With restraint, or, Odd things in churches (2)
A set of stocks does seem an odd thing to find in a church, but it's less odd if viewed in a historical perspective. In the 16th century, the vestry, a committee of parishioners chaired by the church's incumbent, was becoming the key body in parish government. Its responsibilities embraced civil as well as ecclesiastical affairs and included keeping the peace, dealing with vagrants, mending roads, and destroying vermin. These important roles of the vestry continued until Parish Councils were introduced in the late-19th century. Maintaining instruments of punishment, such as stocks and whipping posts, was therefore part of the work of the vestry, and sometimes stocks were set up by the churchyard wall. A few have found their way into the church as historical curiosities, like this set in Dinton, which is kept in the church porch.
Malefactors – drunks, rowdies, vagrants, and scolds – were often put in the stocks for a while, the mixture of shame, inconvenience, and discomfort being a punishment and a way of detaining people until they calmed down, or sobered up. Perhaps the main punishment was that, stuck in the stocks with feet clasped firmly, a person was brought down a peg or two and was, indeed, a laughing stock.
There's one other curious thing about these stocks, though. There are five holes, and an odd number of holes doesn't seem to go with the usual human complement of two feet. The town where I live also has an old set of stocks with an odd number of holes and the tradition here is that they were made that way because a one-legged man was among the local wild bunch who often got into trouble. I don't know how true this is. Maybe having a single foot in the stocks was considered restraint enough: you certainly wouldn't be walking anywhere with one foot stuck in there. But an uneven number of holes certainly makes these stocks in the porch of Dinton church numerically, as well as ecclesiastically, odd.
7 comments:
I was thinking that a miscreant's two arms and two legs could easily be locked into the stocks at one time. And the centre hole would be for the head.
But the head hole isn't big enough. And in any case, it would be physically difficult to bend a drunkard over.
Golly, Hels, that WOULD be torture! There wre pillories for the arms and head, which would have been uncomfortable too.
Bring 'em back I say.
Thank you, Mr Ashley. With yourself as Constable, of course.
This set me googling for images of stocks. Once you get past the noise (searching for 'stock photos' won't get you far) you find many versions, old and new, of the same design, what you might call the upright 3-holer, with a large central hole for the head. This has clearly become the cartoon image of medieval punishment. But when Kent is put in the stocks in King Lear it's explicitly his legs that are restrained. Cornwall says, 'Put in his legs.' Does that suggest there was a choice, or is this just the Elizabethan/Jacobean tendency to embody stage directions in the text? And were portable stocks common, by the way ('Fetch forth your stocks, ho!') or just a theatrical necessity? When the Fool sees Kent, he says, 'Horses are tied by the heads, dogs and bears by the neck, monkeys by the loins and men by the legs,' which suggests that the stocks in your picture were more typical than the Aunt Sally style favoured in medieval fayres and theme parks.
Joe: Thanks for these Shakespearean references, about which I'd forgotten. The Aunt Sally thing is called a pillory; stocks are normally for restraining the legs. Both were used, but if stocks are mentioned, it's legs that would be going in. I'd taken Cornwall's 'Put in his legs' as a way of saying 'Get on with it'. As for portable stocks,I'd have thought them unusual (though I'm open to correction myself on this issue) – you wanted your miscreants to be kept in one place, and for that place to be known, so that the rest of the population could turn up and jeer at those imprisoned.
Pillory, of course. I should have remembered that (though apparently my search engine doesn't distinguish). I suppose stock and stocking must be related, so the clue is in the name.
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