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The 17th-century perjurer Titus Oates in a pillory. The pillory is a device made of a wooden or metal framework erected on a post, with holes for securing the head and hands, used during the medieval and renaissance periods for punishment by public humiliation and often further physical abuse. [1] The pillory is related to the stocks. [2]
Pillories (right) were a common form of punishment.. Public humiliation exists in many forms. In general, a criminal sentenced to one of many forms of this punishment could expect themselves be placed (restrained) in a central, public, or open location so that their fellow citizens could easily witness the sentence and, in some cases, participate as a form of "mob justice".
The stocks, pillory, and pranger each consist of large wooden boards with hinges; however, the stocks are distinguished by their restraint of the feet. The stocks consist of placing boards around the ankles and wrists, whereas with the pillory, the boards are fixed to a pole and placed around the arms and neck, forcing the punished to stand.
In Louisiana, there was a "black code", or Code Noir, which allowed the cropping of ears, shoulder branding, and hamstringing, the cutting of tendons near the knee, as punishments for recaptured slaves. Slave owners used extreme punishments to stop flight, or escape.
The limbs collected from this and other punishments of the time were "emptied by the hundreds". Sometimes, this method was limited to dislocating a few bones, but the torturer often went too far and rendered the legs or arms (sometimes both) useless. In the late Middle Ages, some new variants of this instrument appeared.
Wright, where the Court held that the "cruel and unusual punishments" clause of the Eighth Amendment did not apply to disciplinary corporal punishment in public schools, being restricted to the treatment of prisoners convicted of a crime. [4] In the years since, a number of U.S. states have banned corporal punishment in public schools. [2]
Drunkenness was first made a civil offence in England by the Ale Houses Act 1551, or "An Act for Keepers of Ale-houses to be bound by Recognisances". [nb 1] According to Ian Hornsey, the drunkard's cloak, sometimes called the "Newcastle cloak", [3] became a common method of punishing recidivists, [1] especially during the Commonwealth of England.
The use of tar and pitch in punishments appearing in such medieval works as Anglo-Norman sermons, The Purgatory of Saint Patrick by Marie de France and Dante's Inferno have been seen as precursors for the idea of tarring and feathering. The latter also features the element of feathers when a "human thief is painfully transformed into a ...