In the reign of James I., we learn from Sir Walter Scott, a Highland chief in Ross, of the name of M’Donald, hearing that a poor widow had determined to go on foot to Edinburgh to see the king, and obtain from him justice against the chief, sent for her, and telling her that the way was long, and that she would require to be well shod for the journey, had a blacksmith brought, and made him nail her shoes to her feet, in the same way in which horses are shod. The widow, however, was a woman with a will of her own, and as soon as she had recovered, she betook herself on foot to Edinburgh, and casting herself at the feet of the king, besought of him punishment on the tyrannical chief. King James, indignant at her treatment, had M’Donald seized along with twelve of his accomplices, and had iron soles nailed to their feet. They were exposed in this condition to the public gaze, and were then decapitated.
When Richard Cœur de Lion was on his way to the Holy Land he drew up a code of criminal laws by which discipline was to be maintained among his troops. One of these contains the following article:—“If any one is convicted of theft, boiling pitch shall be poured over his head, and then a pillowful of feathers shall be shaken over it, so that the fellow may be certainly recognised. And he shall be abandoned on the first land where the vessel touches.”
This reminds me of the trick played by certain wags on a poor nun in 1198. They covered her with honey, rolled her in feathers, mounted her on horseback, and paraded her about the town. Philip Augustus, hearing of this, had the unfortunate jokers seized and plunged into a vat of boiling water.
A curious ordinance in force at Dortmund, in Westphalia, A.D. 1348, required that, “if two women quarrel so as to come to blows, and at the same time use abusive language, they shall be required to carry, the whole length of the town along the High Street, two stones weighing together one hundred pounds, attached to chains. The first woman shall carry them from the east gate to the west gate, whilst the second goads her on with a needle fastened to the end of a stick,” and both are directed to wear the lightest of all possible costumes. “The second is then to take the stones upon her shoulders and to carry them back to the east gate, the first applying the same stimulus.” This punishment was common all over Germany. In Lübeck the stones were shaped like bottles, in other places they were rudely-carved heads of women with protruding tongues; and in some towns they were in the shape of cats. At Hamburg a procession of women sounding cows’ horns was part of the programme, and at Worms a band of bell-ringers.
The old English cucking-stool for shrews is well known; it was common abroad also, with some customs peculiarly foreign. For instance, the unfortunate persons who had to do penance for their shrewish tongues were sometimes put into a large hamper, or a cage, and so suspended to a gallows, in the evening to be plunged, basket and all, into the nearest pond.
In the museum at Cahors the iron cage in which shrews were dipped is still shown.
Fools’ caps have long served as punishment in village schools, but their use in them was probably derived from the legal practice of condemning certain delinquents to the use of peculiar caps. Thus in Germany some minor crimes were punished by the culprit being sentenced to sit all day on a post in the middle of a canal, with a tall scarlet steeple cap on his head. In Rome, bankrupts were condemned to wear in public black bonnets of a sugar-loaf form. At Lucca they wore them of an orange colour; and in Spain they bore in addition an iron collar.
The ancient Roman manner of punishing parricide, by casting the murderer into the water in a sack which contained as well a cock, an ape, and a serpent, was not unused in the middle ages, and we find it threatened in an ordinance of the Provost of Paris, published on 25th June 1493, in which all persons sick with smallpox are bidden leave Paris at a day’s notice, or suffer the penalty above mentioned.
I might extract accounts of the most fearful of punishments which the cruelty of man could devise, from Oriental sources, but the barbarities practised by the Mussulmans are sickening through their excessive cruelty. Suffering enough has been undergone in our own quarter of the globe, and that too at no great distance of time from the age in which we live.
I will instance, in conclusion, the painful account of the execution of Balthazar Gerard, who assassinated William of Orange, on the 10th of July 1584, as given by Brantôme. “First he was racked with extraordinary cruelty, without his uttering a word, except that he persisted in his former assertion.