_Quik he het_ (commanded) _his sone take,_ _And spoili him of clothes nake,_ _And beten him with scourges stronge,_ _And afterward him hegge_ (high) _anhonge_. --Weber, iii. 21.
At the intercession of one of the wise men, the youth is respited and thrown into prison, but without his clothing; and when, on a subsequent occasion, he was brought out of prison for judgment, he remained still naked.
Our three cuts which follow illustrate the subject of mediæval punishments for crimes and offences. The first (No. 230) is taken from a well-known manuscript, in the British Museum, of the fourteenth century (MS. Reg. 10 E. iv.), and represents a monk and a lady, whose career has brought them into the stocks, an instrument of punishment which has figured in some of our former chapters. It is a very old mode of punishing offenders, and appears, under the Latin name of _cippus_, in early records of the middle ages. An old English poem, quoted by Mr. Halliwell in his Dictionary, from a manuscript at least as old as the fifteenth century, recounting the punishments to which some misdoers were condemned, says:--
_And twenty of thes oder ay in a pytt,_ _In stokkes and feturs for to sytt._
The stocks are frequently referred to in writers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and they have not yet become entirely obsolete. The _Leeds Mercury_ for April 14, 1860, informs us that, “A notorious character, named John Gambles, of Stanningley (Pudsey), having been convicted some months ago for Sunday gambling, and sentenced to sit in the stocks for six hours, left the locality, returned lately, and suffered his punishment by sitting in the stocks from two till eight o’clock on Thursday last.” They were formerly employed also, in place of fetters, in the inside of prisons--no doubt in order to cause suffering by irksome restraint; and this was so common that the Latin term _cippus_, and the French _ceps_, were commonly used to designate the prison itself. It may be remarked of these stocks, that they present a peculiarity which we may perhaps call a primitive character. They are not supported on posts, or fixed in any way to the spot, but evidently hold the people who are placed in them in confinement merely by their weight, and by the impossibility of walking with them on the legs, especially when more persons than one are confined in them. This is probably the way in which they were used in prisons.