GRIM PENALTIES OF PREVIOUS AGES

Rotorua Morning Post, Volume 1, Issue 62, 4 November 1931, Page 5

GRIM PENALTIES OF PREVIOUS AGES

PRISONERS TORTURE TERRIBLE RIGOUR OF PENAL SYSTEM OF LONG AGO. ; PRESENT SYSTEM SEEMS KINE There could be much that is too gruesome in a colcl discussion of the tortures and the puilishments of Britain's bygone years. Yet William Andrews, a student of Penal history; has collated — not withont diffieulty. but with striking care and festraint — facts about punishment which are an invaluable addition to the history of the nation. In his interesting book is not the gruesome frankriess of sixteenth- eentury tales of martyrs or the delib&rate propaganda of Eugene Sue's "Mysteries of the People." Description of human suffering merely to horrify a reader or to enable an author to embellish some obscure story is not justified; it is unfair and distasteful. But Mr. Andrews reproduces the punishments of the past in the light of the milder penal code of to-day. Complains of Generosity. If he delights in suggesting that the modern Prison Reform Leagues should have heen in existence in the time of Henry VIII, so that real punishment eould have been witnessed, then he is merely complaining of a mistaken generosity of softer modern times which would make the way of the transgressor excessively easy. With him, many readers will agree. Mark Twain in his "Connecticut Yankee" painted the terrible picture of a young mother, hanged before a gaping crowd, for stealing a yard of linsey woolsey. Behind the fiction lay a terrible truth. In Saxon times, when vassals were but animals according to the outloolc of their lords, men, women and children were hanged for a petty theft; drowried by test of water whether guilty or innocent — because, if they rose to the surface they were adjudged guilty and slain; while if they stayed beneath the surface they drowned, innocent or guilty. Burning at Stake. But how few realise that as late as 1777 only the intervention of a powerful peer stopped the burning at the stake of a girl of 14, lier crime being that she admitted a burglar to her mistress' home. To-day, she would have been sent to a reformatory, through the Children's Court, in all probability. But Mr. Andrews gives simply-told stories of such child murder, done in the days pi the Tttdors and after them, when human life was cheap and highwaymen hung gibbeted in chains — "as a warning" — day after day, month after month, year after year. Boiled Alive. Nowadays, five years in g'aol would have suited the demands of popular justice for such crimes of robbery. _Mr. Andrews writes clearly and without embellishment. Boiling in water, alive, he tells us, was the method of despatching poisoners, who to-day would serve at most fifteen years' imprisonment as a life sentence. Beheading was earried out in EngIand and Scotland until 1747, when the execution of Lord Lovat, at the hands of a nervous executioner, put a stop to it. As late as 1710 the Halifax gibbet, a form tof guillotine, ■ was used, and its sister implement of death, the "Seottish Maiden," according to Mr. Andrews, slew unfortunates ,who to-day would be serving short periods of imprisonment for larcency, forgery and embezzlement. A petty thief in the seventeenth century had his right hand branded with hot irons! , to-day, he does six months. Scolds Suffered. A Domain orator of the early nineteenth century sat or stood in the pillory, and as late as 1780 was killed in it by the stones flung by an outraged populace. Authors were whipped for pamphlets, ears were torn off for schism, and as late as 1860 men were placed in stocks, whereas to-day they would be fined five or ten shillings. Mr. Andrews deals interestingly with the implements of torture used on scolds. The brank, that terrible headpice, he has studied specially. To those who enjoy a history of other times, Written vividly yet simply, "Bygone Punishments" will appeal. It is no sensational horrorproducer; rather does it show by comparison with the present day the inhumanity of our ancestors when they set out to punish.