Ancient Punishments
Speaking of ancient punishments, did you notice the whippings in that old text Bacchus linked to, called The Female Husband? After this woman was tried for marrying another woman, and supposedly posing as a man through the effective use of “something of too vile, wicked and scandalous a nature”, this was her sentence:
The prisoner having been convicted of this base and scandalous crime, was by the court sentenced to be publickly and severely whipt four several times, in, four market towns within the county of Somerset, to wit, once in each market town, and to be imprisoned, &c.
These whippings she has accordingly undergone, and very severely have they been inflicted, insomuch, that those persons who have more regard to beauty than to justice, could not refrain from exerting some pity toward her, when they saw so lovely a skin scarified with rods, in such a manner that her back was almost flead; yet so little effect had the smart or shame of this punishment on the person who underwent it, that the very evening she had suffered the first whipping, she offered the gaoler money, to procure her a young girl to satisfy her most monstrous and unnatural desires.
