A daughter of Louis XI, Jeanne de France, invented a scourge which made five wounds. It was a silver cross, armed with five spikes.
Flagellation was not only applied in monasteries; very soon a number of bishops claimed the same right over their priests as abbots had over monks.
Although monks, priests, and deacons were, by special canon, exempt from abbatial fustigation, the monk Godescal submitted to it with grand apparel in the presence of Charles the Bald. The bishop of Spire was flogged by order Pope John XII.
This punishment was frequently used with heretics when they were no longer immured for life, or burnt alive. Their rank was no safeguard against this infamous chastisement.
Prince Raymond VI, Count of Toulouse, suspected of heresy, was publicly flogged outside the church of St. Gilles, Valencia, by the hand of the pope’s legate. Henry II of England was publicly flogged to expiate the murder of the archbishop of Canterbury.
The son and successor of Philippe Auguste, Louis VIII, being found guilty of having continued to claim the English crown when the pope had taken it from him (after having freely given it him), was compelled to expiate this rebellion by consenting to pay the pope a tenth of his income for two years, and to present himself barefooted and with a rod at the door of Notre Dame, Paris, there to be flogged by the canons. Report says that he was flogged on the backs of his chaplains.
Henry IV also was whipped, in 1595, but this was on the backs of his ambassadors, Cardinals du Perron and d’Ossat.
This vicarious flagellation was not exceptional. In the last century but one there could always be found, and almost anywhere, some worthy capuchin who was willing to make his buttocks responsible for the sins of the whole parish, and who, proportionate to the payment received, would flog himself—or at least give out that he had done so. From thence comes the famous Spanish saying: yo soy el culo del fray: which in the interpretation may be rendered: I feel as sore and rum as the friar’s bum.
This symbolic application is met with again in the ceremony of absolution for excommunicated persons. The pleader (if a man), had to present himself before the church door with bared shoulders, and before the bishop or priest who was presiding at the ceremony. Kneeling, and bare headed, he had to humbly beg for the absolution of his sin; and then the priest, having made him swear to obey the commandments of the church, would sit down and, taking a whip or rod, would recite a long psalm and, at each verse, he would strike the petitioner.
The ceremonial was somewhat more solemn for those who had been excommunicated with anathema, or for those who had been excommunicated for grave sins or serious crimes.