ABSTRACT
The effectiveness of such violent penalties depended upon the participation, in more or less active ways, of the crowd. Humiliation or shaming was the name of the game, not to say unchecked brutality, as a result of which the whipping or pillorying could prove to be a death penalty. The pillory, in which offenders stood with head and hands locked through one wing of a four-winged wooden frame, was erected on a platform in such busy open spaces as Cheapside or Charing Cross in London and was used for those who transgressed traditional moral and social boundaries by committing ‘unnatural’ sexual offences, extortion, fraud or perjury. In the 1780s, Old Bailey judges ceased to sentence convicted felons to the pillory, sensitive perhaps to the disorder it aroused, and concerned that punishment was determined more by the crowd than by the law.
