It was the colonial era in what’s now called
the United States of America. A man of the lower classes had been accused
by his Puritan overlords of the contemptible crime of stealing a loaf of bread from the
local bakery. The judge quickly dismissed the man’s hunger,
saying that an empty stomach was no excuse for a person to reduce himself to the state
of a vulgar criminal. Outside the courthouse, a frantic crowd waited,
many of the people armed with wooden paddles, feathers, rotten fruit, and the putrid innards
of farm animals. The judge, a stern and unforgiving man, looked
down at the condemned from his bench. “I sentence you to public humiliation,”
he said in a grave voice, telling the unfortunate thief he hoped he would see the error of his
ways. For two full days, the condemned had his feet
tickled by kids. Bitter neighbors beat his toes with sticks. Even his acquaintances joined in the fun and
covered his face with any kind of garbage they could find. Ok, so you might now be thinking that out
of all the punishments we’ve ever talked about, this one doesn’t sound too bad at
all. You’re quite sure you could handle a bit
of old cabbage being rubbed into your face and even though the paddle would sting a bit,
it’s nothing compared to having your head, fingers, or toes crushed. As for tickling, isn’t that supposed to
be kind of enjoyable? Well, that’s debatable. There’s such a thing as tickle torture you
know, something that goes back centuries and has been used as a form of interrogation. You’re not going to die, but when you experience
what the Japanese used to call “merciless tickling” for hours on end, you’re going
to lose your mind a bit. But tickling is just one thing that happened
to people in the stocks. As you’ll find out later in the show, there
was also a form of the stocks that result in a person losing an ear or two, or perhaps
a pair of eyes, and if the madding crowd took a profound disliking to the condemned, well,
that person could die in those stocks in the most gruesome way. So, you can stop sneering now about us putting
the stocks in the worst punishments series. It was for some people. It was hell on Earth, and the torture was
not over quickly. We’re getting ahead of ourselves here…Some
of you might not even know what we’re talking about. Ok, the stocks. This part of the toolkit of punishers throughout
history is one of the easiest to describe we’ve featured. The stocks basically consisted of a wooden
frame through which a person’s legs were held. The frame could open up of course so the legs
could lie on the lower half, and then the top half went over the top and the thing was
locked – like solid bar handcuffs for the legs. There were other versions of the stocks, but
this is the one we’ll start with. They were usually reserved for the lower classes,
a distinction that back in the day people didn’t mind tagging folks with. Being such a simple device you won’t be
surprised to find out they go back a long way. They even get a mention in the Old Testament,
and a couple of Jesus’s disciples also once found their legs bound in the stocks. You can find that information in the bible
in Acts 16:24. Apparently, while fastened in they prayed
and sang hymns. This kind of punishment was popular from the
1300s until the mid-1800s, and you won’t be surprised to hear that the Brits had stocks
in most villages and towns. Those Puritans that arrived in the New World
were also partial to putting folks in the stocks. The punishment was supposed to be a public
one, thus the person in the stocks was almost always subjected to humiliation from the people
that lived in the vicinity. That’s why the stocks were situated in the
place where just about everyone passed through. The marketplace was often the location of
choice. Some people might not have known what crime
the person had committed, but there was a solution for this. Often the condemned would have a letter on
their clothing. An adulterer would get an A, a thief a T,
a blasphemer a B, and someone who’d been bothersome while under the influence of alcohol,
a D for a drunkard. As you’ll soon find out, that letter was
also sometimes branded on the person’s face. These crimes were the equivalent of what today
you call misdemeanors. Back then, the person would only get the stocks
for petty theft, such as the bread heist we earlier described. For armed robbery, which in the past could
have been called highway robbery, a much more brutal kind of stocks awaited. We’ll get into that soon. One of the reasons why every town and village
in England had stocks was mostly down to something called the Statute of Laborers 1351. In short, this was created after the Black
Death, which as you know, wiped out vast portions of the public all over Europe, including in
England. Post-plague, the lords of the country were
faced with a problem. Many of their workers had died and so there
weren’t enough folks to get the work done. The workers who survived, seeing an opportunity,
started to demand higher wages. Asking for more cash was soon outlawed, as
was refusing to work at all, which was a crime of idleness. We found this written in English law. “Every town and village is to maintain a
set of stocks in which to punish vagabonds, layabouts, and drunkards.” If a person, say a plowman or a servant or
shoemaker or a shepherd demanded a higher wage or refused to work, the resulting punishment
was often the stocks. This usually meant being confined to the stocks
by their feet, but finger stocks were also common. It made no difference really, since the person
couldn’t go anywhere. Throughout the centuries it really depended
on the crime as to what happened to a person while they sat there in the stocks. If they’d upset the village, perhaps by
an act of aggressive drunkenness or speaking words that everyone found rather offensive,
well, they got more punishment. Sometimes that would just be verbal abuse,
along the lines of, “You carbuncle of my eye! You gouty-legged, copper-nosed rogue.” … Hopefully, YouTube doesn’t demonetize
for language that was bad 400 years ago. All those insults are related to diseases
by the way. Diseases were on people’s minds a lot back
then, unlike now of course… Ok, so you got cursed at, and you had your
feet tickled – especially by kids – and you might just get a few kicks to the back
and punches in the face. It wasn’t the end of the world, but it wasn’t
very nice, either, especially if you were covered in rotten eggs. Are they still used now? We found a news article from Columbia which
said in 2012 a 34-old year woman and her 18-year old lover were put in the stocks for 3 days
for the crime of infidelity. Another case in Colombia involved a young
man that was high and attacked his parents. In 2020, several people in that country were
put in the stocks for violating social distancing orders in the municipality of Tuchín. From what we can see, no eggs or feathers
or paddles were used during the ordeal. The punishment almost happened in the USA
in 1989 in the small town of Dermott in Arkansas. There was a curfew at the time and the punishment
was sought after for parents who’d allowed their kids out at night. The owner of the Dermott Pawn Shop was one
of the people asking for the law to be instituted, saying the kids were out of control and had
broken his windows. He thought the stocks would do the trick in
changing their wayward behavior. Ok, now for something a little more serious. When the stocks got blood on them. For poor folks and their misdemeanors, there
were the stocks for the feet, but when the poor, or rich for that matter, transgressed
in a big way, there was something else. This was called the pillory, which was the
same idea as the stocks but instead of putting a person’s legs between two boards, it was
the head and arms that went inside. You’ve likely all seen a fun version of
this at country fairs when people throw soaked sponges at the condemned. Let’s go back some time and now think about
how it would feel if those sponges were replaced with stones and dead animal parts? How would that feel? What if the person in the stocks had committed
a terrible crime in a local town, a crime that made people’s blood run cold, a crime
of violence? Can you imagine what happened to the person
in the pillory? Imagine what would happen to them nowadays? So, the pillory for one thing was a lot more
uncomfortable than the stocks. The reason being, a person had to bend forward
in an awkward position. It was even more uncomfortable if your ears
were nailed to the wood, which happened from time to time. A lot worse happened, too. Nonetheless, you could get out of the pillory
almost unscathed just as a person could have gotten out of the stocks with nothing more
than an embarrassed look on their face. Still, rotten vegetables and buckets of offal
and blood were often thrown at someone, but worse, the missile of choice was sometimes
human or animal excrement. Let’s now have a look at some examples. Unlike the stocks where the poor were fastened,
the pillory was the punishment of more well-known people and so there are lots of examples to
choose from. Take the story of James Nayler, an English
Quaker who thought it would be fun to ride a horse into the city of Bristol pretending
to be Jesus Christ riding into Jerusalem. You couldn’t really get away with that back
in 1656. It offended people. Right after the reenactment he was grabbed
by the authorities and charged with the crime of blasphemy. Parliament almost decided to execute him,
but instead, he ended up in the pillory. No feathers were used for this man. Once contained in the device he was branded
with a red hot poker. The brand, which went on his forehead, was
the letter B for blasphemer. If that wasn’t bad enough, his tongue was
pierced with another red hot piece of iron. Did the crowd feel sorry for him? Hell no, they took their turn beating on the
guy. He died two years later during his sentence
of hard labor. Then there was the pillorying of the famous
writer Daniel Defoe. You’ve probably heard of his name from the
novel Robinson Crusoe, but he was more than a fiction writer. He wrote about society, politics, economics,
and culture, but being an outspoken critic of the way things were back then could result
in something much worse than medieval trolling. For his thoughts, he was charged with the
crime of seditious libel and sent to the pillory. The thing was, a large part of the public
liked Defoe’s writings, and so as the story goes, no one threw anything at him that could
hurt or humiliate. In fact, it’s said that people threw flowers
on him during the three days he was stuck in that very uncomfortable position. Other controversial writers weren’t so lucky. Sometimes they faced the symbolic gesture
of having their ears cut off in the pillory, an act known as “cropping.” It happened to Thomas Barrie, who in 1538
was accused of spreading rumors. It happened to William Prynne and Henry Burton
in 1637 because they’d been critical of the Church hierarchy. In the US during the 1800s, the people pilloried
the most were slaves. The punishment didn’t usually happen for
all the town to see, the slave would be fastened in the device where he or she was enslaved. You could find sets of pillories in barns
or in the fields. During the slaves’ confinement, they would
usually be flogged. It was reported in 1830 that a slave girl
in the British colonies was pilloried by an English woman and she had pepper rubbed in
her eyes for 17 days so she couldn’t sleep. Now back to the depravity of the town square. Unlike punishment these days, what happened
to a person in the pillory much of the time depended wholly on how the crowd felt about
someone. That’s why writers have said the punishment
created a “carnival-like atmosphere” a kind of theater event that folks really looked
forward to. If someone had had a bad day at the office
(or farm), they could take their anger out on the poor soul who was trapped between the
beams. When a girl named Sarah Thomas stood in the
pillory, the crowd gave her wine and hot pot. When in 1751 two highwaymen named Egan and
Salmon were subject to the crowds’ whims, they were pelted with anything and everything. Egan took a stone to the head that killed
him and Salmon died from his injuries after being released from the device. We found a report from 1680 which talked about
a midwife named Elizabeth Cellier. She was basically an activist back in the
day that fought for women’s rights and human rights in general. For her service to humanity, this is what
she got according to the report: “She had been hauled out of bed, though
she could not rise, set on the pillory, twice struck down with stones by the rabble but
lifted up again by the sheriff's officers, and had been kept there till 2 o'clock, though
her sentence was to remain only between 12 and 1. She had been grievously bruised and, several
officers had been wounded in her defense.” You heard that right. The mob even got the officers with their missiles. Here’s what a newspaper said about highwayman
John Waller when he was in the pillory: “On Tuesday, the 13th of June, 1732, this
wicked man was put in the pillory, pursuant to his sentence, at the Seven Dials, in London;
where, so great was the indignation of the populace, that they pelted him to death.” Often people were sentenced to two or three
times in the pillory, sometimes one week after the other. The weekend was chosen so the crowd was bigger. The scene of the punishment was usually the
marketplace. In 1732, a woman named Eleanor Beare was charged
with performing an illegal abortion and supplying a man with poison so he could kill someone. This kind of thing really rankled the mob
and they let that be known. On her first few hours in the pillory, she
was hit with rotten vegetables and mud, but it was the stones that drew blood. She was then taken back to prison. The next week, the newspaper wrote that her
face was still badly swollen. The report noted that again she was pelted
with “all the apples, eggs, and turnips, that could be bought, begged, or stolen”
but also with stones. That report said she “appeared a moving
heap of filth.” She survived, though. After three years in prison, she apparently
“recovered her health, her spirits, and her beauty.” And get this, the fickle mob cheered and played
music for her on her release. In England, you had such things as Poor Laws
and Vagrancy Acts, and that meant if someone was found begging without a license to beg
they could be sent to the pillory for three days and whipped. If a person was discovered wandering around
without a job they could be pilloried and branded on the forehead with a V for Vagrant. Yep, these were harsh times for the homeless
and out of work. Similar punishments were handed out to “rogues”,
which basically meant trouble causers and tavern scrappers, and also “nightwalkers”,
which meant prostitutes. As for accused witches, they got it much worse. If they weren’t burned at the stake, they
were sentenced to prison and occasionally released for a stint in the pillory. Each time, the accused witch would be transported
to a different town so her infamy grew and the crowd had a fresh witch to torture. The 1563 “Act against Conjuration Enchantments
and Witchcrafts” demanded that this happen to witches for the first offense, but if they
were convicted again of witchcraft, they “shall suffer pains of death.” King James VI and I, the guy that sponsored
the bible we all know, was especially cruel to witches. He updated the witchcraft laws and created
the “Witchcraft Statute of 1604.” That decreed that the accused witch should
be taken to the pillory every quarter, again, each town was different every time. The witch had to confess to her crime, and
if she didn’t, well, rotten eggs would no doubt have been replaced with large stones. They didn’t often die, but injuries were
severe. In 1711 in Ireland an accused witch had her
eye knocked out. What’s so hard for us moderns to get our
heads around is how popular the pillory weekends were. People would travel for miles to a town if
they knew a witch was going to be pilloried. It wasn’t only because they loved to see
her bleed and hang her head in shame, but also because such events with so many people
were a good time to do some business. A weekend pillory was the past equivalent
of some big tech or sporting event in today’s world. So many different things could result in the
pillory, too. You have to remember this was the go-to punishment
in times when large state prisons didn’t exist. Misdemeanor crimes resulted in the stocks,
serious crimes resulted in death, and a lot of in-between crimes resulted in the pillory. Obviously, as you’ve heard, crimes that
aren’t crimes these days led to someone getting hurt. Such as Mary Hamilton, aka, Charles Hamilton. She’d been accused of pretending to be a
man and actually marrying women. This was seen to be an act of fraud. She was sentenced to prison and also to be
pilloried and whipped in the towns of Taunton, Glastonbury, Wells, and Shipton Mallet. Here’s a list of other crimes that resulted
in someone in England being put in the pillory: Beating a child. Running a brothel. Boozing during church service hours. Fortune telling. Causing a scandal. Transvestitism. This last one was the case of Dorothy Clayton,
who in 1575 was charged with wearing men’s clothes around town. To get the mob worked up into a fit of anger,
she was forced to don menswear during her time in the pillory. Alas, the punishment pretty much died out
in Europe around the 1830s, as it did in the USA, although there are reports of men being
pilloried and whipped in Delaware as late as 1901. According to an old clipping from the New
York Times a few men received the punishment on one day that year. One of them was Charles Connelly. For the crime of burglary, he stood for one
hour in the pillory and got twenty lashes of the whip. Others received 10 lashes in the pillory for
the crime of theft. No buckets of blood or cow poo were mentioned
in the article. Now you need to watch, “I Spent My Whole
Life In Prison.”
