13. Respectable quaker Barbara Blangdon was brought before the Mayor of Great Torrington, in England. Quakers were a persecuted sect of 'heretics' and the parish priest urged that she should be whipped as a ‘vagabond’, since she was travelling around talking about Quakerism to anyone who would listen.
She was lodged in a filthy prison at Exeter and eventually sentenced to be flogged in 1654. The local parish beadle carried out the sentence with such zeal that the blood reportedly ran down the lady’s bared body in streams.
Real Punishments - 1657 Margery Riggs
14. Margery Riggs of the American colony of New Hampshire was whipped for "leading one George Palmer into sin". It's possible that the method called 'the bilboes' was used to secure her - its use is documented in New England as well as OLD England.
George was only put in the pillory for his (presumably symmetrical) part in the sin. You can almost hear the local clergy reading from Genesis: "And Adam replied 'The woman tempted me, and I did eat'." It was all her fault!
The way I've imagined it, George has to watch his illicit girlfriend being punished. I leave it to you whether this was a good or bad experience for him. It seems he was used to seeing her in this position!
Real Punishments - 1662 Three Quakers
15. The records of the Massachusetts colony of Puritans in America contain the following:
"To the constables of Dover, Hampton, Salisbury, Newberry, Rosley, Ipswich, Wennam, Lynn, Boston, Roxbury, Dedham, and until the vagabond Quakers are carried out of this jurisdiction: You and every of you are required, in the King’s Majesty’s name, to take these vagabond Quakers, Anne Coleman, Mary Tomkins, and Alice Ambrose, and make them fast to the cart’s tail, and, driving the cart through your several towns, to whip them upon their naked backs, not exceeding ten stripes apiece on each of them in each town; and to convey them from constable to constable till they are out of this jurisdiction."
Despite the snow on the ground, they were stripped for the entire ordeal - they couldn't have kept up the pace in long skirts, and panties were yet to be invented.
It's no wonder the Quakers formed a colony of their own at Pennsylvania. And there's no evidence that they retaliated by whipping Puritan girls naked through Pittsburgh, Altoona, Harrisburg, Allentown and Philadelphia, until they were out of the jurisdiction!
