person to be tortured having been placed in this case, wedges were inserted between the limb and the sides of the case, and these wedges were driven down by the executioner with a mall or ham mer, questions being at intervals put to the sufferer, until either he gave the desired information, o" fainted away, or showed such endurance as satisfied the judges that no answer could be extorted from him. The wedges were commonly placed ngaiust the calf of the leg, but bishop Burnet says he had heard that they were sometimes placed against the shin-bone. In one ease—thatof a lad in Orkney, in 1596—It is recorded that they were struck home as many as 57 times. In another—that of John Finn, school master at Prcstonpans, burned for sorcery in 1591—it is said that the victim " did abide so many blows that his legs were crushed and beaten together as small as might be, and the bones and flesh so bruised that the blood and marrow spurted forth in great abund ance, whereby they were made unserviceable forever." " Still," it is added, " he would not confess;" and, indeed, it is remarkable in how many cases we are told that the torture, agonizing as it was, failed in its purpose, even where the sufferer "shrieked for pain in terrible manner, so as to have moved a heart of stone." A writer of 1591, after speaking of the " pilniewinks," "pilliwinks.," thumb-screws, or thumbikins (q.v.) as a "grievous torture," and of compression of the skull by a twisted cord as "a most cruel torment also," describes the B. us " the most severe and cruel pain in the world." i Yet there arc instances in which it was not thought enough. When the boots were first used in Scotland is not known. In a case where a deed of conveyance of land was chal lenged as a forgery, in 1579, two witnesses, a clergyman and a notary, both of Forfar shire, were ordered to be "put in the boots, gins, or any other torments, to urge them to declare the truth." In a letter, still preserved in the state paper office at London, sir Francis Walsingham writes to the English ambassador at Edinburgh, in 1583, that queen Elizabeth desires that father William Holt, an English jesuit then in Scotland, may be "put to the boots." The B. was subject of allusion on the English stage in 1604; in
Marston's Malcontent, printed in that year, one of the characters is made to say: " All your empirics could never do the like cure upon the gout the rack did in England, or your Scotch boots." A young gentlewoman of Aberdeenshire was tortured by the B. in 1630. Soon afterwards, it is said to have fallen into desuetude for about 80 years. It was revived after the insurrection of the westland Covenanters in 1660, and continued to be used throughout the reigns of king Charles II., and king James 11., and during the first years of king William III. "The genius of our nation," writes sir J. Lauder of Fountainhall in 1681, "looks upon the torture of, the boots as a barbarous remedy, and yet of late it bath been frequently used among us." The claim of right brought forward by the Scottish convention in 1689, denounced " the use of torture, without evi dence, and in ordinary crimes, as contrary to law." Notwithstanding this declaration, the B. was used at least once again. In 1600, Neville Payne, an English gentleman who was supposed to have entered Scotland on a treasonable mission, was put to the torture under a warrant superscribed by king William, and still shown in the register hOuse at Edinburgh. The B. was applied to one leg, the thumb-screws to both hands, but with out any effect, although, in the words of one of the privy-councilors, the torture, which lasted for two hours, was inflicted " with all the severity that was consistent with humanity, even into that pitch that we could not preserve life and have gone further." This is believed to be the last time that the B. was used. But it was not until Scotland had ceased to be an independent kingdom, that the British parliament enacted—by the statute 7 Anne. c. 21—that in future " no person accused of any crime in Scotland shall be subject or liable to any torture." Torture is believed not to have been used in England after 1640. It was abolished in France in 17S9, and in Russia in 1801.
See BIIOTAN.
BOoltS, in ancient mythology, the son of Ceres and of Iasion, who, being plundered of all his possessions by his brother Pluto, invented the plow, to which he yoked two oxen, and cultivated the soil to procure subsistence for himself. As a reward for this discovery, he was translated to heaven by his mother with the plow and yoke of oxen, under the name of B., i.e., the ox-driver, which is still borne by one of the constella tions. According to others, B. was the son of Lycaon and Callisto, whom his father slew, and set before Jupiter for a repast, to try his omniscience. Jupiter restored Lim to life, and placed him amongst the stars.