Hood has comically told of his pretended experiences in the Pillory:--“It is a sort of Egg-Premiership: a place above your fellows, but a place which you have on trial. You are not without the established political vice, for you are not exempt from turning,”--with more punning cogitations of a like nature. Of rarer humour is Charles Lamb’s _Reflections in the Pillory_, with its invocation to them that once stood therein:--“Shades of Bastwick and of Prynne hover over thee--Defoe is there, and more greatly daring Shebbeare--from their (little more elevated) stations they look down with recognitions. Ketch, turn me!” A century or so earlier these ingenious wits had possibly stood therein--in fact and not in fancy. It was a way our old-time rulers had of rewarding ingenious wits. And not wits alone: since for many centuries it was in daily use throughout the length and breadth of Merrie England. Our treatment of crime is the exact opposite of our forefathers’. Our criminal toils, is flogged, is hanged in private; the old idea was to make punishment as public as possible, for so penalty and effect (it was thought) were heightened and increased. The Pillory was the completest expression of this idea. A man was exposed for sixty minutes in the market-place at the busiest hour of the day, and the public itself was summoned to approve of and aid the punishment. The thing was known in old Saxon days. In the laws of Withred it is called _healsfang_. The mediæval Latin name for it was _collistrigium_. Both terms = a “catch for the neck.” Its form varied. The simplest was a wooden frame or screen, with three holes in it, elevated some feet above the ground. The culprit stood behind upon a platform, his head and hands caught in and stuck through the aforesaid holes. This was much like the stocks, save that there the patient sat instead of stood and had his feet enclosed instead of his head and hands. In popular phrase this was “to peep through the nut-crackers.” Again, the structure swung on a pivot; so that the inmate might face the compass points in turn. Sometimes, though this was rather a foreign fashion, it was so commodious that it would take a nosegay of twelve; at the same time that it went revolving and revolving--a very far from merry-go-round! Now (as at Dublin) it was the kernel of a large and imposing structure of stone. Now (as at Coleshill, in Warwickshire) it stood a deft arrangements of uprights, boards, and holes, and did triple duty--as stocks, as whipping-post, as Pillory. Now, yet again (as at Marlborough, in Wiltshire), the frame turned on a swivel at the will of the patient, whose deft twistings in dodging missiles hugely delighted the grinning mob. With pen and pencil Mr. Llewellyn Jewitt and other antiquarians have preserved for our delectation yet other forms.