Pillory

 

Places people didn’t want to be stuck in:

The Pillory

The pillory was an ancient form of punishment by public humiliation used generally to punish petty criminals such as cheats, liars, rioters and homosexuals.  The use of the pillory and whipping post go back to 1274, it was used in countries over Europe and their colonies.  The last recorded use in England and Wales was in 1830 although it was not formally abolished until 1873.  Originally a public humiliation for petty crime, in the 15^th and 16^th centuries it became a tool for the Catholic ascendancy to use against Presbyterian dissenters.

The pillory consisted of wooden boards on a post, it had holes to hold the head and hands and was erected in market places, cross roads or other public spaces, usually placed on a platform to increase the visibility of the culprit to the audience.  It often had a placard placed nearby stating the prisoner’s crime.  The punishment generally lasted no more than a few hours and was very uncomfortable and painful for the prisoner, but the main objective was not pain, but humiliation.  When local people heard that the pillory was occupied they would gather to taunt and laugh at the offender.  In order to cause further humiliation the crowd would pelt him with rotten eggs, old vegetables and fruit, mud and excrement.  Sometimes people could be maimed or even killed by being pelted with stones and bricks.  As well as abuse from the crowd, other punishments such as flagellation and cropping (having the ears sliced off) were forced upon the pilloried

The most famous person to be pilloried was Daniel Defoe (1660-1731).  His parents were Presbyterian dissenters and it was expected that he would become a clergyman.  As a dissenter he could not study at Oxford or Cambridge but he obtained an excellent education at Newington Green Academy.  He decided against the ministry and set up as a merchant, trading in many commodities and travelling widely both at home and abroad.  He became an astute and intelligent economic theorist but was continually dogged by misfortune, and in 1692 he went bankrupt for £17,000.

He wrote:

“ No man has tasted differing fortunes more.

And thirteen times I have been Rich and Poor”

 

At the end of 1702 Defoe was in his early 40s, a London dissenter, married with 8 children and owner of a brick and tile works in Tilbury.  He wrote an anonymous pamphlet “The Shortest Way with Dissenters” written as if by a bigoted Catholic zealot.  The pamphlet had huge sales but the irony blew up in Defoe’s face as dissenters and high churchmen alike took it seriously.  Defoe was prosecuted for seditious libel and arrested in May 1703.  In addition to being fined he was sentenced to stand three times in the pillory for an hour each day.  The pillory was erected in three different places: Outside the Royal Exchange, in Cheapside and in Fleet Street by Temple Bar.  The experience proved more of a triumph than an ordeal as all that was thrown at him was flowers, whilst his friends sold copies of his “The Shortest Way” and “A Hymn to the Pillory”  and the mob drank his health.  He was sent back to prison, his business collapsed and he became desperately concerned for the welfare of his large family.  After 4 months he was released on condition that he wrote pamphlets for the Tories and become a spy for the government.

With the change of reign, Anne to Charles1  in 1714, the Tory government fell.  Defoe continued to write for the Whigs but turned his talents more to longer prose works and in 1719 his best known work “Robinson Crusoe” was published, followed in 1722 by “Moll Flanders”.  In all he wrote more than 300 including fiction, pamphlets and Journals on divers topics.

 

Daniel Defoe in the pillory

Note: 

Robinson Crusoe has been translated into over 100 languages including Inuit, Coptic, Maori and Ancient Greek!