She doth protest too much
Posted by Abel on 30 Jul 2007 at 09:32 am | Tagged as: Startles
Back in the old days, attending Quaker meetings in the Boston area was apparently a risky business, subject to:
“flogging through three towns,” a privilege established by the Vagabond Act, so called, of May, 1661, in which it was provided that any foreign Quaker or any native, upon a second conviction, might be ordered to receive an unlimited number of stripes, the whip for such service being a two-handled implement, armed with lashes made of twisted and knotted cord or catgut.
One lady objected formally to the chief magistrate about the whippings. His response was perhaps predictable:
“Margaret Brewster,” carne the stern reply, “you are to have your clothes stript off to the middle, and to be tied to a cart’s tail at the South Meeting House, and to be drawn through the town, and to receive twenty stripes upon your naked body.”
The moral of this story is presumably that it is unwise for girls to object to floggings…
-------Now you can buy a book of the best entries from "The Spanking Writers".
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Oh, Boston! How I miss it. I grew up hearing about switches and birches at virtually all my history class field-trips, and although those wooden implements may not have survived from colonial days, there were often replicas hung on the walls of the colonial houses we visited, along with leather straps in the oddest of places. By the fireplace, for instance. To warm one’s bottom while warming one’s bottom, perhaps?
Abby: I visited a colonial museum in New Zealand and my eye was drawn also to the fact that by the hearth there were any number of pieces of leather…