Flagellation
For a moderated subform of flagellation, described as bastinado, the soles of a person's bare feet are used as a target for beating (see foot whipping).
[citation needed] Caning is routinely ordered by the courts as a penalty for some categories of crime in Singapore, Brunei, Malaysia, Indonesia, Tanzania, Zimbabwe and elsewhere.
In addition to causing severe pain, the victim would approach a state of hypovolemic shock due to loss of blood.
Under this legislation, vagrants were to be taken to a nearby populated area "and there tied to the end of a cart naked and beaten with whips throughout such market town till the body shall be bloody".
[11] In England, offenders (mostly those convicted of theft) were usually sentenced to be flogged "at a cart's tail" along a length of public street, usually near the scene of the crime, "until his [or her] back be bloody".
In the late seventeenth century, however, the courts occasionally ordered that the flogging should be carried out in prison or a house of correction rather than on the streets.
On 31 May 1793, the Jacobin women seized a revolutionary leader, Anne Josephe Theroigne de Mericourt, stripped her naked, and flogged her on the bare bottom in the public garden of the Tuileries.
[16] Ashraf Fayadh (born 1980), a Saudi Arabian poet, was imprisoned for eight years and lashed 800 times, rather than receiving a death penalty, for apostasy in 2016.
Surviving ships logs reveal the majority awarded between twelve and twenty-four lashes, depending on the severity of the offense.
[27] At the urging of New Hampshire Senator John P. Hale, the United States Congress banned flogging on all U.S. ships in September 1850, as part of a then-controversial amendment to a naval appropriations bill.
[30][28] During Melville's time on the USS United States from 1843 to 1844, the ship log records 163 floggings, including some on his first and second days (18 and 19 August 1843) aboard the frigate at Honolulu, Oahu.
[35] Aboard ships, knittles or the cat o' nine tails was used for severe formal punishment, while a "rope's end" or "starter" was used to administer informal, on-the-spot discipline.
Poet Laureate Ted Hughes celebrates the occasion in his poem, "Wilfred Owen's Photographs": "A witty profound Irishman calls/For a 'cat' into the House, and sits to watch/The gentry fingering its stained tails./Whereupon ...Quietly, unopposed,/The motion was passed.
Oman later wrote: If anything was calculated to brutalize an army it was the wicked cruelty of the British military punishment code, which Wellington to the end of his life supported.
[45] The long serving Home Affairs Minister Dawson Bates (1921–1943) was empowered to make any regulation felt necessary to preserve law and order.
An imprisoned member of the Irish Republican Army (1922–1969), Frank Morris remembered his 15 "strokes of the cat" in 1942: "The pain was dreadful; you couldn't imagine it.
In one case, a British soldier on detached duty with the KGL was sentenced to be flogged, but the German commander refused to carry out the punishment.
Unlike Roman times, British law explicitly forbade the combination of corporal and capital punishment; thus, a convict was either flogged or hanged but never both.
Typically, the offender's upper half was bared and he was suspended by the wrists beneath a tripod of wooden beams (known as 'the triangle').
In many cases, the offender's feet barely touched ground, which helped to stretch the skin taut and increase the damage inflicted by the whip.
In addition to the infliction of pain, one of the principal purposes of the flogging was to humiliate the offender in front of his mates and to demonstrate, in a forceful way, that he had been required to submit to authority.
According to Plutarch, women would put themselves in their way to receive blows on the hands, believing that this would help them to conceive or grant them an easy delivery.
[51] The initiation ceremonies of Greco-Roman mystery religions also sometimes involved ritual flagellation, as did the Spartan cult of Artemis Orthia.
The practice of mortification of the flesh for religious purposes has been utilised by members of various Christian denominations since the time of the Great Schism in 1054.
Nowadays the instrument of penance is called a discipline, a cattail whip usually made of knotted cords, which is flung over the shoulders repeatedly during private prayer.
[53] In the 13th century, a group of Roman Catholics, known as the Flagellants, took self-mortification to an extreme, and would travel to towns and publicly beat and whip each other while preaching repentance.
[57] Martin Luther, the Protestant Reformer, regularly practiced self-flagellation as a means of mortification of the flesh before leaving the Roman Catholic Church.
[58] Likewise, the Congregationalist writer Sarah Osborn (1714–1796) also practiced self-flagellation in order "to remind her of her continued sin, depravity, and vileness in the eyes of God".
[60] St. Thérèse of Lisieux, a late 19th-century French Discalced Carmelite nun considered in Catholicism to be a Doctor of the Church, is an influential example of a saint who questioned prevailing attitudes toward physical penance.
[67] Flagellation practiced within an erotic setting has been recorded from at least the 1590s evidenced by a John Davies epigram,[68][69] and references to "flogging schools" in Thomas Shadwell's The Virtuoso (1676) and Tim Tell-Troth's Knavery of Astrology (1680).
