Whipping at Wakefield appears to have been a common punishment. Payments like the following frequently occur in the constable's accounts: 1787, May 15, Assistance at Whiping 3 men 0 3 0 July 6, " " 3 " 0 3 0 Aug. 17, " " 2 " 0 2 0 Sept. 7, " " 3 " 0 3 0 A fire occurred at Olney in 1783, and during the confusion a man stole some ironwork. The crime was detected, and the man was tried and sentenced to be whipped at the cart's tail. Cowper, the poet, was an eye-witness to the carrying out of the sentence, and in a letter to the Rev. John Newton gives an amusing account of it. "The fellow," wrote Cowper, "seemed to show great fortitude; but it was all an imposition. The beadle who whipped him had his left hand filled with red ochre, through which, after every stroke, he drew the lash of the whip, leaving the appearance of a wound upon the skin, but in reality not hurting him at all. This being perceived by the constable, who followed the beadle to see that he did his duty, he (the constable) applied the cane, without any such management or precaution, to the shoulders of the beadle. The scene now became interesting and exciting. The beadle could by no means be induced to strike the thief hard, which provoked the constable to strike harder; and so the double flogging continued, until a lass of Silver End, pitying the pityful beadle, thus suffering under the hands of the pityless constable, joined the procession, and placing herself immediately behind the constable, seized him by his capillary club, and pulling him backward by the same, slapped his face with Amazonian fury. This concentration of events has taken up more of my paper than I intended, but I could not forbear to inform you how the beadle thrashed the thief, the constable the beadle, and the lady the constable, and how the thief was the only person who suffered nothing." It will be gathered from the foregoing letter that the severity of the whipping depended greatly on the caprice of the man who administered it. A statute, in 1791, expressly forbade the whipping of female vagrants. This was certainly a much needed reform. Mr. Samuel Carter Hall, born in the year 1800, in his interesting book entitled "Retrospect of a Long Life" (1883), relates that more than once he saw the cruel punishment inflicted. On the 8th of May, 1822, a man was whipped through the streets of Glasgow by the hangman for taking part in a riot. He was the last person to undergo public whipping at the cart's tail in Glasgow.