Historical Uses
The stocks were popular among civil authorities from medieval to early modern times, and have also been used as punishment for military deserters or for dereliction of military duty. In the stocks, an offender's hands and head, or sometimes their ankles, would be placed and locked through two or three holes in the center of a board. Either before or after this the wrongdoer might have their footwear removed, exposing their bare feet. Exhibiting an offender's bare feet was considered a form of humiliation and often led to the victim's feet being tickled, usually by children. Offenders were forced to carry out their punishments in the rain, during the heat of summer, or in freezing weather, and generally would receive only bread and water, plus anything brought by their friends. Finger pillories often went by the name of "finger stocks". Public stocks were typically positioned in the most public place available, as public humiliation was a critical aspect of such punishment. Typically, a person condemned to the stocks was subjected to a variety of abuses, ranging from having refuse thrown at them, to paddling, whipping of the unprotected feet (bastinado).
The stocks were used in Elizabethan England, and by the Puritans in the colonial period of American history. Their last recorded use in the United Kingdom was in 1872 at either Adpar, Newcastle Emlyn, west Wales or Newbury, Berkshire, England (11th June)
The Spanish conquistadores introduced stocks as a popular form of punishment and humiliation against those that impeded the consolidation of their settlements in the new world. They were still used in the 19th century in Latin America to punish indigenous miners in many countries for rebelling against their bosses.
Read more about this topic: Village Stocks
Famous quotes containing the word historical:
“Some of us still get all weepy when we think about the Gaia Hypothesis, the idea that earth is a big furry goddess-creature who resembles everybodys mom in that she knows whats best for us. But if you look at the historical recordKrakatoa, Mt. Vesuvius, Hurricane Charley, poison ivy, and so forth down the agesyou have to ask yourself: Whose side is she on, anyway?”
—Barbara Ehrenreich (b. 1941)
“The analogy between the mind and a computer fails for many reasons. The brain is constructed by principles that assure diversity and degeneracy. Unlike a computer, it has no replicative memory. It is historical and value driven. It forms categories by internal criteria and by constraints acting at many scales, not by means of a syntactically constructed program. The world with which the brain interacts is not unequivocally made up of classical categories.”
—Gerald M. Edelman (b. 1928)