Page:The Green Bag (1889–1914), Volume 05.pdf/392

 Obsolete Punishments.

359

OBSOLETE PUNISHMENTS.

THE English criminal code has not always been the lenient thing it now is. Indeed — and it will, no doubt, surprise many good folk to learn it — up to the beginning of this century it was, as a great judge put it, " savage almost beyond belief." A man was sentenced to death or to trans portation for life for an offence for which he would now be let off with a month's hard labor, — for such an offence as stealing forty shillings belonging to his master, stealing from a shop-door, stealing apples from an orchard, or the like. In Halifax, in the sixteenth century, when Harrison wrote his "Description of England," there was a law, peculiar to the place, under which a man was executed by a kind of guillotine for a theft of thirteenpence halfpenny or upwards. It is the same Harrison who tells us that Henry VIII. hanged 72,000 " rogues and vagabonds " during his thirty-eight years' reign, and that in his own time (1577) the number of these unfortunates suspended per coll. averaged annually from three hundred to four hundred. Coinsweaters were -boiled in lead or hot water, or, if women, were burnt; pirates were hanged at low-water mark on the shore : and a brutal murderer was first of all half hanged, then had his bowels taken out before his eyes, and was afterwards drawn and quartered. Besides the severe criminal code, half the atrocities of which have been designedly passed over, there were a number of punish ments of a more or less humiliating character, for petty offences, — such, for instance, as night-walking, for which frightful lapsus a chaplain was once sent to the Tun, a round prison on Cornhill; for selling goods after curfew had rung, for being a "common scold," and for scandal-mongermg and lying, — for which, the " Liber Albus " tells us, a man was once adjudged imprisonment for a year, and a day of the pillory once a quarter,

for three hours, with a whetstone tied round his neck. The curious instruments devised for quenching the ardor of hot-tempered shrews were numerous. One was the brank, — a sugar-loaf-shaped cap, made of iron hooping, with a cross at the top, and a flat piece, also of iron, projecting inwards for laying upon the offender's tongue, so that it should not wag, and that her head should not move. The brank was padlocked behind, and the woman led through the streets by an officer of the town, probably a beadle, until she began to show " all external signs imaginable of humiliation and amendment." Equally efficacious was the whirligig, a large circular cage turning upon a pivot. It was (says Captain Grose) put on the heads of trifling offenders of all kinds, and not bawl ing women alone, and was set a-whirling with great rapidity, " so that the delinquent soon became extremely sick," and was very glad to be released and taken home. The most noteworthy, however, of all the instru ments designed for the correction of Eve's offending daughters was the clicking or ducking stool, known also as the tumbrel and the trebuchet. A post, across which was a transverse beam turning on a swivel, and with a chair at one end, was set up on the edge of a pond. Into the chair the woman was chained, turned towards the water (a muddy or stinking pond was usually chosen for this purpose when available), and ducked half a dozen times; or if the water inflamed her instead of acting as a damper, she was let down rapidly times innumerable, until she was exhausted and wellnigli drowned. From the frequency with which we find it mentioned in old local and county histories, in churchwardens' and chamber lains' accounts, and by the poets (Gay, for one, has a description of the process in his third pastoral, " The Shepherd's Week "), we shall probably not be wrong in conclud ing that at one time this institution was