Hanging cages
Up to the end of 18th century, European urban and suburban panoramas abounded in iron and wooden cages attached to the outsides of town halls and ducal palaces, to halls of justice and cathedrals and to city walls, and swaying from tall iron gibbets set up near a main crossroads.
Their use was simple: the victims were locked into the cages and hung up. They perished of hunger and thirst, a fate seconded in winter by storm and cold, in summer by heatstroke and sunburn; often they had been tortured and mutilated before, to make more edifying examples. The putrefying cadavers were generally left in place until the bones fell apart.
