"The country gives me proof and precedent Of Bedlam beggars, who, with roaring voices, Stick in their numb'd and mortify'd bare arms Pins, wooden pricks, nails, sprigs of rosemary;"
and these enforce their charity by lunatic "bans," that is, by licences to beg under the badge of the Star of Bethlehem.
Some doggerel from the most ancient of the Percy "Reliques" will serve for a sample of the rest:
"Forth from my sad and darksome cell, Or from the deepe abysse of Hell, Mad Tom is come into the world againe, To see if he can cure his distemper'd braine."
Tom appears to have brought away with him some of his fetters, then sufficiently abundant in Bedlam:
"Come, Vulcan, with tools and with tackles, To knocke off my troublesome shackles."
_This_ method of treatment--by fetters--has not, it may be well to state, survived, like immersion, in the practice of the present Master of Bedlam.
We learn from Shakespeare how "poor Tom that eats the swimming frog, the toad, the tadpole, the wall-newt and the water [newt]; ... swallows the old rat, and the ditch-dog;" and "drinks the green mantle of the standing pool," was "whipped from tything to tything, and stocked, punished, and imprisoned....
Mice, and rats, and such small deere Have been Tom's food for seven long yeare."[52]
Whipping-posts were very common in the reign of Henry VIII., and we suppose long before; certainly also much later. About the middle of the seventeenth century an old poet, John Taylor, once a waterman on the Thames, and hence called the "Water Poet," wrote:
"In London, and within one mile, I ween, There are of jails and prisons full eighteen, And _sixty whipping-posts_ and stocks and cages."
The whipping-post was sometimes called the "tree of truth." There is a curious passage in Sir Thomas More's works, in which he orders a lunatic to be bound to a tree and soundly beaten with rods.
"There was a tree in Sir Thomas More's garden, at which he so often beat Lutherans, that it was called the 'tree of troth,'" says Burnet. This was not the tree at which he had the poor lunatic flogged, for he says that was in the street.
"It was a good plea in those days to an action for assault, battery, and false imprisonment, that the plaintiff was a lunatic, and that therefore the defendant had arrested him, confined him, and _whipped_ him."[53]