The petitioners were sometimes beaten and put in chains for troubling the King.
For capital offences, as murder and treason, the nobility was decapitated with the sword; the lower classes were paraded through the streets with a chaplet of shoe flowers on their heads, bones of oxen round their necks, and their bodies whitened with lime, and then impaled, quartered and hanged on trees, or pierced with spear while prostrate on the ground, or trampled on by elephants and torn with their tusks. Whole families sometimes suffered for the offences of individuals.
Outcaste criminals like the Rodiyas were shot from a distance as it was pollution to touch them. Female offenders were made to pound their children and then drowned.
The punishments for robbing the treasury, for killing cattle, for removing a sequestration, and for striking a priest or chief consisted of cutting off the offender’s hair, pulling off his flesh with iron pincers dismembering his limbs and parading him through the streets with the hands about the neck.
Corporal punishment was summarily inflicted with whips or rods while the offender was bound to a tree or was held down with his face to the ground; he was then paraded through the streets with his hands tied behind him, preceded by a tom tom beater and made to declare his offence.
Prisoners were sent away to malarial districts or kept in chains or stocks in the common jail or in the custody of a chief, or quartered in villages. The inhabitants had to supply the prisoners with victuals, the families doing so by turns, or the prisoners went about with a keeper begging or they procured the expenses by selling their handiwork in way-side shops built near the prison. The prisoners had to sweep the streets and were deprived of their headdress which they could resume only when they were discharged.
Thieves had to restore the stolen property or pay a sevenfold fine (wandia); till the fine was paid, the culprit was placed under restraint (velekma): a circle was drawn round him on the ground, and he was not allowed to step beyond it, and had to stay there deprived of his head covering exposed to the sun, sometimes holding a heavy stone on his shoulder, sometimes having a sprig of thorns drawn between his naked legs.
A whole village was fined if there was a suicide of a sound person, if a corpse was found unburied or unburnt, or if there was an undetected murder. In case of the breach of any sumptuary law, the inhabitants of the offender’s village were tabooed and their neighbours prohibited from dealing or eating with them.
Oaths were either mere asseverations on one’s eyes or on one’s mother or imprecations by touching the ground or by throwing up handful of sand or by raising the hand towards the sun, or by touching a pebble, or appeals to the insignia of some deity, or to the Buddhist scriptures or to Buddha’s mandorla. The forsworn person was punished in this world itself except in the last mentioned two instances when the perjurer would suffer in his next birth.
There were five forms of ordeal, resorted to in land disputes and the villagers were summoned to the place of trial by messengers showing them a cloth tied with 3 knots.