In chapter 3 we will see that medieval Europe settles down a bit when the knightly warlords are brought under the control of monarchs in centralized kingdoms. But the kings and queens were hardly paragons of nobility themselves.

One died, one survived, two divorced, two beheaded.

Commonwealth schoolchildren are often taught one of the key events in British history with the help of a mnemonic:

King Henry the Eighth, to six wives he was wedded:

Beheaded! In 1536 Henry had his wife Anne Boleyn decapitated on trumped-up charges of adultery and treason because she gave him a son that did not survive, and he had become attracted to one of her ladies-in-waiting. Two wives later he suspected Catherine Howard of adultery and sent her to the ax as well. (Tourists visiting the Tower of London can see the chopping block for themselves.) Henry was clearly the jealous type: he also had an old boyfriend of Catherine's drawn and quartered, which is to say hanged by the neck, taken down while still alive, disemboweled, castrated, decapitated, and cut into four.

Despite signing off on all that torture, Elizabeth I is among England's most revered monarchs. Her reign has been called a golden age in which the arts flourished, especially the theater. It's hardly news that Shakespeare's tragedies depict a lot of violence. But his fictional worlds contained levels of barbarity that can shock even the inured audiences of popular entertainment today. Henry V, one of Shakespeare's heroes, issues the following ultimatum of surrender to a French village during the Hundred Years' War:

The throne passed to Henry's son Edward, then to Henry's daughter Mary, and then to another daughter, Elizabeth. "Bloody Mary" did not get her nickname by putting tomato juice in her vodka but by having three hundred religious dissenters burned at the stake. And both sisters kept up the family tradition for how to resolve domestic squabbles: Mary imprisoned Elizabeth and presided over the execution of their cousin, Lady Jane Grey, and Elizabeth executed another cousin, Mary Queen of Scots. Elizabeth also had 123 priests drawn and quartered, and had other enemies tortured with bone-crushing manacles, another attraction on display in the Tower. Today the British royal family is excoriated for shortcomings ranging from rudeness to infidelity. You'd think people would give them credit for not having had a single relative decapitated, nor a single rival drawn and quartered.

The blind and bloody soldier with foul hand

Your naked infants spitted upon pikes.

why, in a moment look to see,

Defile the locks of your shrill-shrieking daughters;

In King Lear, the Duke of Cornwall gouges out the eyes of the Earl of Gloucester ("Out, vile jelly!"), whereupon his wife, Regan, orders the earl, bleeding from the sockets, out of the house: "Go thrust him out at gates, and let him smell his way to Dover." In The Merchant of Venice, Shylock obtains the right to cut a pound of flesh from the chest of the guarantor of a loan. In Titus Andronicus, two men kill another man, rape his bride, cut out her tongue, and amputate her hands. Her father kills the rapists, cooks them in a pie, and feeds them to their mother, whom he then kills before killing his own daughter for having gotten raped in the first place; then he is killed, and his killer is killed.

Entertainment written for children was no less grisly. In 1815 Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm published a compendium of old folktales that had gradually been adapted for children. Commonly known as Grimm's Fairy Tales, the collection ranks with the Bible and Shakespeare as one of the bestselling and most respected works in the Western canon. Though it isn't obvious from the bowdlerized versions in Walt Disney films, the tales are filled with murder, infanticide, cannibalism, mutilation, and sexual abuse -- grim fairy tales indeed. Take just the three famous stepmother stories:

And their most reverend heads dash'd to the walls,

Your fathers taken by the silver beards,

• Cinderella's stepsisters, when trying to squeeze into her slippers, take their mother's advice and cut off a toe or heel to make them fit. Doves notice the blood, and after Cinderella marries the prince, they peck out the stepsisters' eyes, punishing them "for their wickedness and malice with blindness for the rest of their lives."

• During a famine, the father and stepmother of Hansel and Gretel abandon them in a forest so that they will starve to death. The children stumble upon an edible house inhabited by a witch, who imprisons Hansel and fattens him up in preparation for eating him. Fortunately Gretel shoves the witch into a fiery oven, and "the godless witch burned to death in a horrible way."

• Snow White arouses the jealousy of her stepmother, the queen, so the queen orders a hunter to take her into the forest, kill her, and bring back her lungs and liver for the queen to eat. When the queen realizes that Snow White has escaped, she makes three more attempts on her life, two by poison, one by asphyxiation. After the prince has revived her, the queen crashes their wedding, but "iron slippers had already been heated up for her over a fire of coals… She had to put on the red-hot iron shoes and dance in them until she dropped to the ground dead."

It begins when Punch goes to pet his neighbor's dog, which promptly clamps its teeth around the puppet's grotesquely oversized nose. After prying the dog loose, Punch summons the owner, Scaramouche and, after a bit of crude banter, knocks the fellow's head "clean off his shoulders." Punch then calls for his wife, Judy, and requests a kiss. She responds by walloping him in the face. Seeking another outlet for his affection, Punch asks for his infant child and begins to cradle it. Unfortunately, the baby picks that moment to dirty itself. Always the loving family man, Punch reacts by beating the baby's head against the stage, then hurling its dead body into the audience. When Judy reappears and discovers what's happened, she is understandably upset. Tearing Punch's stick from his hands, she begins to lay into him. He wrestles the cudgel away from her, pummels her to death, and then breaks into a triumphant little song:

As we shall see, purveyors of entertainment for young children today have become so intolerant of violence that even episodes of the early Muppets have been deemed too dangerous for them. And speaking of puppetry, one of the most popular forms of children's entertainment in Europe used to be the Punch and Judy show. Well into the 20th century, this pair of bickering glove puppets acted out slapstick routines in ornate booths in English seaside towns. The literature scholar Harold Schechter summarizes a typical plot:

Who'd be plagued with a wife,

That could set himself free,

Or a good stick, like me?

Even Mother Goose nursery rhymes, which mostly date from the 17th and 18th centuries, are jarring by the standards of what we let small children hear today. Cock Robin is murdered in cold blood. A single mother living in substandard housing has numerous illegitimate children and abuses them with whipping and starvation. Two unsupervised children are allowed to go on a dangerous errand; Jack sustains a head injury that could leave him with brain damage, while Jill's condition is unknown. A drifter confesses that he threw an old man down the stairs. Georgie Porgie sexually harasses underage girls, leaving them with symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder. Humpty Dumpty remains in critical condition after a crippling accident. A negligent mother leaves a baby unattended on a treetop, with disastrous results. A blackbird swoops down on a domestic employee hanging up laundry and maliciously wounds her nose. Three vision-impaired mice are mutilated with a carving knife. And here comes a candle to light you to bed; here comes a chopper to chop off your head! A recent article in the Archives of Diseases of Childhood measured the rates of violence in different genres of children's entertainment. The television programs had 4.8 violent scenes per hour; the nursery rhymes had 52.2.

With a rope or a knife,