BDSM Digest

Continued. Beginning – Whipping As A Punishment – Part One.
Eighteenth century Danish and Dutch inhabitants had no doubt what awaited if they transgressed, the whipping posts prominent in Dutch gaols. In the Netherlands also, the torture of the whip was applied by children so they could learn to become executioners themselves some day. In Denmark those guilty of infanticide were imprisoned for life and whipped annually on the anniversary of and at the place where they had committed the murder. Most Danish towns had a whipping post surmounted by a figure of a man, a whip in his right hand, a sword slung at his waist. Germany’s early Teutonic whip consisted of a short wooden handle from which protruded iron cords, each with a spiked circle at its end. The more conventional whip was also used on perjurers, husbands and wives for infidelity, bigamy and polygamy despite the fact there being no marriage ceremony or vow-taking as such, the authorities frowned on a partner who reneged on the verbal contract and took others into matrimony. Thieves, swindlers, adulterers and witches received neither mercy or lessons in social adjustment. Town councils didn’t waste ratepayer’s money on imprisoning them but simply ordered the executioner to use the whip to escort them to the city limits.
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So easy was a whipping to administer, and so obvious the deterrent it was thought to be, it became the punishment most common throughout the world. On 1530 the Whipping Act ordered delinquents ‘to be tied to the end of a cart, naked, and beaten with whips through a market town till the body be bloody by reason of such whipping’. It was not until the reign of Elizabeth I, in 1597, that culprits were only required to be naked from the waist up. From that time also, the whipping post came into being, for the majority of cases, instead the back of a moving cart. Doubtful the victim benefited other than a stationary target was easier to hit than a moving one.

This punishment was not just for those who committed a crime. Mothers of illegitimate children were punished in this way in the 16th century as were the reputed fathers. Deranged people were whipped for being deranged, ill people for being ill. Blasphemers and drunkards were also constant targets usually with a Whip of Nine Knotted Cords.

Mary Hamilton, alias George Hamilton, alias William Hamilton, who in the guise of a man, married no fewer than fourteen women. Her last wife totally unsuspected until she ‘compared certain circumstances’ with her neighbours Mr and Mrs Goody, then realised her spouse had indulged in ‘vile and deceitful practices. The sentence of the court was a follows: ‘That he, she, prisoner at the bar, is a 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, and to find security for good behaviour as long as they, the learned judges aforesaid, shall or may, in their wisdom and judgment require.’ Accordingly Mary Hamilton was imprisoned and whipped in the bitterly cold winter of 1746.
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