History of the Pillory

Enduring the barrage of smelly eggs and rotting vegetables, dead cats or animal offal, sticky mud and human waste...

When we were reading The Crucible, I mentioned the various modes of public punishments used by the Puritans. The pillory, in particular, as described vividly on page 50 is important to The Scarlet Letter. Note, however, that Hester is sentenced only to "stand a certain time upon the platform, but without undergoing that gripe about the neck and confinement of the head." Here's the beginning of a brief illustrated history of the pillory:

Although Puritans left England to escape religious persecution, people living in the Massachusetts Bay Colony were expected to conform to strict, autocratic standards established by the community’s leaders. All of the leaders, of course, were men.

Seeking to remain essentially British, as they tried to purify the Church of England from within, the Puritans carried on with certain customs they had known before The Great Migration. One of those traditions was punishment in the pillory.

Tracing its history to the 12th century, the pillory was a common sight in towns throughout Britain and on the continent. It consisted of an upright board with a hole in the middle where a person's head was set. As often as not, a person's ears were nailed to the board. Usually there were two openings for hands.

Also known as a neck-stretcher, the pillory's purpose was to publicly punish (and humiliate) people for all kinds of offenses. Frequently, a pillory could be rotated, so members of the public could get a good look at the person on display, as depicted by William Pyne in The Costume of Great Britain (1805). The most famous pillory in London was at Charing Cross.

Sometimes people locked in a pillory had bricks, or other heavy objects, thrown at them. Not a few died as a result, since they were unable to protect themselves with their hands.

Others, like Daniel Defoe (the author of Robinson Crusoe) who spent three days in the Charing Cross pillory (beginning July 31, 1703) for writing a pamphlet (The Shortest Way with Dissenters), were showered with flowers by a sympathetic crowd. Most, however, endured the more usual barrage of smelly eggs and rotting vegetables, dead cats or animal offal, sticky mud and human waste.

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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