criminal toils, is flogged, is hanged in private; the old idea was
to make punishment as public as possible, for so penalty and effect
(it was thought) were heightened and increased. The Pillory was the
completest expression of this idea. A man was exposed for sixty minutes
in the market-place at the busiest hour of the day, and the public
itself was summoned to approve of and aid the punishment. The thing
was known in old Saxon days. In the laws of Withred it is called
_healsfang_. The mediæval Latin name for it was _collistrigium_. Both
terms = a “catch for the neck.” Its form varied. The simplest was a
wooden frame or screen, with three holes in it, elevated some feet
above the ground. The culprit stood behind upon a platform, his
head and hands caught in and stuck through the aforesaid holes. This
was much like the stocks, save that there the patient sat instead of
stood and had his feet enclosed instead of his head and hands. In
popular phrase this was “to peep through the nut-crackers.” Again,
the structure swung on a pivot; so that the inmate might face the
compass points in turn. Sometimes, though this was rather a foreign
fashion, it was so commodious that it would take a nosegay of twelve;
at the same time that it went revolving and revolving--a very far from
merry-go-round! Now (as at Dublin) it was the kernel of a large and
imposing structure of stone. Now (as at Coleshill, in Warwickshire)
it stood a deft arrangements of uprights, boards, and holes, and did
triple duty--as stocks, as whipping-post, as Pillory. Now, yet again
(as at Marlborough, in Wiltshire), the frame turned on a swivel at the
will of the patient, whose deft twistings in dodging missiles hugely
delighted the grinning mob. With pen and pencil Mr. Llewellyn Jewitt
and other antiquarians have preserved for our delectation yet other
forms.
The Pillory was first used for dishonest bakers, brewers, corn-sellers,
and the like. Then, its offices were extended to divers kinds of
misdemeanants. Later, it was the lot of your scurrile pamphleteer, your
libeller, and your publisher of unlicensed volumes. The victim was not
always pelted; for feeling might run high against the Government; and
when he was acclaimed his shame became his glory. So the thing served
as a weather-glass of popular opinion.
I turn to some historic instances. Under Henry III., by the Assize
of Bread and Ale, it was decreed that knavish bakers, brewers, and
butchers be “set on the pyllory.” It was also provided that “The
pyllory shal be of a metely strengthe, so that they that be fautye
may be thereon without any jeopardye of their lyvys.” (The platform
must not seldom have broken down, leaving the “worm of the hour”
suspended by the neck--that had been securely fastened--in peril of
strangulation, in a case of this sort, under Elizabeth, he sued the
town, and recovered damages.) The articles of usage for the City of
London, published under Edward I., set forth some evil humours of the
time. Rustical simplicity fell, then as now, an easy prey to urban
cunning. What rascals these mediæval cits were, to be sure! Thus, your
corn dealer would take in grain from harmless necessary bumpkins, to
whom he would give an earnest, telling them to come to his house for
payment. Here he met them with a long face:--his wife had gone out with
the key of the cash-box; would his country friends call again? And when
they do, he is “not in.” (Ah! That “call again” and that “not in!” Were
they stale so many centuries ago?) If the rogue were discovered, he
impudently denied his debt:--he had never seen the gentlemen before;
or, raising some dispute about the price, he told him to take back his
goods--when the corn was found too wet for removal. “By these means
the poor men lose half their pay in expenses before they are settled
with;” and the wrong-doer is to be amerced heavily. Being unable to
pay, “then he shall be put on the Pillory, and remain there an hour in
the day at least; a Serjeant of the City standing by the side of the
Pillory with good hue-and-cry as to the reason why he is punished.”
The wicked butcher suffered after the same fashion; while the baker,
who put off bad bread, was drawn--for the first offence upon a hurdle
from the Guildhall to his own house, by “the great streets that are
most dirty, with the faulty loaf hanging about his neck,” a spectacle
to gods and a cockshy for men. For the second offence he processioned
as before; and, to boot, he must stand in the Pillory for an hour.
Offending for the third time, he was judged incorrigible: his oven was
dismantled, and he might bake within the city bounds no more. Sure, the
ancient London loaf, be it _manchet_, or _chete_, or mere _mystelon_,
must ever have been of good quality? When, indeed, did the falling off
begin? Was it when the city fathers unwisely took to regulating men’s
morals? In the seventh of Richard II. this punishment was ordained
for the man of evil life:--“Let his head and beard be shaved except a
fringe on the head two inches in breadth, and let him be taken to the
Pillory, with minstrels, and set thereon for a certain time, at the
discretion of the Mayor and Aldermen.” As for the erring sister, she
was taken from the prison into Aldgate with a hood of ray and a white
wand in her hand. From Aldgate minstrels played her to the Thew (a
species of Pillory for women). Thence, her offence being proclaimed,
she was led “through Chepe and Newgate to Cokkes Lane, there to take
up her abode.” Again, the brawler or the scold must hold a distaff
with tow in hand--and so on; for your old-time law-giver lusted after
variation.
Once the Pillory was an indispensable ornament of the market-place.
Nay, were it not kept fit for use, the very right to hold a market
might be lost. As an emblem of power, it was claimed by the great
lords: often, indeed, it went with the lordship of the manor. Thus at
Beverley, in the twenty-first of Edward I., John, Archbishop of York,
claims the right of Pillory with the right of gallows and gibbet;
and with the right of Pillory the right of tumbrell, which was the
dung-cart wherein minor malefactors were shamefully trundled through
the town. Legislative ingenuity was ever striving to devise fresh marks
of ignominy. Stow relates that, in the seventh of Edward IV., certain
common jurors must (for their partial conduct) ride in paper mitres
from Newgate to the Pillory in Cornhill, and there do penance for their
fault. Again, in the first of Henry VIII. (1509), Smith and Simpson,
ringleaders of false inquests, rode the City (also in paper mitres)
with their faces to the horse’s tail; and they were set on the Pillory
in Cornhill; and they were brought again to Newgate, where they died
from very shame. The like fate, it seems, befell a much later offender,
one James Morris, who was pilloried (April 2, 1803) for fraud in the
market place at Lancaster. Next morning he was found dead in his bed,
and the coroner’s jury brought it in as “visitation of God.” Oft-times
the sufferer came less mysteriously to his end. The mobility was,
in effect, invited, as it were, to italicise his sentence in terms
of anything you please, from rotten eggs to brickbats. Not seldom it
did so to the sternest purpose. On June 22, 1732, contemporary prints
report:--“Last night the corpse of John Walker, who was killed in the
Pillory on Tuesday last, was buried at St. Andrew’s, Holborn;” and
among the casualties of the December of that same year, the case of
another poor wretch is dismissed with “murder’d in the pillory.” In
1756 Egon and two others were pilloried for procuring the commission of
a robbery, in order to get a reward for its detection. Egon was stoned
to death. On one or two occasions--notably when Elizabeth Collier was
pilloried by order of Jeffreys in 1680--the authorities were ordered to
see that the peace was kept and that the culprit suffered the exposure
alone.
A long list might be given of misdemeanours punished by the
Pillory:--as, practising the art magick; cutting a purse; placing a
piece of iron in a loaf of bread; selling bad oats, stinking eels,
strawberry pottles half fall of fern; vending ale by measures not
sealed and thickening the bottom of such measures with pewter. As
(also) lies, defamations, and libels of all sorts. If the lie were
notorious, or were told of the mayor or any other dignitary, the liar
was pilloried with a whetstone round his neck: whence it came that a
whetstone was the popular reward for audacious mendacity, and “lying
for the whetstone” was a current phrase.
Late Tudor and Stuart times edged and weighted the punishment of
the Pillory. It might be preceded by a flogging at the Cart’s-tail.
Stripped to the waist, the culprit, man or woman, was tied to the
hinder end (our fathers used a shorter phrase) of a cart, and was thus
lashed through the streets. (This vulgarly was called, “Shoving the
tumbler,” or “Crying carrots and turnips.”) Or, as Butler’s couplet
reminds us, the patient’s ears were nailed to the wood:--
Each window like a Pillory appears,
With heads thrust through, nail’d by the ears.
Or his ears were cropped, and not seldom his nose was slit likewise.
In 1570, Timothy Penredd was pilloried in Chepe on two successive
market-days for counterfeiting the seal of the Queen’s Bench. Each
time an ear was nailed; and this poor member he must free “by his own
proper motion.” If the wrench were too great for human fortitude, the
thoughtful authorities lent some aid. In one case (1552) the culprit
would not “rent his eare”; so that in the long run “one of the bedles
slitted yt upwards with a penkniffe to loose it.” Indeed, the law had
a strong grudge against the ears of malefactors. The fourteenth of
Elizabeth, cap. 5, ordered that vagrants be grievously whipped and
burned through the gristle of the right ear, unless some credible
person took them to service (if they relapsed they were hanged). The
punishments of the time show a curious alternation between Pillory
and Cart. Thus, whilst keepers of immoral houses were carted about
the town to the music of ringing basins, in the eleventh of James I.,
William Barnwell, “gentleman” (an inaccurate description had vitiated
the indictment), and his wife Thomasina, criminals of the same class,
were whipped at the Cart’s-tail from the prison to their house, and
back again. Thus, too, were handled those who lived by cards and dice;
but, for witchcraft, Dorothy Magicke was set four times a year upon
the Pillory, and must thereon make public confession. This man capers
dolefully at the Cart’s-tail for stealing lead; that must take his
turn in the Pillory for snatching three-pence worth of hairs from a
mare’s tail. Later, it was thought excellent for fraudulent attorneys.
In November 1786 one “Mr. A----” (the name is thus disguised), a legal
gentleman, was brought from Newgate in a hackney cab and pilloried for
an hour hard by the gate of Westminster Hall. What he did, and how he
fared, we are not told; so it may be that his hap was even as Thomas
Scott’s, pilloried for a false accusation in January 1804. Scott was
pelted with rotten eggs, filth, and dirt of the street. Also, the
neighbouring ragamuffins had thoughtfully collected good store of dead
cats and rats “in the vicinity of the metropolis” that morning.
Was it so very edifying after all? Opinions began to differ. Yet Lord
Thurlow solemnly cracked it up “as a restraint against licentiousness
provided by the wisdom of our ancestors”; and in 1814 Lord Ellenborough
ordered Lord Cochrane to be pilloried for conspiring to spread false
news. The justice of this last abominable sentence was questioned.
Sir Francis Burdett, Cochrane’s fellow-member for Middlesex, vowed
that he would stand with him on the day of punishment; but the
Government did not venture to carry out the sentence. Two years later,
in 1816, the punishment of Pillory was restricted to persons guilty
of perjury; and in 1837, by the 1 Vict. cap. 23, it was abolished
altogether. The last person who suffered it is said to have been
Peter James Bossy, pilloried in front of the Old Bailey, June 24,
1830. The public whipping of women went in 1817; the private followed
in 1820 by 1 Geo. IV. cap. 57. The whipping of men for a common law
misdemeanour has never been formally abolished; but the punishment is
now inflicted only under the Garrotters Act (1863) for robbery with
violence; which, of course, has nothing to do with existing statutory
provisions for the flogging of juvenile male offenders. I should add
that in America Pillory and Whipping-Post were “an unconscionable time
a-dying”; lingered especially in the State of Delaware; and that their
restoration has been urged.
The Finger Pillory deserves a word. It was fixed up inside churches
(that of Ashby-de-la-Zouch, for instance) and halls. Boys who
misbehaved during service, and offenders at festive times against
the mock reign of the lord of misrule, alike expiated their offences
therein.
I note some remarkable cases. First, and most important, is the group
of literary martyrs. The Stuart Government could not crush the press;
but author, printer, and publisher all worked in peril of the Pillory.
The author of _Robinson Crusoe_ was, perhaps, its most famous inmate.
Earless on high stood unabash’d De Foe,
And Tutchin flagrant from the scourge below,
sings Pope in the _Dunciad_ with reckless inaccuracy. In 1703, De Foe,
for his _Shortest Way with the Dissenters_, was condemned to stand
thrice in the Pillory before the Royal Exchange, near the Conduit in
Cheapside, and at Temple Bar. The mob, he tells us, treated him very
well, and cheered long and loud when he was taken out of what he calls
a “Hieraglyphick state machine; Contrived to punish fancy in” (_Hymn
to the Pillory_). He comforts himself by reflecting that the learned
Selden narrowly escaped it, and turns the whole thing to ridicule; but
then mutilation was no port of the sentence. Pope’s reference to John
Tutchin is still wider of the mark. Tutchin, having narrowly escaped
death for his share in Monmouth’s rebellion, was sentenced by Jeffreys,
on his famous Western Circuit (1685), to seven years’ imprisonment,
during which he must, once a year, be whipped through every market-town
in Dorsetshire. The very clerk of the court was moved to protest that
this meant a whipping once a fortnight; but the sentence remained.
Out of bravado, or in desperation, the prisoner petitioned the King
to be hanged instead of whipped; but, in the result, he was neither
whipped nor hanged. He fell ill of the small-pox; passion cooled;
and, intelligently bribing, he escaped, to visit Jeffreys in the
Tower. Apparently he went to gloat, but remained to accept the ruined
Chancellor’s explanation, that he had only obeyed instructions. “So
after he had treated Mr. _Tutchin_ with a glass of wine, Mr. _Tutchin_
went away.”
Another of Pope’s examples is “old Prynne,” cropped (in 1632) in the
Pillory for his _Histriomastic_, or Players’ Scourge, which was held to
reflect on Charles I.’s Queen. Again he stood there in 1637, when the
executioner cruelly mangled the ancient stumps. A quite incorrigible
person was this same William Prynne, described by Marchmont Needham
as “one of the greatest paper worms that ever crept about a library.”
He wrote some forty works remarkable for virulence even in that age
of bitter polemics. He strenuously supported the Restoration, and the
new Government was at its wit’s end what to do with him till Charles
himself solved the difficulty with happy humour. “Let him amuse himself
with writing against the Catholics and poring over the records in the
Tower,” said the king; and silenced him with the Keepership of the
Records and £500 a year. Prynne’s second appearance was for a bitter
attack on Laud; and he had as fellow-sufferers John Bastwick, who had
written a sort of mock _Litanie_, and Henry Burton. Bastwick was “very
merrie.” His wife “got on a stool and kissed him;” and, “his ears being
cut off, she called for them, put them in a clean handkerchief, and
carried them away with her.” There was a great crowd, which “cried and
howled terribly, especially when Burton was cropped.” Being angered by
the jeers and execrations of the mob, the executioner did his work very
brutally. Pope’s Billingsgate is classic, but it remains Billingsgate.
The Pillory shows often in his verse. Edmund Curl was a pet aversion
of his, and for publishing the _Memoirs of Ker of Kersland_ Curl
suffered the punishment at Charing Cross on Feb. 23, 1728. Pope hints
(_Dunciad_, II. 3 and 4) that he was badly handled by the mob. In truth
he came off very well, owing, it seems, to an explanatory circular he
got distributed among the spectators.
As time wore on the punishment reverted to its earlier and milder form.
Thus, in 1630, Dr. Leighton, for his _Zion’s Plea against Prelacy_,
was pilloried, branded, cropped, and whipped; but the authors of the
eighteenth century were punished by exposure alone, and were often
solaced by popular sympathy. In 1765 Williams, the bookseller, stood
in the Pillory for re-publishing _The North Briton_: he held a sprig
of laurel in his hand, and a large collection was made for him then
and there. In derision of authority the mob displayed (_inter alia_)
the famous Bootjack--the popular reference to Lord Bute, the late
Prime Minister. Still more farcical was the exposure (1759) of Dr.
Shebbeare for publishing political libels. He was attended on the
platform by a servant in livery holding an umbrella over his head,
and his neck and arms were not confined. The court thought the
under-sheriff of Middlesex something more than remiss: wherefore he
was fined and imprisoned, it being judicially decided that the culprit
must stand not merely _on_ but _in_ the Pillory. In this connexion I
will only further mention the case of Eton the publisher, “a very old
man,” who in 1812 was pilloried for printing Paine’s _Age of Reason_.
Here, again, the crowd, by the respect it heaped upon the prisoner,
altogether eliminated the sting from the punishment. The minor scribe
of to-day is supposed to court an action, nay, a criminal prosecution,
as a stimulus to circulation; a former age saw in the Pillory the best
possible advertisement for the Grub Street hack. In Foote’s _Patron_,
Puff, the publisher, urges Dactyl to produce a satire; and, when the
proposed risk is hinted at, retorts: “Why, I would not give twopence
for an author who was afraid of his ears.... Why, zooks, sir! I never
got salt for my porridge till I mounted at the Royal Exchange, that was
the making of me.... The true Castalian stream is a shower of eggs and
a Pillory the poet’s Parnassus.”
Among cases other than literary, a notable one is that of Titus Oates
(1685), who, being convicted of perjury, was sentenced to stand in
the Pillory and be whipped at the Cart’s-tail. The lashing was so
cruelly done that you feel some pity even for that arch rascal. The
curious computed that he received 2256 strokes with a whip of six
thongs--13,536 strokes in all. Yet the wretch lived to enjoy a pension
after the Revolution! There was another remarkable instance that same
year. Thomas Dangerfield, convicted of libelling the King when Duke of
York, was sentenced to a fine, to the Pillory, and to be whipped from
Aldgate to Newgate, and from Newgate to Tyburn. The dreadful work was
over, and he was returning prisonwards in a coach, when there steps
forward Robert Francis, a barrister of Gray’s Inn, with the cruel jibe,
“How now, friend? Have you had your heat this morning?” Dangerfield
turned on him with bitter curses (“Son of a wh----” is the elegant
sample preserved by the records). Francis, much enraged, thrust at the
aching, smarting, bleeding wretch with a small cane, and by mischance
put out an eye, so that in two hours Dangerfield was dead; and no great
while thereafter he himself was tried, condemned, and hanged. According
to the testimony of the Rev. Mr. Samuel Smith, Ordinary at Newgate, he
made a very edifying end.
Quite interesting is the case of Japhet Crook, _alias_ Sir Peter
Stringer, whose unhappy memory is preserved in some of Pope’s most
biting lines. In 1731, poor Japhet stood in the Pillory at Charing
Cross for forging a deed; when the hangman, dressed like a butcher,
“with a knife like a gardener’s pruning knife cut off his ears, and
with a pair of scissors slit both his nostrils.” The wretch endured all
this with great patience; but at the searing “the pain was so great
that he got up from his chair.” No wonder! Two years after Eleanor
Beare, keeper of “The White Horse,” Nuns Green, Derby, was pilloried
(August 1732) after just escaping the gallows for murder. She mounted
the platform “with an easy air”; thus exasperating a mob already
ill-disposed, which bombarded her with apples, eggs, turnips, and so
forth; so that “the stagnate kennels were robbed of their contents, and
became the cleanest part of the street.” Managing to escape, she dashed
off, “a moving heap of filth,” but was presently seized and lugged
back; and at the end of the hour she was carried to prison, “an object
which none cared to touch.” A week after she was again forced to take
her stand. The officer noted that her head was wondrous swelled, and
he presently stripped it of “ten or twelve coverings,” whereof one was
a pewter plate. Her aspect was most forlorn, but the crowd, no whit
moved, pelted its hardest, and she was borne away more dead than alive.
Yet she too not only lived, but “recovered her health, her spirits,
and her beauty.” Two lighter instances, and I have done. In the early
stages of Monmouth’s rebellion, an astrologer, consulting the stars,
saw that the duke would be presently King of England. After Sedgemoor
he was cast into Dorchester Gaol for this unlucky prediction. Again
falling to his observations, he clearly read “that he would be whipped
at the Cart’s ----”; and this time the planets spoke true. In 1783, the
poet Cowper reports one humorous case from his own experience. At Olney
a man was publicly whipped for theft; he whealed with every stroke; but
that was only because the beadle drew the scourge against a piece of
red ochre hidden in his hand. Noting the fraud, the parish constable
laid his cane smartly about the shoulders of the all too-lenient
official, whereat a country wench, in high dudgeon, set to pomelling
the constable. And of the three the thief alone escaped punishment.
State Trials for Witchcraft
Early Laws against Witchcraft--The Essex Witches--The Devon
Witches--The Bury St. Edmunds Case--Bewitched Children--The
Scepticism of Serjeant Keeling--Evidence of Sir Thomas Browne--The
Judge’s Charge--The End of it All--The Trial of Richard
Hathaway--The Comic Side of Superstition--A Rogue’s Punishment--A
Word in Conclusion.
I propose to examine the Witchcraft cases in Howell’s twenty-one bulky
volumes of State Trials. The general subject, even in England, is too
vast for detailed treatment here; also it is choked with all manner of
absurdities. In a trial some of these are pared away: you know what
the people saw, or believed they saw, and you have the declarations of
the witches themselves. Only five cases, all between 1616 (13 Jac. I.)
and 1702 (1 Anne) are reported. The selection is capricious, for some
famous prosecutions as that of the Lancashire witches are omitted, but
it is fairly representative.