CHURCH CASES

Rotorua Morning Post, Volume 2, Issue 257, 22 June 1932, Page 6

CHURCH CASES

CLERICAL COURTS CHARGES MADE AGAINST CLERGY IN THE PAST. METHODS OF PUNISHMENT. Publicity has recently been given to the investigation by an Ecclesiastical Court of charges made against a clergyman. However, the case may end, it certainly cannot have the remarkahle sequel to a similar investigation in. 1759, when a Methodist preacher was accused of immoral conduct. The Court having found the charges proved, this unfortunate minister was condemned to do public penance by standing on a stool before the congregation in church, dressed in a linen shroud, with a placard announcing his offence pinned to his breast. Sic tempora, sic mores. Happily, the methods of judicial investigation and punishment have undergone drastic revolution since the period so vividly portrayed in the records of the eighteentli century crime collated by those two smug attorneys, Knapp and Baldwin, in the Newgate Calendar. Not only were sentences harsh, but the punishment often exceeded in its execution the intentions of the judge. Take, for instance, the pillory. To quote our attorneys: — ■ "To some men (and surely all such men must be lost to shame!) the pillory would be no punishment. To stand with the head and hands fastened to a block of wood for an hour, and where no pain arises from the punishment, would hold up no terror to evildoers, were not the honest populace, indignant at the law's not hanging such diabolical villains by the neck on a gallows, in some measure to make good the defect." A terrible example was the case of John Walker, who being pilloried at Seven Dials for perjury, was pelted to death by the mob. The pillory, moreover, was not intended as sole punishment, as was also whipping There are advocates to-day of the whip for serious offenees, but no one could approve of the freedom with which this punishment was dispensed in Calendar days. Fourteen "Husbands." As even our two attorneys eonfess, it is difficult to imagine under what statute or law Mary Hamilton was convicted. Dressed as a man, she had "married" no fewer than 14 of her own sex. At the trial after the fourteenth "wife' 'testified that they had lived together for over three months without this deception being discovered. Sentenced, we are told, to imprisonment and to be whipped in the tcwns of Taunton, Glastonbury, Wells and Shepton Mallet, "Mary, the monopoliser of her own sex, was imprisoned and whipped accordingly in the severity of the winter of 1746." Though women were still burned at the stake for husband murder, it was customary to strangle them befor*e the fiames reached their bodies— as an act of mercy. In the case of Oatherine Hayes in 1726, however, the executioner accidentally let go the rope, his hand having been scorched, and the wretched woman was left to roast in agony. Sympathy perhaps is misplaced, for she was a eallous creature; her husband's severed head having been found and exhibited for identification on a pole in a Westminster churchyard, she inspected it with loud lamentations, even going to the length of kissing it. One is inclined to feel more sympathy for Barbara Spencer, who, at the stake at Tyburn, "seemed willing to exercise herself in devotion, but was much interrupted by the mob throwing stones and dirt at her." Not Always Fatal. If hanging was more barbarous than in modern times, it was at least less certain of fatal results. The case of "Half-hanged Smith," who was resuscitated and gave a vivid description of his sensations, has already been recorded; the story of Margaret Dixon is even more remarkable. This woman was convicted of child-murder and hanged. ' After the usual time, her body was cut down and delivered to her friends, who placed it in a coffin and sent it in a cart to be buried at her native place. . . . but, the weather being sultry, the persons who had the body in their care, stopped about two miles from Edinburgh. While they were refreshing themselves, one of them perceived the lid of the coffin move, and, uneovering it, the woman immediately sat up, and most of the speetators ran off, with every sign of trepidation. She was put to bed and bled by a leech. Next day she could walk. By Scotch law her marriage had been dissolved by her "execution," so her husband remarried her publicly some days after she had been hanged, and she survived for 30 years. It is not only in the realm of punishment that times have changed; certain crimes of the period could hardly reeur to-day. fJohn Crouch and his wife, "having heard that young maidens were scarce , in London," dragged their niece thith- ! er on foot from Cornwall and tried to sell her. Colley, assisted by a vilI lage mob, ducked a man and his wife ; suspected of witchcraft so unmercifully in a pond that both died. Bolland, a sheriff's officer, swindled un- . fortunate debtors by detaining them ' in his house in preference to prison — at a price. Patriclc Bourke killed 15 sheep in order to sell their fat to a tallow chandler for a few shillings. | All except Crouch and his wife were executed.