TREVELYAN ON TORTURE IN ENGLAND

Yet, until the Code Napoleon was received on the Continent, it is possible that English justice, bad as it was, may have been the best in the world, as Blackstone boasted. 

It had at least two advantages over the European codes of the ancien regime. 

It gave the prisoner in political cases a real chance to defend himself against the government, an improvement made by the treason law of 1695, and by the general tendency of political and judicial practice since the Revolution [English, 1688, presumably].

And in no cases, political or other, was torture permitted to extort evidence or confession.

But it cannot be said that English justice eschewed torture as a means of punishment, for although breaking on the wheel was unknown in our island, the floggings, particularly in the army and navy, often amounted to torture.

    -Trevelyan, George Macauley,  English Social History, Longmans, London, 1944, 1978, p. 305, in the the chapter entitled Dr. Johnson's England I, circa 1780. 

William Blackstone wrote his Commentaries on the Laws of England in 1765. 

In four volumes, these became the bible of American colonial lawyers as they were portable in saddlebags as they traveled from town to town to appear in court by horseback, as I was informed by a professor of mine four decades ago.  He wasn't there either but he seemed to know whereof he spoke.