This book, published as part four of Henry Charles Lea's 'Superstition and Force', is one of the most succinct accounts in English of the place of torture in the legal process from the Roman Empire to the nineteenth century. His study suggest that torture occupied a far more complex place in the legal sociology of the period between the third and the eighteenth centuries and the revival of torture in the twentieth century raises once again the question of torture's true place in the realms of law. Lea's wide scholarship and meticulous respect for original sources make this study one of the most reliable accounts of the history of torture available in English. -- Publisher description.