It has been customary to condemn all these old rights for so many years accorded to clerkship, because they are supposed to have constituted infringements of the principle that all men should be equal before the law.[484] But when we consider the barbarities they prevented, and after we have examined and ascertained the aimlessness and inutility of mere punishments, we may be forced to think that they were not an unmixed evil, and that, perhaps, they rather made for good. SUMMARY AND “POETIC” PUNISHMENTS Since the poor human body has always been sensitive, so at the promptings of the revenge instinct it has always been assailable and most readily beaten. Naturally enough the Duke of Gloster exclaims—in that most subtle second act of _Henry VI._—“Have you not beadles in your town and things called whips?” Of course they had. The serf, the varlet, the vagabond, the lunatic, and the petty offender were all whipped with uncertain severity;[485] most likely until the victim was bloody and until the operator was tired and felt he had earned his fee. Doubtless the whips were of all sorts and sizes. They are frequently represented as having three thongs;[486] Titus Oates was flogged with a whip of six.[487] I have seen and handled a lash of transportation times, which had a thick leather thong bound with wire.[488] The cat-o’-nine-tails is alluded to in the eighteenth century.[489] Both men and women[490] (the latter up to 1817[491]) were flagellated in public, being either tied up to a post, or fastened behind a cart and so thrashed along the road. Perhaps the most obvious thing to do, next to flogging an offender, was to exhibit him to the populace. The country was immeasurably more parochial than it is now in these times of travel, and to be rendered infamous in one’s village or neighbourhood was no trifling penalty; and so we find the stocks set up in the towns and hamlets,[492] and, for more serious misdemeanours, there was the lofty pillory or neck-catcher (the _heals-fang_).