Curious Punishments of Bygone Days

								

mortally sick, was bolstered up by his friends with a shoemaker's bench
and kit in front of him, pretending to work, and when the sheriffs came
to seize him and carry him to the gallows, he did not seem very sick and
they left the house without him. He died that night peaceably in bed.
All these doings seem too barbarous for civilized England.
Thomas Maule was a Salem Quaker and an author. His book was ordered to
be burned in 1695 in Boston market place. The diary of the Reverend Dr.
Bentley says of him:
"Tho's Maule, shopkeeper of Salem, is brought before the Council to
answer for his printing and publishing a pamphlet of 260 pages entitled
"Truth held Forth and Maintained," owns the book but will not own all,
till he sees his copy which is at New York with Bradford who printed it.
Saith he writt to ye Gov'r of N. York before he could get it printed.
Book is ordered to be burnt--being stuff'd wth notorious lyes and
scandals, and he recognizes to it next Court of Assize and gen'l gaol
delivery to be held for the County of Essex. He acknowledges that what
was written concerning the circumstance of Major Gen. Atherton's death
was a mistake, was chiefly insisted on against him, which I believe was
a surprize to him, he expecting to be examined in some point of
religion, as should seem by his bringing his Bible under his arm."
In 1654 the writings of John Reeves and Ludowick Muggleton, self-styled
prophets, were burned in Boston market-place by that abhorred public
functionary the hangman. Other Quaker books were similarly burned, and
John Rogers of New London, who hated the Quakers, but whom the Boston
magistrates persisted in regarding and classifying as a Quaker, had to
see his books perish in the flames in company with Quaker publications.
In 1754 a pamphlet called The Monster of Monsters, a sharp criticism
on the Massachusetts Court which caused much stir in provincial
political circles, was burned by the hangman in King Street, Boston. We
learn from the Connecticut Gazette that about the same time another
offending publication was sentenced to be "publickly whipt according to
Moses Law, with forty stripes save one, and then burnt." The true
book-lover winces at the thought of the blood-stained hands of the
hangman on any book, even though a "Monster."

VI
THE WHIPPING-POST

John Taylour, the "Water-Poet," wrote in 1630:


"In London, and within a mile, I ween
There are jails or prisons full fifteen
And sixty whipping-posts and stocks and cages."
Church and city records throughout England show how constantly these
whipping-posts were made to perform their share of legal and restrictive
duties. In the reign of Henry VIII a famous Whipping Act had been passed
by which all vagrants were to be whipped severely at the cart-tail "till
the body became bloody by reason of such whipping." This enactment
remained in force nearly through the reign of Elizabeth, when the