Often when we talk about the Dark Ages at school everybody gets this feeling of how inhumane executions were. Obviously we cannot deny there were many perverse methods used in the Middle Ages for torture/execution; but, how common did these types of things really happen? Did all criminals/convicted felons get executed/tortured in a brutal manner?
Speaking for the late Roman and early medieval era, torture was quite common, a bit matter-of-fact actually. People were tortured not only to extract confessions, but certainly for slaves evidence was considered unreliable unless under torture. There was quasi-legal administrative torture for the purposes of extracting taxes and there was also torture that was considered a routine run up to an execution.
I say this because, we should consider that historically, torture was not an aberration but a norm, and that it's not until early modern times that the reverse became true.
Part of this is due to the nature in many pre-modern (and some modern) societies of the need for confession in order to establish guilt. By one example, it was only once that jury trials, in England for example, could consider more circumstantial evidence in deciding guilt that confessions were no longer a requirement for establishing guilt, thus rendering the need for torture in order to extract a confession (or even a plea) unnecessary.
Sources:
Wisnewski, Jeremy. Understanding Torture. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2010. Print.
Wickham, Chris. Framing the Early Middle Ages: Europe and the Mediterranean 400-800. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2005. Print.
Gregory. The History of the Franks. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1974. Print.