rake someone over the coals

Example: “The director raked the design team over the coals for missing the deadline.”

Origin: The literal practice behind this is grim and real. Hauling or dragging a person across hot coals was used in medieval and early modern Europe as a trial by ordeal, particularly against those accused of heresy: survival was taken as proof of innocence, which in practice meant the procedure functioned as punishment and as a means of extracting confession rather than as any kind of test. The older and more common English form was "haul over the coals," attested from the 1600s, with "rake" appearing as a variant later. What survives in the modern sense is the interrogation rather than the fire — being raked over the coals means facing sustained, hostile questioning from someone with the power to make it unpleasant, which is precisely the part of the original that did not depend on the coals at all.