An evocative photo caught my eye whilst googling free-to-use images for a work presentation the other day. (You know how it is: you start off hunting for pictures of ‘businesspeople in meetings’, and your fingers accidentally type ‘public flogging’):

The photograph comes from a 1931 book on entitled ‘Bygone Punishments’ (of which we actually own an earlier copy, dating from 1899, without the illustration in question). The commentary explains that we’re looking at the “Stocks and whiping-post, Aldbury, from a photo by A. Whitford Anderson, Esq., Watford”:

“A half-timbered house, probably Tudor, beside a pond; in the foreground are wooden stocks, with the somewhat unevenly placed holes just visible, and one post higher so as to be used as a whipping post… Today Aldbury is part of the Borough of Dacorum. The stocks and whipping-post are still there, but not as complete.”

Now, I’ve seen lots of photos of whipping posts – but never one that’s so evocative of the era in which they were actually put to use. I can just picture a maid, tied to the post, looking out over the duck pond as she was lashed in front of the watching crowd for stealing butter from her master’s kitchen.

The prominence of the apparatus, bang in the centre of the village, also got me thinking. For in a small place like that, it would be quite impossible for the young lass not to have to walk past the scene of her thrashing on an almost-daily basis – the memories and the sense of shame lasting long after her marks had faded.