Stocks and Pilliories
http://medievalcrimeandpunishment.wetpaint.com/page/Stocks+and+pillories.+The+Humiliation
Stocks and pillories. The Humiliation
Stocks and Pillories were used for humiliation. The stocks were a form of punishment. They were
used for crimes that were not considered server crimes.
In 1495 law required vaggabonds to be in the stocks for three days, living on bread and water. By
1351 every town was required to have and maintain a set of stocks.
Crimes that required as a punishment the stocks were criems such as: Drunkeness ( 6 hrs at the
stocks), drunkard (4 hrs) and swearing (1hr).
All these crimes could avoid the stocks, if the accused could pay the fine for the crime they
committed.
stocks
pillories
Once a person was at the stocks they were " at the mercy of the mob". Once the accused was
at the stocks the crowd would pelt them with literelly anything that could fit in their hands. The
crowd threw vegetables and fruit that were rotten, mud, dead rodents especailly rats, excretment
and stones.
The individual not only suffered humilation, abuse and mockey but also the pain of not been able
to move. Some individuals evn had their ears nailed to the stocks to prevent them moving even
more. Sometime in order to avoid the rotten vegetables and other items that were thrown at
them, the accused would move and in the process rip their ears, which was exteremly painful.
Some people in history that suffered the humiliation and pain at the stocks:
Names
Reason For Been In The Stocks
John Waller
Robbery and Prejury
Ann Marrow
Fraud and Same Sex Marriges
(three).
Vere Street Coterie
Homosexual Offences
Titus Oates
Prejury and the inventor of the
Popish Plot
http://www.geocities.com/WestHollywood/Heights/9417/index.html
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A whole website about stocks and pillories! Lots of pics, loads of info!
http://www.stronghold-knights.com/site/article224.html
The "pillory" was an upgrade to the stocks and used two hinged timbers to lock the offenders' head and often
their hands in position for all to see. They were primarily designed to humiliate gentlemen and aristocrats but
were also used for lesser men. In this article we'll be looking at how they were made and why they were used...
Submitted by Aubergine
Pillory Design
The pillory was developed some time during the 1600's as an upgrade to the stocks. As well as locking arms
and/or legs in position, the offenders' head was also clamped in so as to "hold it up to the public gaze".
The pillory was usually constructed so as to force the offender to stand upright, as shown above, usually on a wooden
platform. There is a reported incident of a near-death resulting from rotten wood collapsing in the wooden platform
almost resulting in a broken neck.
While most pillories would clamp the hands as shown above, there are examples of "small finger pillory" and "thumb
stocks" where fingers would be clamped instead of the hands.
Where Were they Located?
Pillories would often be found in busy public places such as market squares - indeed many towns would forfeit their
right to a market if they did not first build a pillory.
Like stocks, some pillories were fixed in position while others were movable. Offenders restrained in movable
pillories would often be faced northwards, southwards, eastwards then westwards in succession for quarter of an
hour in each direction.
Who Was Punished?
Although all sharpers, beggars, impostors and vagabonds were liable to be placed in the pillory, it was mostly used for
gentlemen and aristocrats as a way of humiliating them.
In his famous "Hymn to the Pillory", De Foe said:
"Tell us, great engine, how to understand
Or reconcile the justice of this land;
How Bastwick, Prynne, Hunt, Hollingsby and Pye -Men of unspotted honesty -Men that had learning, wit and sense,
And more than most men have had since,
Could equal title to thee claim
With Oates and Fuller, men of fouler fame."
The over-use of the pillory for gentlemen and aristocrats backfired to some extent as many began to see the pillory as
a platform for heros by the late 1700's.
Women were sometimes put in a pillory on counts of purgery or theft.
Reasons for Punishment
The most common reasons for this type of punishment were:
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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. Cabbage stealing would also guarantee your place in a pillory.
What Was the Punishment?
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 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."
The pillory was mainly designed to humiliate the offender by putting their face on show but there are numerous
reports of offenders being killed after villagers throwing rocks and weapons at them.
As an added punishment, some offenders would have their ears nailed to the wooden timbers and in extreme cases
their ears could be cut of alltogether in a process known as "cropping". There are also documented cases of offenders
being whipped and even branded while being restrined in a pillory.
Just like the stocks, offenders would often be pelted with all manner of things. In particular, rotten eggs were
favoured by most onlookers.
http://www.oldbaileyonline.org/static/Punishment.jsp#corporal-whipping
Whipping
Offenders (mostly those convicted of theft) were sentenced to be stripped to the waist and flogged "at a cart's
tail" along a length of public street, usually near the scene of the crime, "until his [or her] back be bloody".
Publicity was traditionally an essential feature of this punishment, serving to shame the offender and deter others
from committing the crime. Even in the late seventeenth century, however, the courts occasionally ordered that
the punishment should be carried out in prison or a house of correction rather than on the streets. From the
1720s courts began explicitly to differentiate between private whipping, which took place inside or immediately
outside Newgate Prison, a house of correction, or the Old Bailey; and public whipping, which was carried out in
the traditional way.
Over the course of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries the proportion of whippings carried out in public
declined, but the number of private whippings increased after 1772 owing to a loss of faith in the alternative
punishments of transportation and the death penalty. The public whipping of women was abolished in 1817 (after
having been in decline since the 1770s) and that of men ended in the early 1830s, though it was not formally
abolished under 1862.
Private whipping (in prison, with the press in attendance), from the 1850s virtually of men only, continued,
however, beyond the end of this period. Following the passage of the Security from Violence Act (the "Garrotters
Act") in 1863, which authorised up to 50 strokes, this punishment was frequently used for those convicted of theft
with violence. This punishment was not abolished until 1948.
Fines
In the late seventeenth and first half of the eighteenth century fines were used primarily for the punishment of
misdemeanours. However, in 1779 a clause in the Penitentiary Act allowed a fine to be levied in lieu of branding.
Thereafter fines were frequently used, often in conjunction with a term of imprisonment, for manslaughter, petty
larceny, and simple grand larceny. Judges could vary the amount according to the severity of the offence and the
status of both the victim and the convict. The amounts involved varied from less than a shilling to hundreds of
pounds. Non-payment of fines led to incarceration in jail until the fine was paid.
Young offenders were sometimes fined and then sentenced to a period of imprisonment in the London Refuge for
the Destitute which was, in effect, a juvenile reformatory. Interestingly, this was a covert procedure and thus was
frequently not documented in the Proceedings. The short life narratives recorded in the minute books of the
Refuge for the Destitute for individuals tried at the Old Bailey and sentenced in this way are reproduced here as a
part of the Associated Records.