The Pillory: Public Shaming From Daniel Defoe to Delaware in 1905

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In 1703 the writer Daniel Defoe stood locked in a pillory for seditious libel, head and hands trapped between heavy boards, waiting for the crowd to pelt him. They threw flowers. That scene opens a history of a device built less to restrain than to humiliate. Unlike the stocks, which held the legs of a seated offender, the pillory forced a person to stand bowed and face first on a raised platform in the marketplace, with a placard naming the crime and the neighbors invited to do their worst.

The crowd threw rotten food, mud, excrement, and dead animals, and sometimes bricks and stones that maimed or killed. Authorities added their own permanent marks with branding, whipping, and cropped ears. The episode follows the idea through Puritan whipping posts, Scandinavian shame poles, rotating French towers, and the carved stone pelourinhos that Portugal exported to its colonies, where enslaved people were chained and whipped. It ends with how slowly the law let go.

The drunkard's cloak, also called the barrel pillory or Spanish mantle, forced offenders to wear a wooden barrel and walk the town.
French pillory towers set the prisoner on a turntable so the whole square got a full view of the condemned.
Peter James Bossy became the last person pilloried in England in 1830, for perjury, and the penalty was abolished in England and Wales in 1837.
Delaware did not abolish the pillory until March of 1905, held its last whipping in 1952, and kept the whipping post on the books until 1972.
The verb to pillory has been attested since 1699, and the episode asks whether online pile-ons are the same town square in digital form.

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