Capital Punishment

The medieval justice system was nothing if not robust. In 1565 a Liverpool purse-thief called Thomas Johnson was nailed by the ear to a post and afterwards whipped out of town by boys carrying bunches of twigs. Over the centuries, pain and public humiliation remained essential elements of criminal justice. In 1785 Joseph Timms, another thief, was put in the pillory and flogged. Stocks were situated at High Cross in High Street and the punishment was still used in the nineteenth century. Walton-on-the-Hill, three miles from Liverpool, housed an iron stocks. As late as 1857 a prisoner was confined there by order of the local magistrate. James Stonehouse recalled that children were particularly cruel to victims held in the stocks: ‘I have seen stout and sturdy fellows faint under the sufferings they endured.’ He also remembered the large pond in Marybone, called the Flashes, which once held a ducking stool for women.

People had their own form of community justice, operating independently of the official authority of the police and the courts. ‘Rough music’, also called ‘charivari’, was a ceremonial shaming ritual involving loud, jarring noise and dramatic performance inflicted upon those who had failed to conform to communal standards of behaviour. In 1825 Liverpool ropemakers carried two strike-breakers around town in a cart with their coats turned inside out and placards around their necks accusing them of being ‘black sheep’ (black-legs). Two years later, during a dispute among the shipwrights, a worker was surrounded by unemployed journeymen and greeted by cries of ‘Baa! Black sheep.’