In 1547 English vagrants were branded with a V and enslaved for two years. Should the unfortunate attempt escape, a hot S was burned into the flesh and he was a slave for life. A second attempted escape was death. In those days wife-whipping was a common and respectable domestic discipline; culprits in the pillory and stocks were stationed in the marketplace where all the people might strike them; prisoners were stripped of their clothes, confined in filthy dungeons half filled with stagnant water, and there not unfrequently left to starve, while slimy reptiles crawled over the naked body, or drove their poisonous fangs into the quivering flesh.
The sports of the Spaniards we now regard as cruel, as ours will be regarded four hundred years hence. Although delighting in games, in pantomimic dance, in fencing, wrestling, running, leaping, hunting, hawking, with the gentler pastime of song and guitar, the more popular amusements were cock-fights, dog and bull fights, bull and bear fights, bear and dog fights, enjoyed alike by high and low, by women, boys, and men, by laity and clergy. Sometimes fighters would enter the arena blindfolded and engage in deadly encounter. Yet how much more cruel were these sports than modern horse-racing, cock-fighting, dog-fighting, prize-fighting, rope-walking, lion-taming, steeple-chases, to say nothing of the more gentlemanly cruelty of raising foxes to be hunted, and worried, and finally torn in pieces by dogs, let posterity judge. I do not say that the sixteenth-century sports of Spain were not more cruel than the English sports of to-day. I think they were. But that Spaniards were inherently more cruel, that is to say, that their hearts were more wickedly wanton, their sympathies more inhumane, or that they enjoyed a more ardent pleasure in inflicting pain upon others than men do now, I do not believe. The Spaniards were a nation of soldiers, and soldiers are necessarily cruel. Men go to war to hurt the enemy, not to be kind to him. Unquestionably the effect of bull-fights, like the gladiatorial shows of imperial Rome, was debasing, tending to excite a love of the bloody and terrible, and to render insipid tamer and more refined amusements. This to them was a misfortune, although the repulsive sport did foster a spirit of courage and endurance.