Curious Punishments of Bygone Days

								

thrust forth in a few weeks with fresh stripes to another grudged
resting place. Such entries as this of the town of Westerly, Rhode
Island, might be produced in scores:
"September 26, 1748. That the officer shall take the said transient
forthwith to some publick place in this town and strip him from the
waist upward, & whyp him twenty strypes well layd on his naked back, and
then be by said officer transported out of this town."
The appearance of crime likewise had to be avoided. In 1635 Thomas Petet
"for suspition of slander, idleness and stubbornness is to be severely
whipt and kept in hold."
More shocking and still more summary was the punishment meted out to a
Frenchman who was suspected only of setting fire to Boston in the year
1679. He was ordered to stand in the pillory, have both ears cut off,
pay the charges of the court, and lie in prison in bonds of five hundred
pounds until sentence was performed.
These Massachusetts magistrates were not the only ones to sentence
punishment on suspicion. In Scotland one Richardson, a tailor, being
"accusit of pickrie," or pilfering, was adjudged to be punished with
"twelve straiks with ane double belt, because there could be nae
sufficient proof gotten, but vehement suspition."
Writing of punishments of bygone days, an English rhymester says:


"Each mode has served its turn, and played a part

    For good or ill with man; but while the bane
Of drunkenness corrupts the nation's heart--

    Discrediting our age--methinks the reign

    Of stocks, at least, were well revived again."
There is, in truth, a certain fitness in setting in the stocks for
drunkenness; a firm confining of the wandering uncertain legs; a fixing
in one spot for quiet growing sober, and meditating on the misery of
drunkenness, a fitness that with the extreme of publicity removed, or
the wantonness of the spectators curbed, perhaps would not be so bad a
restraining punishment after all. Some of the greatness and self-control
of the later years of Cardinal Wolsey's life may have come from those
hours of mortification and meditation spent in the stocks. And over the
stocks might be set "a paper" as of yore, bearing in capital letters the
old epitaph found in solemn warning of eternity on many an ancient
tombstone but literally applicable in this temporal matter.


"All Ye who see the State of Me
Think of the Glass that Runs for Thee."

IV
THE PILLORY

Hawthorne says in his immortal Scarlet Letter:
"This scaffold constituted a portion of a penal machine which now, for
two or three generations past, has been merely historical or
traditionary among us, but was held in the old time to be as effectual
in the promotion of good citizenship as ever was the guillotine among
the terrorists of France. It was, in short, the platform of the pillory;
and above it rose the framework of that instrument of discipline, so