Today's encore excerpt comes from the rigorously
primary-source-oriented historian Barbara Tuchman in her book A Distant Mirror, the Calamitous 14th Century. Here she comments on the violence in everyday village life in the Middle Ages:

"In village games, players with hands tied behind
them competed to kill a cat nailed to a post by
battering it to death with their heads, at the risk of cheeks ripped open or eyes scratched out by the frantic animal's claws. Trumpets enhanced the
excitement. Or a pig enclosed in a wide pen was
chased by men with clubs to the laughter of
spectators as he ran squealing from the blows until beaten lifeless. Accustomed in their own lives to physical hardship and injury, medieval men and
women were not necessarily repelled by the
spectacle of pain, but rather enjoyed it. The citizens of Mons bought a condemned criminal from a neighboring town so that they should have the
pleasure of seeing him quartered.

"Violence was official as well as individual. Torture
was authorized by the Church and regularly used by the Inquisition to uncover heresy. The tortures and punishments of civil justice customarily cut off hands and ears, racked, burned, flayed, and pulled apart people's bodies. In everyday life passersby saw some criminal flogged with a knotted rope or chained upright in an iron collar. They passed corpses hanging on the gibbet and decapitated heads and quartered bodies impaled on stakes on the city walls."

Barbara Tuchman, A Distant Mirror, the Calamitous 14th Century, Ballantine Books, 1978, p.
135.