Puritans Made Things Painful (For Those who Broke the Rules)

Pillory stocks, used for public humiliation

As I mentioned in class, most of the punishments used by the Puritans of Massachusetts -- stocks, whippings, and hangings -- were public, with the punishment serving to shame the lawbreaker and remind the public that to disagree with the state's decisions is to disagree with God's laws and will. That being said, public punishment was not a product of the Puritan age, but it played a large part in the village life of the Massachusetts Bay colony. We'll see this up close when we study The Scarlet Letter next month.

For now, here are a few examples of public punishments in use during the late 17th century -- in both Massachusetts and in Europe.

The Shrew's Fiddle

The barrel pillory

Here's an excellent article on the subject from The Salem News, published in 2004:

Punishments in 17th-century Massachusetts were diverse, creative, and often cruel. They ranged from simple fines to maiming to burning at the stake, although the latter was never used in Essex County. Instead, locals convicted of murder, like Dorothy Talby of Salem who capped a career of deviant behavior by killing her daughter, met their respective ends on the gallows.

The pillory and stocks mentioned by Hawthorne, along with the whipping post, were fixtures in many local communities until they were outlawed in Massachusetts in 1813. The pillory could be a most uncomfortable instrument. The criminal's neck was placed in a stretched position in a hole between two pieces of hinged wood (in extreme cases, the offender's ears might be nailed to the pillory frame). Two smaller openings trapped the miscreant's hands, preventing him or her from warding off the rotten eggs or other foodstuffs thrown by onlookers.

Recommended: read whole article