The Spanking Writers

Vasco Da Gama was a cruel, cruel man, according to author K.G. Jayne’s description of a 1524 expedition to Goa:

Before his flotilla put to sea, he had posted at the foot of the masts an order that any woman detected on board after the ships had passed Belem would be publicly flogged. If she were married, her husband would be sent home in irons ; if a slave, she would be sold and the proceeds given to charity ; while any captain wilfully conceahng such a stowaway would be cashiered.

The fleet arrived at Mozambique on the 14th of August, and halted for the flagship to repair a sprung yardarm. As it lay hove-to, three women stowaways were denounced to the Viceroy, and placed under arrest…

The three unfortunate women who had been detected in his ships were sentenced to be flogged through the streets while the town-crier intoned: “The Justice of the King our Lord ! It orders these women to be flogged because they had no fear of his justice, and crossed over to India despite his prohibition.”

Subsequent colonialists were rather keener for their overseas representatives to enjoy female company, it seems, according to another article:

It was much later that single virgin Dutch girls were dispatched to Cochin… Such ships bringing in Dutch virgins were called maiden ships. Eligible virgins were recruited from orphanages in Netherlands. They were then made available to higher ranked officials…

Punishments for misconduct were still strict, though, both aboard ship on the long voyage from Europe and from the girls’ new husbands. Or, at least, I assume they still adhered to at least some of da Gama’s principles, the article in question sadly neglecting to discuss the disciplinary arrangements.

I so wished I’d had £251 to spare back in December, to buy this wonderful collection of papers on eBay:

Look closely and you’ll see the phrase “Reformatory School”, for – in the words of the seller – the item comprised:

Small group of 5 documents/papers dated 1855 concerning poor Catherine Regan aged 13, who was convicted of stealing at August sessions at Liverpool in 1854. She is admitted to Birmingham Reformatory School

1. Detailed 3 page admission form sets out her sad past: her crime is pardoned conditional on her residence at Birmingham Reformatory School.

2. Detailed 11 page 8vo letter in support from Rev Thomas Carter 18 Jan 1855 of Liverpool Reformatory: Carter was a leading light in the Victorian reformatory school movement.

3. Folio 4 page ms conditional pardon signed at head by [Queen] Victoria & inside by [Prime Minister] Palmerston.

4. Ms copy of pardon

5. Telegram from Carter to B’ham solicitor

It’s all described as “an interesting insight into the workings of the Victorian legal system”. That it also has so much potential to form the basis of a wonderful scene was overlooked – but perhaps not by the buyer who paid £250, as Cath (who spotted the item in the first place) and I watched enviously from the sidelines.

Where spanking implements are concerned, I consider myself sufficiently well-educated. I thought, until recently, that I knew every instrument of spanking worth knowing about, at least among what the Western civilisation had to offer.

That was until Mija discovered the “palmer”, which was a medieval education aid. It’s a “stick with a round, flattened head with which to slap students palms.” So, a sort of paddle, but for the hand! I want one.

I was particularly fascinated to find that it’s also called “palmeta” in Spanish and “palmatoria” in Portuguese, which just shows you how international spanking implements were in medieval times.

Excuse me while I picture myself as a medieval young woman who disguises herself as a boy in order to take calligraphy lessons. The master is armed with a palmer, which has a wicked sting, but when I hand out my hand for punishment, my eyes must remain dry. All the boys are looking on to see if I’ll cry from this chastisement. I mustn’t cry; I mustn’t.

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.

A rather fascinating account came to light recently on a blog from the island of Orkney:

The punishment of Jean Seatter on 9 March 1697 caused a lot of excitement in Kirkwall. Business stopped, and crowds gathered around the Tolbooth, surging forward to catch a glimpse of the prisoner being led from the damp cells.

Jean, a tall young woman with fair hair, was escorted by the magistrates. Her punishment began when she was taken to the rampart of the Brig at about 11 o’clock and stripped to her shift. She received three lashes over her shoulders, with the cord or tow. Three more lashes were inflicted at the Mercat Cross, then a further three at the ‘head of the town’, followed by banishment from Orkney. If anyone harboured her, the fine was 40 shillings for every night she spent under their roof. Jean’s crime was that of theft.

She was a servant with the Bailie Moncrieff, at a time of great hunger and famine, when many in Orkney were starving. She stole from her employer a small quantity of bere meal, and more seriously, ‘did cut down and steal away’ 27 pieces of beef which had been hanging in the larder. She attempted to hide the meat whilst the household was in church, but was discovered.

Jean pled for mercy, saying that desperation had made her steal to feed her family, but no leniency was shown and the full punishment was carried out.

A lot of excitement, they say? Why, surely people aren’t interested in watching the administration of corporal punishment to attractive young women? What damned perverts…

The authorities in Hong Kong held a rather interesting-sounding exhibition back in 2006 “to mark the decommissioning of 160-year-old Victoria Prison, Hong Kong’s first jail”.

Apparently, “department officers dressed in historic uniforms [showed] the changes in attire over the years” from the former Prisons Department, which “was renamed the Correctional Services Department in 1982″.

I’m rather wondering which uniform was used by the punishment officers…

Visitors were also able to inspect “records of corporal punishment as ordered by judges from 1946 to 1977″, as well as the prison’s rather ferocious-looking cat-o’-nine tails:

I think the young ladies in my previous post a little while back about colonial days got off rather lightly with a caning…

Look what Cath gave me for Christmas:

The caption at the foot of the print reveals that the staircase in question is the entrance to the Birching Tower at Rugby school.

They had a birching tower?

Now my imagination’s working overtime to conjure up an image of the room to which the stairs would lead. I’m picturing  something old, large, with wood panelling adorning the walls – empty save for a small table and chair in the corner and the whipping block in the centre. How those girls who’ve misbehaved since the school went co-ed must have trembled as they nervously made their way up those stairs and cried as they came back down after their punishment…

Remember: if in the company of royalty, it’s always best to be polite – as this anecdote from an 1831 book at Project Gutenberg so aptly demonstrates:

Princess Esterhazy was a great favourite of George IV. At a ball given in honour of his Majesty’s birth-day, the young ladies were each expected to kneel, and present him with a nosegay; but the princess declared, that as she was of royal blood, she would prefer death to such degradation.

The King received her graciously, notwithstanding her obstinacy; but her governess sent the child to bed immediately after dinner.

“Bon pour la digestion,” exclaimed the princess; which so enraged the governess, that she took her out of bed and whipped her soundly.

“Bon pour la circulation,” said the princess; and the next day the governess resigned.

A young lady called Kimberly posted a sad little tale on a discussion board a few years back:

I attended a public middle school in South Carolina that allowed corporal punishment. One time I got a paddling (one swing) when the teacher thought I had done something that I didn’t actually do. When she realized her mistake, she informed me, in front of the class, that she was sorry and I now had a “get out of jail free” card for the next infraction I committed.

I was shy and quiet and never got to use it. But the other kids thought I was cool because I could go break a rule without being paddled. I remember them shouting suggestions out to me in class. Pretty funny, now that I think about it.

I wonder what on earth girls in some of the school role plays we’ve enjoyed would get up to if they knew they had immunity from the next whacking. Then again, the very idea that a master at such an event might waive a future punishment is much too far-fetched to merit serious consideration… Cruel, aren’t we?

Well, that was an interesting evening…

See, Cath and I headed out yesterday afternoon to a local antique shop yesterday, and found that it stocked a rather nice selection of riding crops. I studied a few and made my selection, at which point the elderly gentleman chatting to the owner turned to me and said, “You know what that is, don’t you? A bull’s manhood.”

For, indeed, I had managed to buy a prized artefact – a pizzle. I defer to the authoritative “Agony & Ecstacy” for more details:

The pizzle is a whip made from a bull’s penis (which is also called a pizzle)… The penis is cleaned, salted and dried. By stretching and sometimes twisting during this process, it becomes a highly flexible rod-like whip of 3ft overall length (actually, it can be stretched much longer, becoming increasingly thin).

They describe it as a’ severe’ implement, noting that the eighteenth-century German equivalent, the Ochenziemer, “was used as a harsher alternative to the birch rod for judiciary punishments”:

If mentioned in the sentence, the lashes were given during the culprit stay at the prison. The men usually got it on the bare back, tied to a post, the women on mostly on clothed buttocks, frequently covered only with thin wet pants but sometimes also on the bare, while lying on a long low bench which had restraining mechanisms for holding the head and feet.

But even when a flogging was not included in the judge’s sentence, the pizzle (or a birch rod) was used for the customary “welcome” and “farewell” floggings given to all prisoners, male and female, just after entering and just before leaving the prison. Those floggings were usually given in front of people, both women and men, that went to prison just for watching (and enjoying) the punishments.

Like this, for example:

So what of my newly-acquired penis? Well, as night fell I became the master of the local hunt. Young Catherine was a maid in the house of one of the other huntsmen; she’d managed to get in the way of the hunt that afternoon, and a flogging was called for – for endangering herself, the riders and the horses.

The master took out his most feared implement – the pizzle – and bade her bare herself and bend over. By her eighteenth and final stroke, the sorry young lady was pleading for forgiveness… as was my lovely new possession, the leather tip of which managed to fly off during the flogging – as shown in the photo below (with a copy of our book, to give you an idea of scale):

I asked young Catherine, once the maid had been dismissed, to tell me how the pizzle compared to other riding crops she’d experienced. “I don’t think I ever have,” she foolishly replied, so a selection of five were duly brought out and tested in turn. After four strokes of each, the dressage whip was voted the winner, if you’re wondering!