Market Place Stocks

In middle ages every town, abbey, and nearly all the more important manorial lords had the right of hanging, so that the gallows were on every hand a conspicuous feature. And considering that Henry VIII., the monarch of “the hanging reign,” (72,000 persons were executed during' his 37 years of sovereignty) favoured the town with his courtship of Katherine Parr, it is hardly likely that this ancient borough should have been wanting in this gruesome object. But where it stood I can find no mention, nor indeed anything concerning it. But we have here in the Market Place certain knowledge of the public stocks, which were made to hold two persons, and which stood near to this last mentioned inn, until removed in 1835.

In 1405 an Act was passed for every town and village to be provided with a pair of stocks, so that a place was not considered complete, or only regarded as a hamlet, without this instrument of punishment, so essential to due order and government were they deemed to be. It was enacted, in the year 1605, that every person convicted of drunkenness should be fined five shillings or spend six hours in the stocks, and here amid the busy market the poor culprit would sit upon a cold stone seat, with his feet fastened in the miserable structure, subject to the merciless scorn and derision of the crowd. Even the shins of the great Cardinal Wolsey, when incumbent at Lymington, about the year 1500, became acquainted with that town’s wooden pinfold, for overstepping the bounds of moderation at a village feast.

“ A parson here! confined in stocks,

A prison made of wood—a—

Weeping and praying to get out,

But couldna’ for his blood—a—

The pillory, it hung o’er his head,

The whipping-post so near—a

A crowd of people round about

Did at Thomas laugh and jeer—a"

It was a fearful punishment without doubt, and perhaps was wisely discontinued.

An old inhabitant says that both men and women used to be flogged in the Market Place near to the stocks, there being a ring fixed to the wall to which the culprits were fastened by a rope. Prior to this modification of Queen Elizabeth’s, upon the famous Whipping Act of Henry VIII., both men and women were frequently punished by being tied naked to a “cart tail,” and flogged through the streets, “ till the body be bloody by reason of such whipping.” He also mentions the early practice of carting prisoners through the town, with a board hung on their backs, on which was painted in conspicuous characters, the word “ thief ’ or “ VAGRANT.” After going the length of the principal streets in this fashion the culprit was set down at the town’s end, and so discharged forth from the borough. John F Curwen, Kirkbie Kendal (1900)