Punishment+in+Colonial+America

= What are stocks and pillories? = ====Most people have seen at least a picture of a set of stocks, but there are many different sorts. A stock is simply a wooden board with one or more semicircles cut into one edge. When adjoined to another stock, the semicircles form holes and become stocks.====

The stocks
It had holes in it which the troublemaker's ankles were locked while setting down.

The pillory
A set of stocks with three holes, one in the centre for the neck, and smaller holes each side for the wrists. These stocks are fixed to the top of a central post (or posts at each end), obliging the occupant to stand with his or her head and hands thus confined. Like the stocks, the upper stock can be either hinged or in side runners.Pillories were usually either for one or two people. Although some pillories could accommodate more by fixing one end of each set of stocks to a central post, so the stocks were arranged like the spokes of a wheel.

For punishment
Stocks and pillories were used to punish a many minor offences. Drunkenness, prostitution, not attending church; the list is endless. Under more puritanical regimes, even dancing round a maypole.

Here are just a few examples of offences punished by the stocks or pillory:
In 1500, a young priest sat in the stocks for getting drunk at a village feast. He was later to become Cardinal Wolsey. In 1555, a woman was put in the pillory for beating her child. In 1704, even the famous author, Daniel Defoe (pictured on the right), was pilloried for writing “The Shortest Way with the Dissenters”. In Sheffield, on 12 February 1790, for drinking in a public-house during the time of service in the church, nine men were locked in the stocks. In 1810, a man and a woman were pilloried together in Driffield for fortune telling.