Flagellation in France from a medical and historical standpoint.

Date:
1898
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Flagellation in France from a medical and historical standpoint. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    mistress, the day in question was chosen as the day of revenge. At a given moment the mistresses of the ill- used boys were seized, each in her own house, and being made ready by willing hands, were treated to a dose of the oil of strap, as flogging was then called, each lad laying on a few stripes with all his might. Dire threats of retribu- tion were uttered, but when it was found, upon inquiry, that more than one mistress had suffered a similar fate, prudence dictated silence, and it was not till some time after the event that the masters came to know how their apprentices had served their wives while they were absent at Edinburgh. A similar story is told of some weaver boys of Kilmarnock. The mistresses in that town, we believe, were always greater floggers than the masters, and were constantly having the 'prentices over their knees for even very slight offences. Let us not be misunderstood. We are no advocates for general and indiscriminate birching. The time, we hope, will never come, w^ien the boy shall birch his mother, the father his daughter-in-law, and the brother his sister, or maiden aunt. There are circumstances when such action is admissible, but they do not often occur. We tremble to think what dreadful accidents might occur if universal flogging were to come into vogue. Fortunately the law has taken such eventualities into consideration. A straw-plait manufacturer at a village in Bedfordshire, who had been in the habit of whipping females in his employment, was upon one occasion, much to his astonish- ment, sentenced to six moutJi>i' imprisonment for indecently birching a girl who was in his service. We were recently told a story of a 'parish girl who obtained a coronet through being whipped by her mistress, a lady's shoemaker.