Our treatment of crime is the exact opposite of our forefathers’. Our 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.