It was the colonial era in what’s now called the United States of America.
A man of the lower classes had been accused by his Puritan overlords of the contemptible
crime of stealing a loaf of bread from the local bakery.
The judge quickly dismissed the man’s hunger, saying that an empty stomach was no excuse
for a person to reduce himself to the state of a vulgar criminal.
Outside the courthouse, a frantic crowd waited, many of the people armed with wooden paddles,
feathers, rotten fruit, and the putrid innards of farm animals.
The judge, a stern and unforgiving man, looked down at the condemned from his bench.
“I sentence you to public humiliation,” he said in a grave voice, telling the unfortunate
thief he hoped he would see the error of his ways.
For two full days, the condemned had his feet tickled by kids.
Bitter neighbors beat his toes with sticks.
Even his acquaintances joined in the fun and covered his face with any kind of garbage
they could find.
Ok, so you might now be thinking that out of all the punishments we’ve ever talked
about, this one doesn’t sound too bad at all.
You’re quite sure you could handle a bit of old cabbage being rubbed into your face
and even though the paddle would sting a bit, it’s nothing compared to having your head,
fingers, or toes crushed.
As for tickling, isn’t that supposed to be kind of enjoyable?
Well, that’s debatable.
There’s such a thing as tickle torture you know, something that goes back centuries and
has been used as a form of interrogation.
You’re not going to die, but when you experience what the Japanese used to call “merciless
tickling” for hours on end, you’re going to lose your mind a bit.
But tickling is just one thing that happened to people in the stocks.
As you’ll find out later in the show, there was also a form of the stocks that result
in a person losing an ear or two, or perhaps a pair of eyes, and if the madding crowd took
a profound disliking to the condemned, well, that person could die in those stocks in the
most gruesome way.
So, you can stop sneering now about us putting the stocks in the worst punishments series.
It was for some people.
It was hell on Earth, and the torture was not over quickly.
We’re getting ahead of ourselves here…Some of you might not even know what we’re talking
about.
Ok, the stocks.
This part of the toolkit of punishers throughout history is one of the easiest to describe
we’ve featured.
The stocks basically consisted of a wooden frame through which a person’s legs were
held.
The frame could open up of course so the legs could lie on the lower half, and then the
top half went over the top and the thing was locked – like solid bar handcuffs for the
legs.
There were other versions of the stocks, but this is the one we’ll start with.
They were usually reserved for the lower classes, a distinction that back in the day people
didn’t mind tagging folks with.
Being such a simple device you won’t be surprised to find out they go back a long
way.
They even get a mention in the Old Testament, and a couple of Jesus’s disciples also once
found their legs bound in the stocks.
You can find that information in the bible in Acts 16:24.
Apparently, while fastened in they prayed and sang hymns.
This kind of punishment was popular from the 1300s until the mid-1800s, and you won’t
be surprised to hear that the Brits had stocks in most villages and towns.
Those Puritans that arrived in the New World were also partial to putting folks in the
stocks.
The punishment was supposed to be a public one, thus the person in the stocks was almost
always subjected to humiliation from the people that lived in the vicinity.
That’s why the stocks were situated in the place where just about everyone passed through.
The marketplace was often the location of choice.
Some people might not have known what crime the person had committed, but there was a
solution for this.
Often the condemned would have a letter on their clothing.
An adulterer would get an A, a thief a T, a blasphemer a B, and someone who’d been
bothersome while under the influence of alcohol, a D for a drunkard.
As you’ll soon find out, that letter was also sometimes branded on the person’s face.
These crimes were the equivalent of what today you call misdemeanors.
Back then, the person would only get the stocks for petty theft, such as the bread heist we
earlier described.
For armed robbery, which in the past could have been called highway robbery, a much more
brutal kind of stocks awaited.
We’ll get into that soon.
One of the reasons why every town and village in England had stocks was mostly down to something
called the Statute of Laborers 1351.
In short, this was created after the Black Death, which as you know, wiped out vast portions
of the public all over Europe, including in England.
Post-plague, the lords of the country were faced with a problem.
Many of their workers had died and so there weren’t enough folks to get the work done.
The workers who survived, seeing an opportunity, started to demand higher wages.
Asking for more cash was soon outlawed, as was refusing to work at all, which was a crime
of idleness.
We found this written in English law.
“Every town and village is to maintain a set of stocks in which to punish vagabonds,
layabouts, and drunkards.”
If a person, say a plowman or a servant or shoemaker or a shepherd demanded a higher
wage or refused to work, the resulting punishment was often the stocks.
This usually meant being confined to the stocks by their feet, but finger stocks were also
common.
It made no difference really, since the person couldn’t go anywhere.
Throughout the centuries it really depended on the crime as to what happened to a person
while they sat there in the stocks.
If they’d upset the village, perhaps by an act of aggressive drunkenness or speaking
words that everyone found rather offensive, well, they got more punishment.
Sometimes that would just be verbal abuse, along the lines of, “You carbuncle of my
eye!
You gouty-legged, copper-nosed rogue.”
… Hopefully, YouTube doesn’t demonetize for language that was bad 400 years ago.
All those insults are related to diseases by the way.
Diseases were on people’s minds a lot back then, unlike now of course…
Ok, so you got cursed at, and you had your feet tickled – especially by kids – and
you might just get a few kicks to the back and punches in the face.
It wasn’t the end of the world, but it wasn’t very nice, either, especially if you were
covered in rotten eggs.
Are they still used now?
We found a news article from Columbia which said in 2012 a 34-old year woman and her 18-year
old lover were put in the stocks for 3 days for the crime of infidelity.
Another case in Colombia involved a young man that was high and attacked his parents.
In 2020, several people in that country were put in the stocks for violating social distancing
orders in the municipality of Tuchín.
From what we can see, no eggs or feathers or paddles were used during the ordeal.
The punishment almost happened in the USA in 1989 in the small town of Dermott in Arkansas.
There was a curfew at the time and the punishment was sought after for parents who’d allowed
their kids out at night.
The owner of the Dermott Pawn Shop was one of the people asking for the law to be instituted,
saying the kids were out of control and had broken his windows.
He thought the stocks would do the trick in changing their wayward behavior.
Ok, now for something a little more serious.
When the stocks got blood on them.
For poor folks and their misdemeanors, there were the stocks for the feet, but when the
poor, or rich for that matter, transgressed in a big way, there was something else.
This was called the pillory, which was the same idea as the stocks but instead of putting
a person’s legs between two boards, it was the head and arms that went inside.
You’ve likely all seen a fun version of this at country fairs when people throw soaked
sponges at the condemned.
Let’s go back some time and now think about how it would feel if those sponges were replaced
with stones and dead animal parts?
How would that feel?
What if the person in the stocks had committed a terrible crime in a local town, a crime
that made people’s blood run cold, a crime of violence?
Can you imagine what happened to the person in the pillory?
Imagine what would happen to them nowadays?
So, the pillory for one thing was a lot more uncomfortable than the stocks.
The reason being, a person had to bend forward in an awkward position.
It was even more uncomfortable if your ears were nailed to the wood, which happened from
time to time.
A lot worse happened, too.
Nonetheless, you could get out of the pillory almost unscathed just as a person could have
gotten out of the stocks with nothing more than an embarrassed look on their face.
Still, rotten vegetables and buckets of offal and blood were often thrown at someone, but
worse, the missile of choice was sometimes human or animal excrement.
Let’s now have a look at some examples.
Unlike the stocks where the poor were fastened, the pillory was the punishment of more well-known
people and so there are lots of examples to choose from.
Take the story of James Nayler, an English Quaker who thought it would be fun to ride
a horse into the city of Bristol pretending to be Jesus Christ riding into Jerusalem.
You couldn’t really get away with that back in 1656.
It offended people.
Right after the reenactment he was grabbed by the authorities and charged with the crime
of blasphemy.
Parliament almost decided to execute him, but instead, he ended up in the pillory.
No feathers were used for this man.
Once contained in the device he was branded with a red hot poker.
The brand, which went on his forehead, was the letter B for blasphemer.
If that wasn’t bad enough, his tongue was pierced with another red hot piece of iron.
Did the crowd feel sorry for him?
Hell no, they took their turn beating on the guy.
He died two years later during his sentence of hard labor.
Then there was the pillorying of the famous writer Daniel Defoe.
You’ve probably heard of his name from the novel Robinson Crusoe, but he was more than
a fiction writer.
He wrote about society, politics, economics, and culture, but being an outspoken critic
of the way things were back then could result in something much worse than medieval trolling.
For his thoughts, he was charged with the crime of seditious libel and sent to the pillory.
The thing was, a large part of the public liked Defoe’s writings, and so as the story
goes, no one threw anything at him that could hurt or humiliate.
In fact, it’s said that people threw flowers on him during the three days he was stuck
in that very uncomfortable position.
Other controversial writers weren’t so lucky.
Sometimes they faced the symbolic gesture of having their ears cut off in the pillory,
an act known as “cropping.”
It happened to Thomas Barrie, who in 1538 was accused of spreading rumors.
It happened to William Prynne and Henry Burton in 1637 because they’d been critical of
the Church hierarchy.
In the US during the 1800s, the people pilloried the most were slaves.
The punishment didn’t usually happen for all the town to see, the slave would be fastened
in the device where he or she was enslaved.
You could find sets of pillories in barns or in the fields.
During the slaves’ confinement, they would usually be flogged.
It was reported in 1830 that a slave girl in the British colonies was pilloried by an
English woman and she had pepper rubbed in her eyes for 17 days so she couldn’t sleep.
Now back to the depravity of the town square.
Unlike punishment these days, what happened to a person in the pillory much of the time
depended wholly on how the crowd felt about someone.
That’s why writers have said the punishment created a “carnival-like atmosphere” a
kind of theater event that folks really looked forward to.
If someone had had a bad day at the office (or farm), they could take their anger out
on the poor soul who was trapped between the beams.
When a girl named Sarah Thomas stood in the pillory, the crowd gave her wine and hot pot.
When in 1751 two highwaymen named Egan and Salmon were subject to the crowds’ whims,
they were pelted with anything and everything.
Egan took a stone to the head that killed him and Salmon died from his injuries after
being released from the device.
We found a report from 1680 which talked about a midwife named Elizabeth Cellier.
She was basically an activist back in the day that fought for women’s rights and human
rights in general.
For her service to humanity, this is what she got according to the report:
“She had been hauled out of bed, though she could not rise, set on the pillory, twice
struck down with stones by the rabble but lifted up again by the sheriff's officers,
and had been kept there till 2 o'clock, though her sentence was to remain only between 12
and 1.
She had been grievously bruised and, several officers had been wounded in her defense.”
You heard that right.
The mob even got the officers with their missiles.
Here’s what a newspaper said about highwayman John Waller when he was in the pillory:
“On Tuesday, the 13th of June, 1732, this wicked man was put in the pillory, pursuant
to his sentence, at the Seven Dials, in London; where, so great was the indignation of the
populace, that they pelted him to death.”
Often people were sentenced to two or three times in the pillory, sometimes one week after
the other.
The weekend was chosen so the crowd was bigger.
The scene of the punishment was usually the marketplace.
In 1732, a woman named Eleanor Beare was charged with performing an illegal abortion and supplying
a man with poison so he could kill someone.
This kind of thing really rankled the mob and they let that be known.
On her first few hours in the pillory, she was hit with rotten vegetables and mud, but
it was the stones that drew blood.
She was then taken back to prison.
The next week, the newspaper wrote that her face was still badly swollen.
The report noted that again she was pelted with “all the apples, eggs, and turnips,
that could be bought, begged, or stolen” but also with stones.
That report said she “appeared a moving heap of filth.”
She survived, though.
After three years in prison, she apparently “recovered her health, her spirits, and
her beauty.”
And get this, the fickle mob cheered and played music for her on her release.
In England, you had such things as Poor Laws and Vagrancy Acts, and that meant if someone
was found begging without a license to beg they could be sent to the pillory for three
days and whipped.
If a person was discovered wandering around without a job they could be pilloried and
branded on the forehead with a V for Vagrant.
Yep, these were harsh times for the homeless and out of work.
Similar punishments were handed out to “rogues”, which basically meant trouble causers and
tavern scrappers, and also “nightwalkers”, which meant prostitutes.
As for accused witches, they got it much worse.
If they weren’t burned at the stake, they were sentenced to prison and occasionally
released for a stint in the pillory.
Each time, the accused witch would be transported to a different town so her infamy grew and
the crowd had a fresh witch to torture.
The 1563 “Act against Conjuration Enchantments and Witchcrafts” demanded that this happen
to witches for the first offense, but if they were convicted again of witchcraft, they “shall
suffer pains of death.”
King James VI and I, the guy that sponsored the bible we all know, was especially cruel
to witches.
He updated the witchcraft laws and created the “Witchcraft Statute of 1604.”
That decreed that the accused witch should be taken to the pillory every quarter, again,
each town was different every time.
The witch had to confess to her crime, and if she didn’t, well, rotten eggs would no
doubt have been replaced with large stones.
They didn’t often die, but injuries were severe.
In 1711 in Ireland an accused witch had her eye knocked out.
What’s so hard for us moderns to get our heads around is how popular the pillory weekends
were.
People would travel for miles to a town if they knew a witch was going to be pilloried.
It wasn’t only because they loved to see her bleed and hang her head in shame, but
also because such events with so many people were a good time to do some business.
A weekend pillory was the past equivalent of some big tech or sporting event in today’s
world.
So many different things could result in the pillory, too.
You have to remember this was the go-to punishment in times when large state prisons didn’t
exist.
Misdemeanor crimes resulted in the stocks, serious crimes resulted in death, and a lot
of in-between crimes resulted in the pillory.
Obviously, as you’ve heard, crimes that aren’t crimes these days led to someone
getting hurt.
Such as Mary Hamilton, aka, Charles Hamilton.
She’d been accused of pretending to be a man and actually marrying women.
This was seen to be an act of fraud.
She was sentenced to prison and also to be pilloried and whipped in the towns of Taunton,
Glastonbury, Wells, and Shipton Mallet.
Here’s a list of other crimes that resulted in someone in England being put in the pillory:
Beating a child.
Running a brothel.
Boozing during church service hours.
Fortune telling.
Causing a scandal.
Transvestitism.
This last one was the case of Dorothy Clayton, who in 1575 was charged with wearing men’s
clothes around town.
To get the mob worked up into a fit of anger, she was forced to don menswear during her
time in the pillory.
Alas, the punishment pretty much died out in Europe around the 1830s, as it did in the
USA, although there are reports of men being pilloried and whipped in Delaware as late
as 1901.
According to an old clipping from the New York Times a few men received the punishment
on one day that year.
One of them was Charles Connelly.
For the crime of burglary, he stood for one hour in the pillory and got twenty lashes
of the whip.
Others received 10 lashes in the pillory for the crime of theft.
No buckets of blood or cow poo were mentioned in the article.
Now you need to watch, “I Spent My Whole Life In Prison.”