Curious Punishments of Bygone Days

								

fashioned as to confine the human head in its tight grasp, and thus hold
it up to the public gaze. The very ideal of ignominy was embodied and
made manifest in this contrivance of wood and iron. There can be no
outrage, methinks--against our common nature--whatever be the
delinquencies of the individual--no outrage more flagrant than to
forbid the culprit to hide his face for shame."

This "essence of punishment"--the pillory or stretch-neck--can be traced
back to a remote period in England and on the Continent--certainly to
the twelfth century. In its history, tragedy and comedy are equally
blended; and martyrdom and obloquy are alike combined. Seen in a
prominent position in every village and town, its familiarity of
presence was its only retrieving characteristic; near church-yard and in
public square was it ever found; local authorities forfeited the right
to hold a market unless they had a pillory ready for use.
A description of a pillory is not necessary to one who has read any
illustrated history of the English Church, of the Quakers, Dissenters,
or of the English people; for the rude prints of political and religious
sufferers in the pillory have been often reproduced. Douce, in his
Illustrations of Shakespeare gives six different forms of the pillory.
It was an upright board, hinged or divisible in twain, with a hole in
which the head was set fast, and usually with two openings also for the
hands. Often the ears were nailed to the wood on either side of the
head-hole. Examples exist of a small finger-pillory or thumb-stocks, but
are rare.
It would be impossible to enumerate the offences for which Englishmen
were pilloried: among them were treason, sedition, arson, blasphemy,
witch-craft, perjury, wife-beating, cheating, forestalling, forging,
coin-clipping, tree-polling, gaming, dice-cogging, quarrelling, lying,
libelling, slandering, threatening, conjuring, fortune-telling,
"prigging," drunkenness, impudence. One man was set in the pillory for
delivering false dinner invitations; another for a rough practical joke;
another for selling an injurious quack medicine. All sharpers, beggars,
impostors, vagabonds, were liable to be pilloried. So fierce sometimes
was the attack of the populace with various annoying and heavy missiles
on pilloried prisoners that several deaths are known to have ensued. On
the other side, it is told in Chamber's Book of Days that a prisoner,
by the sudden collapse of a rotten footboard, was left hanging by his
neck in danger of his life. On being liberated he brought action
against the town and received damages.
The pillory in England has seen many a noble victim. The history of
Puritanism, of Reformation, is filled with hundreds of pages of accounts
of sufferings on the pillory. When such names as those of Leighton,
Prynne, Lilburne, Burton and Bastwick appear as thus being punished we
do not think of the pillory as a scaffold for felons, but as a platform