Sorry spelling mistakes and accidentally omitted words in post above, please delete the one above...

The witch processes saw some really horrible torture, including a worse version of the water torture (feigning a death experience making the victim feel like drowning) that the one the USA used in Iraq and some places in eastern Europe. The popular fiction and some history magazines really makes it sound like it was an everyday thing that almost everyone suffered from. In a way, if you consider public whipping and similar punishments which were common during some periods. But I believe the main effect of that was however humiliation rather than pain. But real torture for the sake of trying to obtain information or make examples of someone, or to vent your superstitious or otherwise irrational fear on some minority you feared or used as an object to let out your fear on, also existed, although probably not in as huge quantities as some popular texts imply. I don't think the Medieval common man had such a different view on torture from what we have, the main differences are rather in technological, society structural and other non-psychological factors. First of all modern torturers have often developed more intense pain or fear methods to get the time to torture more victims, while Medieval torture usually used slower working methods. Secondly, people hadn't like today realized that torture was usually inefficient for gaining information or that making examples with it was quite unsuccessful in the long run except in a few cases where however those who made examples didn't lose completely but there the making example wasn't really what helped them, extreme military and political advantages instead did.

So those are probably the main reasons why we think of Medieval torture as so horrible. Even though the humans who lived then probably didn't think too much differently than we do, they acted differently because the prospects and knowledge was different.