Whippings in England

 

Anglo-Saxon law was customary, and never collected in written form. In this period, whipping was one of the normal punishments for most offenses and payments for whippings appear in the accounts of many cities. The criminals were usually flogged on the back with a whip with three knotted cords. The whippings were reserved to the villains, and were never used on freemen. Whippings were used also in servants for domestic misbehavior.
 

 

In more recent times, in 1530, Henry VIII passed what was known as the Whipping act, which seems to be the first written law mentioning the whip, where vagrants were to be “tied to the end of a cart naked and beaten with whips throughout such market town till the body shall be bloody”. The cart traveled around the town or even between nearby towns, stopping at important points (the market, in front of the church, at the city hall) in each of which the delinquent received a dose of the whip.
 

From the reign of Elizabeth I, in 1597,  culprits were only required to be naked from the waist up. This was also the period in which the whipping post, usually installed on a public and prominent place, as the market square, or in front of the church, began replacing the cart’s tail.

Which was a punishable crime varied as the uses varied. Mothers of illegitimate children (and the reputed father) were whipped, as unfaithful women and prostitutes were. The whip punished also lesser crimes, as petty larceny. Serious crimes were punishable by death, or transportation to the colonies (usually Australia, but the US was also used). Also peddlers, who damaged the commerce of established shopkeepers, were whipped. The sick were flogged as whippings were reputed as a therapy for many diseases.

Women were flogged as often as men were. A woman considered an old offender was taken from the Clerkenwell Bridewell to Enfield and there publicly whipped at the cart’s tail by the common hangman for cutting wood in Enfield Chase.

There is the famous case of Mary Hamilton, alias George Hamilton, alias William Hamilton in 1746. This woman, disguised as a man, married fourteen women, until the last one, talking with some neighbors “compared certain circumstances” and realized her spouse had indulged in “vile and deceitful practices” (it seems that women had not too much sexual or anatomy’s knowledge then). The judges said “that he, she, prisoner at the bar, is an uncommon notorious cheat; and we, the Court, do sentence her or him, whichever he or she may be, to be imprisoned for six months, and during that time to be whipped in the towns of Taunton, Glastonbury, Wells and Shipton Mallet (four market towns)”. And she or he (it seems that the Court was not better in anatomy than the women) was thoroughly whipped.

 

The notoriously cruel Judge Jeffreys (probably a sadist that profited from his position to indulge in his sexual inclinations) in so sentencing a female prisoner, is reported to have exclaimed “Hangman, I charge you to pay particular attention to this lady. Scourge her soundly, man: scourge her till her blood runs down. It is Christmas: a cold time for madam to strip. See that you warm her shoulders” (but he was a man of good reputation, and was created Baron Jeffreys of Wem in 1685).

The punishments were always public, to humiliate the culprit (most people on small towns knew one another personally) and as a deterrent for the onlookers. In larger towns huge crowds were attracted to the whippings, which were a public entertainment. From the 1720s, courts began to distinguish between private whipping, which took place inside or immediately outside the prisons, in London at Newgate Prison or the Old Bailey, and public whipping at the cart tail or whipping post.

 

At the prisons criminals were flogged at the block that had a pillory like bar to hold  the hands, and a box to restrain the legs of the prisoner. This is Newgate's block

But even when public whippings went out of fashion, London gentlemen (and some ladies also) had as a pastime going to the Bridewell women’s prison on Wednesdays to see the prisoners stripped to the waist up, tied to the post and whipped.

Finally, a statute of 1791 abolished whipping female vagrants, and in 1820 the Whipping of Female Offenders Abolition Act was passed, which ended the punishment of females by whipping.

The last man was whipped at the cart tail at Glasgow on 8th May, 1822, shortly after all public flogging were abolished.

The corporal punishment in prisons continued for a long time, with whips and birch rods. The infliction of corporal punishments was severely limited by the Criminal Justice Act of 1948 and was abolished in 1967. The last prison flogging seems to have being given in 1962.

The “English vice”

Even when punishment for erotic purposes is universal, we, as a site for consensual spankings, cannot talk on whippings in England without mentioning what the French call the “vice anglais”.

The first mostly pornographic work on the subject of flagellation, even when presented as a book on medicine, was published in England. I was a book called “A Treatise on the use of Flogging in Medicine and Venery” published in 1718, a translation of one written in Latin by one Johann Heinrich Meibom "De Flagrorum Usu in Re Veneria & Lumborum Renumque Officio"  (1590–1655). It explained at length and defended the flagellation with sexual purposes. It made sexual floggings fashionable all over Europe and marked the English as the experts on the subject.

And even when what we now call BDSM was enjoyed everywhere and always, in the nineteenth century there were in England many brothels specialized in flagellation, of which the most famous was one of a Mrs. Theresa Berkley (or Berkeley) of 28 Charlotte Street. She not only made a fortune on the business, but also invented a flogging ladder, the “Berkley horse”.
 

Men went to these brothels for being flogged, the most popular flogging instruments being the same used to correct schoolchildren and criminals, the birch rod, the cane and the whips. It seems that enjoying floggings for sexual reasons was considered somewhat deviant, but not sick.
 

Published: 01/17/07