Submitted by Aubergine

Pillory Design

The pillory was developed some time during the 1600's as an upgrade to the stocks. As well as locking arms and/or legs in position, the offenders' head was also clamped in so as to "hold it up to the public gaze".

The pillory was usually constructed so as to force the offender to stand upright, as shown above, usually o­n a wooden platform. There is a reported incident of a near-death resulting from rotten wood collapsing in the wooden platform almost resulting in a broken neck.

While most pillories would clamp the hands as shown above, there are examples of "small finger pillory" and "thumb stocks" where fingers would be clamped instead of the hands.

Where Were they Located?

Pillories would often be found in busy public places such as market squares - indeed many towns would forfeit their right to a market if they did not first build a pillory.

Like stocks, some pillories were fixed in position while others were movable. Offenders restrained in movable pillories would often be faced northwards, southwards, eastwards then westwards in succession for quarter of an hour in each direction.

Who Was Punished?

Although all sharpers, beggars, impostors and vagabonds were liable to be placed in the pillory, it was mostly used for gentlemen and aristocrats as a way of humiliating them.

In his famous "Hymn to the Pillory", De Foe said:

"Tell us, great engine, how to understand
Or 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 claim
With Oates and Fuller, men of fouler fame."

The over-use of the pillory for gentlemen and aristocrats backfired to some extent as many began to see the pillory as a platform for heros by the late 1700's.

Women were sometimes put in a pillory o­n counts of purgery or theft.

Reasons for Punishment

The most common reasons for this type of punishment 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. Cabbage stealing would also guarantee your place in a pillory.

What Was the Punishment?

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."

The pillory was mainly designed to humiliate the offender by putting their face o­n show but there are numerous reports of offenders being killed after villagers throwing rocks and weapons at them.

As an added punishment, some offenders would have their ears nailed to the wooden timbers and in extreme cases their ears could be cut of alltogether in a process known as "cropping". There are also documented cases of offenders being whipped and even branded while being restrined in a pillory.

Just like the stocks, offenders would often be pelted with all manner of things. In particular, rotten eggs were favoured by most o­nlookers.