Whilst we’re on the trail of historical whippings, here’s an interesting tale of one Sarah Priddon, alias Sally Salisbury. Born in Shrewsbury around 1690, she came to London with her parents as an infant:
Her father joined the Footguards, and lived in St Giles’s in the Fields, where he also worked as a bricklayer and a solicitor. At the age of nine Sally was apprenticed to a seamstress near Aldgate. She soon left her parents and worked as a costermonger in Covent Garden, at different seasons of the year shelling beans and peas, or selling nosegays, newspapers, matches.
Aged fifteen, she was recruited by Mother Wisebourn, a brothel keeper, and became one of the city’s most famous courtesans, ending up being “kept by a Peer in Villiers Street”. Yet she “kept in touch with the girls in the employ of Mother Wisebourn”, and was caught there in a raid by the constabulary in 1713.
Sent to Tothill Fields Bridewell, she was brought before the courts. And here’s where it gets interesting, for:
The Justice of the Peace sent instructions that she was not to receive the usual punishment, but was to be privately disciplined by himself.
Whipped, for sure. And then how else might he have dealt with her? I think we can all imagine. Damned pervert!