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Boiling to death, was, perhaps, the most vindictive and atrocious of all the kinds of punishment formerly used in England. It was not allowed by the common law, but, in order to deal more effectually, as was supposed, with the crime of wilful poisoning, which had previously been a very rare offence in England, and which was regarded as the most detestable of all species of deaths because it could, of all others, be the least prevented either by man-hood or fore-thought, a new statute was passed in the twenty second year of the reign of Henry VIII. (22 Henry VIII., c. 9), which made the offence high treason, punishable by this grievous and lingering death without benefit of clergy.

It seems probable that this extraordinary punishment was adopted by the legislature from the peculiar circumstances of the crime which gave rise to it. There is a statement in the preamble of the statute, to the effect that a cook named Rose (variously described by historians as Rose, Roose, and Rouse), had placed some poison in a large pot of porridge, prepared for the Bishop of Rochester’s family and for the poor of the parish, whereby sixteen residents in the Bishop’s house and a number of poor persons, who were fed with the remains of the porridge, narrowly escaped with their lives, and a man and a woman were killed outright. By a retrospective clause of the statute, Rose was ordered to be boiled to death, and a similar sentence was for the future to be passed upon all persons guilty of the heinous offence of wilful poisoning, which was thereafter to be deemed in law, high treason. Rose was publicly boiled to death in Smithfield, in pursuance of the statute, on April 5, 1531, and the event was duly recorded, among other chronological notes, in a list of the bailiffs of Ludlow, from the year of the grant of the charter of Edward IV., in 1461, to the year 1783. (1531:- “Also, there was a cooke boyled in Smithfield for poysoninge.” The occurrence is also related in Rapin’s History of England, 2nd Ed., Vol. i., p. 792.)

On March 17, 1541, a maid was boiled to death in Smithfield, for poisoning, and again the fact was duly recorded in the same document at Ludlow. (1541:- “A maide boyled in Smithfield for poyssoning three householders.” )

It is to be hoped there were no cases in the County of Salop in which the sentence of bolding to death was passed.

The horrible nature of the punishment was, apparently too much even for the law-givers of the sixteenth century, who were accustomed to impose upon criminals, sentences of a most severe description, for, no sooner was Henry VIII dead, than an Act of Edward VI (1 Edw. VI., c. 12.) repealed the boiling statute, or “Act for Poisoning,’ and by consequence the punishment which was instituted by it. This act is rather amusing and apologetic in its terms; it practically admits the extreme severity of the punishment, but adds that it was not established without great consideration, and, for the time being, was very expedient and necessary. There was doubtless some little ground for this statement, made, as it was, at a time when murder was more commonly committed in a less subtle manner then by the cup; when the danger of a bad example was by no means imaginary; and when chemistry was not a science which could lend its powerful aid to the detection of murder.

Source: Obsolete Punishments of Shropshire By S. Meeson Morris. Transactions of the Shropshire Archaeological Society 1st Series Vol. XI., 1888.