Victorian times were a period of transition for humanity. The period happens to be the melting
pot of modernization of technology and archaic traditions, which created some interesting and
grim results of how creative but woeful human minds can get. The police force was starting
to take a formal shape but the Victorian prisons were still harsh and poor to survive in like the
Middle Ages. The pain and punishment during the Victorian era were still unacceptable
but the methods benefitted from the advancement of technology which didn’t bode well for those tested
on. Welcome to Nutty History in today’s video we are going to find out what Punishment was like in
the Victorian Era. Simple, effective, and one of the safest exercising equipment, the treadmill is
a popular and high-selling machine that is common not only in gyms but in a lot of households too.
So, it may come as a shock that the origin of this much-adored piece of exercise equipment is
dark and gritty and can chill anyone’s bones. The treadmill in its modern version first
appeared during the Victorian era but not for the purpose it is used today. Back then it wasn’t an
activity but one of the most wicked punishments. In 1817, Sir William Cubitt wasn’t happy with the
state of British prisons as most prisoners were sitting idle for most of the day. As they say,
an idle mind is the devil’s workshop and lack of business among prisoners had Sir Cubitt worried.
To keep prisoners occupied and toiled, he came up with a new kind of mill that would grind air
instead of corn. With resistance provided by a system of weights, 19th-century penal treadmills
resembled large and wide wheels that had steps affixed to them. Prisoners were forced to climb
these stairs repeatedly which would cause the rotation of the wheel. Multiple persons could
climb a single treadmill at once and were given hand-held bars for support and sometimes were
separated by partitions as was the case at the Vagrants Prison in Coldbath Fields. According to
academic Vybarr Cregan-Reid, Sir Cubitt’s penal treadmills were the perfect method of punishment
by Victorian Standards. This was hard labor but had no productivity about it. Apparently,
the exhaustive pointlessness was religiously ideal as in the eyes of the authority, the real
fruit of hard work here was atonement. Prisoners had to walk or climb the treadmill for a minimum
of six-hours every day during which they would climb an average of ten to fourteen thousand feet.
This punishment, if harnessed for energy at the time, would have produced hundreds of Watts
ranging from 300-1000. The highest record of most climbing was held by prisoners of Warwick Gaol who
walked an incredible amount of seventeen thousand feet in a single day over a span of ten hours and
they did it in the blazing heat of peak summer. If you are questioning, wasn’t treadmill walking
healthy for the prisoners? We all have heard stories of how some people get swole in prisons
because of investing a lot of their sentence time in fitness. But modern prison scenarios do
not apply to Victorian prisons which were not very keen on keeping their prisoners healthy or… alive.
The celebrity prisoner of Pentonville Prison, famed writer Oscar Wilde nearly walked himself
to death by treading these treadmills day in, and day out. Sentenced to two years of hard labor in
prison for indecency, Oscar Wilde was only 41 when he was incarcerated and was freed in 1897
at the age of 44. The treatment at the prison including the treadmill left him so broken that
the poor Irish Poet succumbed two years later in Paris. Treadmills would not only greatly
reduce prisoners’ social interaction time but they would also confine them in a very limited space.
For many, life in prison meant spending the day on the treadmill and night in their little
cell. Indeed, such an environment would be heavily taxing on mental health. Prisoners
were hurting physically as well. Climbing nearly twelve thousand steps every day would
easily burn 2000 or much more calories off each prisoner. But the rations of these prisons were
a far cry from replenishment, leaving them malnourished and exhausted. But back in 1875,
the British government held the treadmills responsible for improving prison discipline
considerably nationwide. The Society for the Improvement of Prison Discipline also
hailed these machines for being effective as a preventive measure. However, it seems the death
of Oscar Wilde did make some impact and the use of these machines was abolished in 1902.
Ireland’s freedom movement is one of the darkest chapters of the United Kingdom’s history. In the
18th century the Irish population was inspired by the French Revolution. Some Irishmen set up the
Society of United Irishmen in Belfast in October 1791 intending to bring democracy to Ireland. The
society met fierce suppression from the government from the onset and was driven underground, but the
members kept the society alive in secret. The tension between the authorities and the society
grew to the apex in 1798 and rebellion broke out in and around Dublin. Though the Irish had spirit,
they were poorly armed and poorly led because most of the United Irish leaders were in prison
during the insurgency. The fighting in the 1798 rebellion lasted just three months,
but tens of thousands had perished. A high estimate of the death toll is 70,000 and the
lowest one puts it at about 10,000. Authorities cracked down hard on confirmed rebellions and
suspects alike and the oppression continued during the Victorian times too. In attempts to weed out
the clandestine United Irish Society, British authorities tried everything. From forgoing
public punishments to offering amnesty and full pardon, they tried to bribe the imprisoned members
of the organization in every possible way. But there was another side of this coin as well,
long before they offered rewards, they used many forms of pain to convince members and
suspects without any difference. These punishments continued to be a bane of the Irish for over a
century. The usual methods of convincing enforced by the British were flogging, half-hanging,
and picketing. While flogging is a term that almost everybody is familiar with, half-hanging
was a sick game of letting them dangle but cutting them down before life left their body. They will
then help the prisoner to get back on their feet and then repeat the excruciating and appalling
process many times. Picketing was the process of placing the bare soles on pegs driven into
the ground, with their pointed ends uppermost. Their whole weight was therefore supported on
the most sensitive part and it would inflict unbearable pain. While these three horrible
means of punishment were common, pitchcapping was kept for special occasions. The process involved
pouring hot tar into the pitch cap, a conical cap shaped very similar to a clown’s cap. This
cap was then placed onto one's said head, allowed to cool, and then removed rapidly. Although it
was traditional for men to be bareheaded in church, it was said that Irish priests made
an exception for survivors of pitchcapping to cover their scarred scalps with a handkerchief.
In the nineteenth century, a report by the education department of the British government
reported that the educational system wasn’t doing so well in Wales. Citing that Welsh children had
little motivation to study or get educated and were living in bad conditions. The Victorian-era
British decided that the reason for such poor education standards has to be the lack of English
in their education system. So, they came up with a punishment system to dissuade Welsh children from
speaking Welsh. A piece of wood plaque inscribed with the letters WN was crafted to hang around the
neck of children who were caught speaking Welsh in school. However, there was only one plaque
for all the children in school and that’s where this punishment became sadistic. If the person
who currently had the plaque caught someone else speaking Welsh, the first offender could pass the
“Welsh Not Plaque'' to the second offender. The plaque would be passed around Welsh children for
the entire school day like a wicked version of Hot Potato, as Welsh students would turn on each other
to avoid wearing the plaque at the time the final bell of the school would ring. At the end of the
day whoever had the plaque around their neck, would be punished by school authorities. This
punishment served the British ‘Divide and Rule policy’ wonderfully at a micro level.
The British Army abolished the use of flogging as a punishment method in 1881. Until then,
flogging was the standard punishment for minor offenses such as drunkenness or failing to perform
duties timely. Faced with the challenge to invent a new punishment form to replace flogging, British
officials came up with Field Punishment Number One. Depending on the degree of the offense,
an offender would be tied up to a mast or worse a wheel and wasn’t allowed to slouch or relax.
A military officer was assigned to check on the posture of the offender regularly and disobeying
the command meant an increase in the punishment time. The punishment survived till 1920 and was
considered life-threatening as offenders would be often tied up in plain view subjecting them to
shellfire. No wonder the punishment was abolished in the very first year of the First World Battle.
Do you think we missed any other horrible Victorian punishments? Tell us in the comments
below and make sure to like and subscribe. As always, thanks for watching Nutty History.