A corporal punishment or a physical punishment is a punishment which is intended to cause physical pain to a person. When it is inflicted on minors, especially in home and school settings, its methods may include spanking or paddling. When it is inflicted on adults, it may be inflicted on prisoners and slaves, and can involve methods such as whipping with a belt or a horsewhip.
Flagellation, flogging or whipping is the act of beating the human body with special implements such as whips, rods, switches, the cat o' nine tails, the sjambok, the knout, etc. Typically, flogging has been imposed on an unwilling subject as a punishment; however, it can also be submitted to willingly and even done by oneself in sadomasochistic or religious contexts.
The pillory is a device made of a wooden or metal framework erected on a post, with holes for securing the head and hands, used during the medieval and renaissance periods for punishment by public humiliation and often further physical abuse. The pillory is related to the stocks.
Stocks are feet restraining devices that were used as a form of corporal punishment and public humiliation. The use of stocks is seen as early as Ancient Greece, where they are described as being in use in Solon's law code. The law describing its use is cited by the orator Lysias: "'He shall have his or her foot confined in the stocks for five days, if the court shall make such addition to the sentence.' The 'stocks' there mentioned, Theomnestus, are what we now call 'confinement in the wood'".
Public humiliation or public shaming is a form of punishment whose main feature is dishonoring or disgracing a person, usually an offender or a prisoner, especially in a public place. It was regularly used as a form of judicially sanctioned punishment in previous centuries, and is still practiced by different means in the modern era.
In the common law of crime in England and Wales, a common scold was a type of public nuisance—a troublesome and angry person who broke the public peace by habitually chastising, arguing, and quarrelling with their neighbours. Most punished for scolding were women, though men could be found to be scolds.
A whipping boy was a boy educated alongside a prince in early modern Europe, who supposedly received corporal punishment for the prince's transgressions in his presence. The prince was not punished himself because his royal status exceeded that of his tutor; seeing a friend punished would provide an equivalent motivation not to repeat the offence. An archaic proverb which captures a similar idea is "to beat a dog before a lion". Whipping was a common punishment administered by tutors at that time. There is little contemporary evidence for the existence of whipping boys, and evidence that some princes were indeed whipped by their tutors, although Nicholas Orme suggests that nobles might have been beaten less often than other pupils. Some historians regard whipping boys as entirely mythical; others suggest they applied only in the case of a boy king, protected by divine right, and not to mere princes.
Ducking stools or cucking stools were chairs formerly used for punishment of disorderly women, scolds, and dishonest tradesmen in medieval Europe and elsewhere at later times. The ducking-stool was a form of wymen pine, or "women's punishment", as referred to in Langland's Piers Plowman (1378). They were instruments of public humiliation and censure both primarily for the offense of scolding or backbiting and less often for sexual offences like bearing an illegitimate child or prostitution.
Human branding or stigmatizing is the process by which a mark, usually a symbol or ornamental pattern, is burned into the skin of a living person, with the intention of the resulting scar making it permanent. This is performed using a hot or very cold branding iron. It therefore uses the physical techniques of livestock branding on a human, either with consent as a form of body modification; or under coercion, as a punishment or to identify an enslaved, oppressed, or otherwise controlled person. It may also be practiced as a "rite of passage", e.g. within a tribe, or to signify membership of or acceptance into an organization.
The Great Stock Exchange Fraud of 1814 was a hoax or fraud centered on false information about the Napoleonic Wars, affecting the London Stock Exchange in 1814.
Foot whipping, falanga/falaka or bastinado is a method of inflicting pain and humiliation by administering a beating on the soles of a person's bare feet. Unlike most types of flogging, it is meant more to be painful than to cause actual injury to the victim. Blows are generally delivered with a light rod, knotted cord, or lash.
Bilboes are iron restraints normally placed on a person's ankles. They have commonly been used as leg shackles to restrain prisoners for different purposes until the modern ages. Bilboes were also used on slave ships, such as the Henrietta Marie. According to legend, the device was invented in Bilbao and was imported into England by the ships of the Spanish Armada for use on prospective English prisoners. However, the Oxford English Dictionary notes that the term was used in English well before then.
Alice Morse Earle was an American historian and writer from Worcester, Massachusetts.
A whirligig is a punitive or torture contraption comprising a suspended cage-like device. The victim would be placed in the cage, which was spun violently in order to cause severe nausea.
Thomas Maule, was a prominent Quaker in colonial Salem, Massachusetts.
A drunkard's cloak was a type of pillory used in various jurisdictions to punish miscreants.
Judicial corporal punishment is the infliction of corporal punishment as a result of a sentence imposed on an offender by a court of law, including flagellation, forced amputations, caning, bastinado, birching, or strapping. Legal corporal punishment is forbidden in most countries, but it still is a form of legal punishment practiced according to the legislations of Brunei, Iran, Libya, the Maldives, Malaysia, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, the United Arab Emirates, Yemen, and Qatar, as well as parts of Indonesia and Nigeria.
Cropping is the removal of a person's ears as an act of physical punishment. It was performed along with the pillorying or immobilisation in the stocks, and sometimes alongside punishments such as branding or fines. The punishment is described in Victor Hugo's The Hunchback of Notre-Dame.
Anna Green Winslow, was an American letter writer. A member of the prominent Winslow family of Boston, Massachusetts, United States, she wrote a series of letters to her mother between 1771 and 1773 that portray the daily life of the gentry in Boston at the first stirrings of the American Revolution. She made copies of the letters into an eight-by-six-and-a-half-inch book in order to improve her penmanship, making the accounts a sort of diary as well. This diary, edited by 19th-century American historian and author Alice Morse Earle, was published in 1894 under the title Diary of Anna Green Winslow, A Boston School Girl of 1771, and has never gone out of print. It provides a rare window into the life of an affluent teenage girl in colonial Boston.
The Relief of the Poor Act 1696, formally titled An Act for supplying some Defects in the Laws for the Relief of the Poor of this Kingdom, was a 1697 welfare statute, operating within the framework of the Poor Relief Act 1601. This act is perhaps best remembered for its expansion of the requirement that welfare recipients be marked to indicate their status, in this case by wearing a prominent badge.
