In many places of Germany their growes very good wines, in some none at all.  The Rhenish wine which growes on the renouned Rhein, on which standes so many brave tounes, is weill enough knowen.  They sometymes sell their wine by the weight as the livre or pound, etc., which may seime as strange as the cherries 2 tymes a year in France.  Thus they ar necessitate to do in the winter, when it freizes so that they most break it wt great mattocks and axes, and sell it in the faschion we have named.

Adultery, especially in the women, is wery vigorously punished in many places of France.  In Poictou, as Mr. Daille informed, they ignominously drag them after the taile of a mule thorow the streits, the hangman convoying them, then they sett them in the most publick part of the toune bound be a stake, wt their hands behind their backs, to be a obiect of mockery ther to all that pleases.

They that commits any pitty roobery or theifte are whipt thorow the toune and stigmatized wt a hote iron marked wt the flower de lis on the cheik or the shoulder.  If any be taken after in that fault having the mark, theirs no mercy for them under hanging.

Every province almost hath its sundry manner of torturing persones suspected for murder or even great crimes to extort from them a confession of the truth.  At Paris the hangman takes a serviet, or whiles a wool cloath (which I remember Cleark in his Martyrologie discovering the Spanish Inquisition also mentioned), which he thrustes doune the throat of him as far as his wery heart, keiping to himselfe a grip of one end of the cloath, then zest wt violence pules furth the cloath al ful of blood, which cannot be but accompanied wt paine.  Thus does the burreau ay til he confesses.  In Poictou the manner is wt bords of timber whilk they fasten as close as possibly can be both to the outsyde and insyde of his leg, then in betuixt the leg and the timber they caw in great wedges[166] from the knee doune to the wery foot, and that both in the outsyde and insyde, which so crusheth the leg that it makes it as thin and as broad as the loafe[167] of a mans hand.  The blood ishues furth in great abondance.  At Bourdeaux, the capital of Guienne, they have a boat full of oil, sulfre, pitch, resets, and other like combustible things, which they cause him draw on and hold it above a fire til his leg is almost all brunt to the bone, the sinews shrunk, his thigh also al stretched wt the flame.

    [166] The torture of the boot was apparently new to Lauder, but from
        his later MSS., it appears to have been in use in Scotland.

    [167] Loof, palm.