The condemnation of excessive brutality and judicial torture prevalent in medieval literature is among the lasting legacies of the Middle Ages. As European society progressed through the tumultuous fifteenth century and into the early-modern period, the image of brutality as a signifier of medieval barbarity was reimagined in literature and on stage as torture gained a foothold in English jurisprudence. What many early-modern audiences perceived as a ‘medieval’ practice actually climaxed in the religious and political struggles of the sixteenth century. In the Preface to his History of the World (1614), Sir Walter Ralegh commented that ‘whosoever in writing a modern History, shall follow truth too near the heels, it may happily strike out his teeth … It is enough for me … to write of the eldest times: wherein also why may it not be said, that in speaking of the past, I point at the present, and tax the vices of those that are yet living, in their persons that are long since dead’.