Curious Punishments of Bygone Days

This was a law well-executed at the time in Scotland, though Dunton was ignorant of it.

There are no entries to show that the law authorizing ducking ever was executed in Massachusetts nor in Maine, where a dozen towns – Kittery, York and others – were fined for “having no coucking-stool.” It was ordered on Long Island that every Court of Sessions should have a ducking-stool; but nothing exists in their records to prove that the order was ever executed, or any Long Island woman ducked; nor is there proof that there was in New York city a ducking-stool, though orders were issued for one; a Lutheran minister of that city excused himself for striking a woman who angered him by her “scholding” because she was not punished by law therefor.

Pennsylvania, mild with the thees and thous of non-belligerent Quakers, did not escape scolding women. In 1708 the Common Council of Philadelphia ordered a ducking-stool to be built. In 1718 it was still lacking, and still desired, and still necessary.

“Whereas it has been frequently and often presented by several former Grand Jurys for this City the Necessity of a Ducking-stool and house of Correction for the just punishment of scolding Drunken Women, as well as divers other profligate and Unruly persons in this Town who are become a Publick Nuisance and disturbance to the Town in Generall, Therefore we the present Grand Jury Do Earnestly again present the same to the Court of Quarter Sessions for the City Desireing their Immediate Care That these Public Conveniances may not be any Longer Delay’d but with all possible Speed provided for the Detention and Quieting such Disorderly Persons.”

For several years later the magistrates clamored for a ducking-stool, and the following indictment was brought against an unruly woman:

“City of Philadelphia. We the grand Inquest for our Lord the King upon respective oaths and affirmations Do present that Mary wife of John Austin late of Philadelphia, Cordwainer, the twenty-ninth day of September and divers other days and times as well before as after in the High City Ward in the City afforsd within the Jurisdiction of this Court was and yet is a Common Scold, And the Peace of our Lord the King a common and publick Disturber, And Strife and Debate among her neighbours a Comon Sower and Mover, To the Great Disburbance of the Leige Subjects of our sd Lord the King Inhabiting the City afforsd, And to the Evill Example of other Such Cases & Delinquents And also agt the Peace of our Lord the King his Crown and Dignity.”

As late as 1824 a Philadelphia scold was sentenced by this same Court of Sessions to be ducked; but the punishment was not inflicted, as it was deemed obsolete and contrary to the spirit of the time.

In 1777 a ducking-school was ordered at the confluence of the Ohio and Monongahela rivers – and doubtless it was erected and used.

In the year 1811, at the Supreme Court at Milledgeville, Georgia, one “Miss Palmer,” who, the account says, “seems to have been rather glib on the tongue,” was indicted, tried, convicted and punished for scolding, by being publicly ducked in the Oconee River. The editor adds: “Numerous spectators attended the execution of the sentence.” Eight years later the Grand Jury of Burke County, of the same state, presented Mary Cammell as a “common scold and disturber of the peacable inhabitants of the County.” The Augusta Chronicle says this of the indictment:

“We do not know the penalty, or if there be any, attached to the offense of scolding; but for the information of our Burke neighbours we would inform them that the late lamented and distinguished Judge Early decided, some years since, when a modern Xantippe was brought before him, that she should undergo the punishment of lustration by immersion three several times in the Oconee. Accordingly she was confined to the tail of a cart, and, accompanied by the hooting of a mob, conducted to the river, where she was publicly ducked, in conformity with the sentence of the court. Should this punishment be accorded Mary Cammell, we hope, however, it may be attended with a more salutary effect than in the case we have just alluded to – the unruly subject of which, each time as she rose from the watery element, impiously exclaimed, with a ludicrous gravity of countenance, ‘Glory to God.’”

It is doubtful whether these Georgia duckings were done with a regularly constructed ducking-stool; the cart was probably run down into the water.

One of the latest, and certainly the most notorious sentences to ducking was that of Mrs. Anne Royal, of Washington, D. C., almost in our own day. This extraordinary woman had lived through an eventful career in love and adventure; she had been stolen by the Indians when a child, and kept by them fifteen years; then she was married to Captain Royall, and taught to read and write. She traveled much, and wrote several vituperatively amusing books. She settled down upon Washington society as editor of a newspaper called the “Washington Paul Pry” and of another, the “Huntress”; and she soon terrorized the place. No one in public office was spared, either in personal or printed abuse, if any offense or neglect was given to her. A persistent lobbyist, she was shunned like the plague by all congressmen. John Quincy Adams called her an itinerant virago. She was arraigned as a common scold before Judge William Cranch, and he sentenced her to be ducked in the Potomac River. She was, however, released with a fine, and appears to us to-day to have been insane – possibly through over-humored temper.

III

THE STOCKS

One of the earliest institutions in every New England community was a pair of stocks. The first public building was a meeting-house, but often before any house of God was builded, the devil got his restraining engine. It was a true English punishment, and to a degree, a Scotch; and was of most ancient date. In the Cambridge Trinity College Psalter, an illuminated manuscript illustrating the manners of the twelfth century, may be seen the quaint pictures of two men sitting in stocks, while two others flout them. So essential to due order and government were the stocks that every village had them. Sometimes they were movable and often were kept in the church porch, a sober Sunday monitor. Shakespeare says in King Lear:

“Fetch forth the stocksYou stubborn ancient knave!”

In England, petty thieves, unruly servants, wife-beaters, hedge-tearers, vagrants, Sabbath-breakers, revilers, gamblers, drunkards, ballad-singers, fortune-tellers, traveling musicians and a variety of other offenders, were all punished by the stocks. Doubtless the most notable person ever set in the stocks for drinking too freely was that great man, Cardinal Wolsey. About the year 1500 he was the incumbent at Lymington, and getting drunk at a village feast, he was seen by Sir Amyas Poulett, a strict moralist, and local justice of the peace, who humiliated the embryo cardinal by thrusting him in the stocks.

The Boston magistrates had a “pair of bilbowes” doubtless brought from England; but these were only temporary, and soon stocks were ordered. It is a fair example of the humorous side of Puritan law so frequently and unwittingly displayed that the first malefactor set in these strong new stocks was the carpenter who made them:

“Edward Palmer for his extortion in taking £1, 13s., 7d. for the plank and woodwork of Boston stocks is fyned £5 & censured to bee sett an houre in the stocks.”

Thus did our ancestors make the “punishment fit the crime.” It certainly was rather a steep charge, for Carpenter Robert Bartlett of New London made not long after “a pair of stocks with nine holes fitted for the irons,” and only charged thirteen shillings and fourpence for his work. The carpenter of Shrewsbury, Massachusetts, likewise, as Pepys said of a new pair of stocks in his neighborhood, took handsel of the stocks of his own making.

In Virginia a somewhat kindred case was that of one Mr. Henry Charlton of Hungar’s Parish in 1633. For slandering the minister, Mr. Cotton, Charlton was ordered “to make a pair of stocks and set in them several Sabbath days after divine service, and then ask Mr. Cotton’s forgiveness for using offensive words concerning him.”

In Maryland in 1655 another case may be cited. One William Bramhall having been convicted of signing a rebellious petition, was for a second offense of like nature ordered to be “at the Charge of Building a Pair of Stocks and see it finished within one Month.” There is no reference to his punishment through the stocks of his own manufacture.

With a regard for the comfort of the criminal strangely at variance with what Cotton Mather termed “the Gust of the Age,” and a profound submission to New England climate, a Massachusetts law, enacted June 18, 1645, declares that “he yt offens in excessive and longe drinkinge, he shalbe sett in the stocks for three howers when the weather is seasonable.”

Just as soon as the Boston stocks had been well warmed by Carpenter Palmer they promptly started on a well-filled career of usefulness. They gathered in James Luxford, who had been “psented for having two wifes.” He had to pay a fine of £100 and be set in the stocks one hour upon the following market-day after lecture, and on the next lecture-day also, where he could be plainly seen by every maid and widow in the little town, that there might be no wife Number Three. Then a watchman of the town, “for drinking several times of strong waters,” took his turn. Soon a man for “uncivil carriages” was “stocked.” Every town was enjoined to build stocks. In 1655 Medfield had stocks, and in 1638 Newbury and Concord were fined for “the want of stocks,” and Newbury was given time till the next court session to build them. The town obeyed the order, and soon John Perry was set in them for his “abusive carriage to his wife and child.” Dedham and Watertown were “psent’d” in 1639 for “the want of stocks.” Ipswich already had them, for John Wedgwood that same year was set in the stocks simply for being in the company of drunkards. In Yarmouth, a thief who stole flax and yarn, and in Rehoboth, one who stole an Indian child, were “stocked.” Portsmouth, New Hampshire, built stocks and a cage. Plymouth had a constant relay of Quakers to keep her stocks from ever lying idle, as well as other offenders, such as Ann Savory, of unsavory memory. Rhode Island ordered “good sufficient stocks” in every town. In the southern and central colonies the stocks were a constant force. The Dutch favored the pillory and whipping-post, but a few towns had stocks. We find the Heer officer in Beverwyck (Albany) dispensing justice in a most summary manner. When Martin de Metslaer wounded another in a drunken brawl, the authorities hunted Martin up, “early hauled him out of bed and set him in the stocks.” Connecticut was a firm advocate of the stocks, and plentiful examples might be given under New Haven and Connecticut laws.

Web Adey, who was evidently a “single-man,” for “two breaches of the Saboth” was ordered to be set in the stocks, then to find a master, and if not complying with this second order the town would find one for him and sell him for a term of service. This was the arbitrary and not unusual method of disposing of lazy, lawless and even lonely men, as well as of more hardened criminals, who, when sold for a term of service, usually got into fresh disgrace and punishment through disobedience, idleness and running away.

I do not find many sentences of women to be set in the stocks. Jane Boulton of Plymouth was stocked for reviling the magistrates; one of her neighbors sat in the stocks and watched her husband take a flogging. Goody Gregory of Springfield in 1640, being grievously angered by a neighbor, profanely abused her, saying “Before God I could break thy head.” She acknowledged her “great sine and fault” like a woman, but she paid her fine and sat in the stocks like a man, since she swore like one.

And it should be noted that the stocks were not for the punishment of gentlemen, they were thoroughly plebeian. The pillory was aristocratic in comparison, as was also branding with a hot iron.

Fiercely hedged around was divine worship. The stocks added their restraint by threatened use. “All persons who stand out of the meeting-house during time of service, to be set in the stocks.”

In Plymouth in 1665 “all persons being without the dores att the meeting house on the Lords daies in houres of exercise, demeaneing themselves by jesting, sleeping, and the like, if they shall psist in such practices hee (the tithing-man) shall sett them in the stocks.”

Regard for church and state were often combined by making public confession of sin in church with punishment in front of the church after the service. This was simply a carrying out of English customs. Mr. Hamilton, author of that interesting book, Quarter Sessions from Queen Elizabeth to Queen Anne, says, dealing with Devonshire:

“A favorite punishment for small offenses, such as resisting the constable, was the stocks. The offender had to come into the church at morning prayer, and say publicly that he was sorry; he was then set in the stocks until the end of the evening prayer. The punishment was generally repeated on the next market-day.”

It seems scarcely necessary to describe the shape and appearance of stocks, for pictures of them are so common. They were formed by two heavy timbers the upper one of which could be raised, and when lowered, was held in place by a lock. In these two timbers were cut two half-circle notches which met two similar notches when the upper timber was in place and thus formed round holes, holding firmly in place the legs of the imprisoned culprit; sometimes the arms were thrust into smaller holes similarly formed. Usually, however, the culprit sat on a low bench with simply his legs confined. Thus securely restrained, he was powerless to escape the jests and jeers of every idler in the community.

The stocks were the scene of many striking figures, and many amusing ones; what a sight was that when an English actor who had caused the playing of the Midsummer-Night’s Dream in the very house of the Bishop of Lincoln, and on Sunday, too, was set in stocks at the Bishop’s gate with an ass’s head beside him and a wisp of hay – in derision of the part he had played, that of Bottom the weaver. This in 1631 – after both Plymouth and Boston had been settled.

And the stocks were not without their farcical side in New England. Governor Winthrop’s account of the exploits of a Boston Dogberry in 1644 is certainly amusing.

“There fell out a troublesome business in Boston. An English sailor happened to be drunk, and was carried to his lodging, and the constable (a godly man and much zealous against such disorders), hearing of it, found him out, being upon his bed asleep, so he awaked him, and led him to the stocks, no magistrate being at home. He being in the stocks, one of La Tour’s French gentlemen visitors in Boston lifted up the stocks and let him out. The constable, hearing of it, went to the Frenchman (being then gone and quiet) and would needs carry him to the stocks. The Frenchman offered to yield himself to go to prison, but the constable, not understanding his language pressed him to go to the stocks: the Frenchman resisted and drew his sword; with that company came in and disarmed him, and carried him by force to the stocks, but soon after the constable took him out and carried him to prison, and presently after, took him forth again, and delivered him to La Tour. Much tumult was there about this: many Frenchmen were in town, and other strangers, who were not satisfied with this dealing of the constable yet were quiet. In the morning the magistrate examined the cause, and sent for La Tour, who was much grieved for his servant’s miscarriage, and also for the disgrace put upon him (for in France it is a most ignominious thing to be laid in the stocks), but yet he complained not of any injury, but left him wholly with the magistrates to do with him what they pleased, etc. … The constable was the occasion of all this transgressing the bounds of his office, and that in six things. 1. In fetching a man out of his lodging that was asleep upon his bed, and without any warrant from authority. 2. In not putting a hook upon the stocks, nor setting some to guard them. 3. In laying hands upon the Frenchman that had opened the stocks when he was gone and quiet. 4. In carrying him to prison without warrant. 5. In delivering him out of prison without warrant. 6. In putting such a reproach upon a stranger and a gentleman when there was no need, for he knew he would be forthcoming and the magistrate would be at home that evening; but such are the fruits of ignorant and misguided zeal… But the magistrates thought not convenient to lay these things to the constable’s charge before the assembly, but rather to admonish him for it in private, lest they should have discouraged and discountenanced an honest officer.”

Truly this is a striking and picturesque scene in colonial life, one worthy of Hogarth’s pencil. The bronzed English sailor, inflamed with drink, ear-ringed, pigtailed, with short, wide, flapping trousers and brave with sash and shining cutlass; the gay, volatile Frenchman, in the beautiful and courtly dress of his day and nation, all laces and falbalas; and the solemn pragmatic Puritan tipstaff, with long wand of black and white, and horn lanthorn, with close-cropped head, sad-colored in garments, severe of feature, zealous in duty; and the spectators standing staring at the stocks; Indian stragglers, fair Puritan maidens, fierce sailor-men, a pious preacher or sober magistrate – no lack of local color in that picture.

It is interesting to note in all the colonies the attempt to exterminate all idle folk and idle ways. The severity of the penalties were so salutary in effect, that as Mrs. Goodwin says in her Colonial Cavalier, they soon would have exterminated even that social pest, the modern tramp. Vagrants, and those who were styled “transients,” were fiercely abhorred and cruelly spurned. I have found by comparison of town records that they were often whipped from town to town, only to be thrust forth in a few weeks with fresh stripes to another grudged resting place. Such entries as this of the town of Westerly, Rhode Island, might be produced in scores:

“September 26, 1748. That the officer shall take the said transient forthwith to some publick place in this town and strip him from the waist upward, & whyp him twenty strypes well layd on his naked back, and then be by said officer transported out of this town.”

The appearance of crime likewise had to be avoided. In 1635 Thomas Petet “for suspition of slander, idleness and stubbornness is to be severely whipt and kept in hold.”

More shocking and still more summary was the punishment meted out to a Frenchman who was suspected only of setting fire to Boston in the year 1679. He was ordered to stand in the pillory, have both ears cut off, pay the charges of the court, and lie in prison in bonds of five hundred pounds until sentence was performed.

These Massachusetts magistrates were not the only ones to sentence punishment on suspicion. In Scotland one Richardson, a tailor, being “accusit of pickrie,” or pilfering, was adjudged to be punished with “twelve straiks with ane double belt, because there could be nae sufficient proof gotten, but vehement suspition.”

Writing of punishments of bygone days, an English rhymester says:

“Each mode has served its turn, and played a partFor good or ill with man; but while the baneOf drunkenness corrupts the nation’s heart —Discrediting our age – methinks the reignOf stocks, at least, were well revived again.”

There is, in truth, a certain fitness in setting in the stocks for drunkenness; a firm confining of the wandering uncertain legs; a fixing in one spot for quiet growing sober, and meditating on the misery of drunkenness, a fitness that with the extreme of publicity removed, or the wantonness of the spectators curbed, perhaps would not be so bad a restraining punishment after all. Some of the greatness and self-control of the later years of Cardinal Wolsey’s life may have come from those hours of mortification and meditation spent in the stocks. And over the stocks might be set “a paper” as of yore, bearing in capital letters the old epitaph found in solemn warning of eternity on many an ancient tombstone but literally applicable in this temporal matter.

“All Ye who see the State of MeThink of the Glass that Runs for Thee.”

IV

THE PILLORY

Hawthorne says in his immortal Scarlet Letter:

“This scaffold constituted a portion of a penal machine which now, for two or three generations past, has been merely historical or traditionary among us, but was held in the old time to be as effectual in the promotion of good citizenship as ever was the guillotine among the terrorists of France. It was, in short, the platform of the pillory; and above it rose the framework of that instrument of discipline, so fashioned as to confine the human head in its tight grasp, and thus hold it up to the public gaze. The very ideal of ignominy was embodied and made manifest in this contrivance of wood and iron. There can be no outrage, methinks – against our common nature – whatever be the delinquencies of the individual – no outrage more flagrant than to forbid the culprit to hide his face for shame.”

This “essence of punishment” – the pillory or stretch-neck – can be traced back to a remote period in England and on the Continent – certainly to the twelfth century. In its history, tragedy and comedy are equally blended; and martyrdom and obloquy are alike combined. Seen in a prominent position in every village and town, its familiarity of presence was its only retrieving characteristic; near church-yard and in public square was it ever found; local authorities forfeited the right to hold a market unless they had a pillory ready for use.

A description of a pillory is not necessary to one who has read any illustrated history of the English Church, of the Quakers, Dissenters, or of the English people; for the rude prints of political and religious sufferers in the pillory have been often reproduced. Douce, in his Illustrations of Shakespeare gives six different forms of the pillory. It was an upright board, hinged or divisible in twain, with a hole in which the head was set fast, and usually with two openings also for the hands. Often the ears were nailed to the wood on either side of the head-hole. Examples exist of a small finger-pillory or thumb-stocks, but are rare.

It would be impossible to enumerate the offences for which Englishmen were pilloried: among them were treason, sedition, arson, blasphemy, witch-craft, perjury, wife-beating, cheating, forestalling, forging, coin-clipping, tree-polling, gaming, dice-cogging, quarrelling, lying, libelling, slandering, threatening, conjuring, fortune-telling, “prigging,” drunkenness, impudence. One man was set in the pillory for delivering false dinner invitations; another for a rough practical joke; another for selling an injurious quack medicine. All sharpers, beggars, impostors, vagabonds, were liable to be pilloried. So fierce sometimes was the attack of the populace with various annoying and heavy missiles on pilloried prisoners that several deaths are known to have ensued. On the other side, it is told in Chamber’s Book of Days that a prisoner, by the sudden collapse of a rotten footboard, was left hanging by his neck in danger of his life. On being liberated he brought action against the town and received damages.

The pillory in England has seen many a noble victim. The history of Puritanism, of Reformation, is filled with hundreds of pages of accounts of sufferings on the pillory. When such names as those of Leighton, Prynne, Lilburne, Burton and Bastwick appear as thus being punished we do not think of the pillory as a scaffold for felons, but as a platform for heroes. Who can read unmoved that painful, that pathetic account of the punishment of Dr. Bastwick. His weeping wife stood on a stool and kissed his poor pilloried face, and when his ears were cut off she placed them in a clean handkerchief and took them away, with emotions unspeakable and undying love.

De Foe said, in his famous Hymn to the Pillory:

“Tell us, great engine, how to understandOr reconcile the justice of this land;How Bastwick, Prynne, Hunt, Hollingsby and Pye —Men of unspotted honesty —Men that had learning, wit and sense,And more than most men have had since,Could equal title to thee claimWith Oates and Fuller, men of fouler fame.”

Lecture-day, as affording in New England, in the pious community, the largest gathering of reproving spectators, was the day chosen in preference for the performance of public punishment by the pillory. Hawthorne says of the Thursday Lecture: “The tokens of its observance are of a questionable cast. It is in one sense a day of public shame; the day on which transgressors who have made themselves liable to the minor severities of the Puritan law receive their reward of ignominy.” Thus Nicholas Olmstead, in Connecticut, is to “stand on the pillory at Hartford the next lecture-day.” He was to be “sett on a lytle before the beginning and to stay thereon a lytle after the end.”