20 Outrageous Things People Were Publicly Shamed For In History

The punishment made famous by The Scarlet Letter wasn’t entirely fictional. Under a 1658 Plymouth Colony law, anyone convicted of adultery first had to stand on the gallows with a noose around their neck. After that ordeal, they were required to permanently sew a red cloth capital letter “A” onto their clothing so everyone knew what they had been convicted of. Taking it off could get them whipped. Nearly two centuries later, in 1850, Nathaniel Hawthorne drew on this very real 17th-century practice for The Scarlet Letter. And 160 years after that, Emma Stone proudly slapped the “A” onto her own wardrobe in Easy A, which, for the record, is one of my favorite movies ever. Quite the journey for one little letter!

In 1174, English King Henry II walked barefoot for three miles to Canterbury while dressed in coarse wool sackcloth. Four years earlier, Henry had angrily complained about Thomas Becket, the Archbishop of Canterbury, which several of his knights interpreted as a royal command to kill him. Becket was murdered inside Canterbury Cathedral, and Henry was widely blamed for inspiring the attack. So, to publicly repent for his role, the king traveled to Becket’s shrine and allowed himself to be whipped by 80 monks. That display of penance was also meant to ease pressure from the Pope and help restore peace to Henry’s kingdom.

When Daniel Defoe was sentenced in July 1703 to spend three days in the pillory for his satire, The Shortest-Way with the Dissenters, he wrote a poem celebrating the device, “A Hymn to the Pillory,” which his supporters sold to the crowds who gathered around him. But instead of flinging filth at him, the crowd cheered Defoe, raised their drinks in his honor, and showered him with flowers. The pillory relied on the public’s willingness to participate in its infliction.

The dunce cap was actually never intended to embarrass children. The name comes from John Duns Scotus, a theologian who died in 1308, whose followers wore pointed caps on the theory that the shape focused their thoughts. In time, Scotus’s followers were regarded by their detractors as pedants, and “dunce” became a slang word for a stupid person. During the late 18th century through the mid-20th century, schoolteachers put a paper dunce-cap cone on a student’s head when he or she misbehaved.

In China, a punishment known as the cangue was used for offenses such as minor theft from the Song Dynasty through 1912. The offender was locked inside a heavy wooden collar and made to stand at a busy intersection for weeks, often with a sign attached that told everyone what they had done. The collar could weigh anywhere from 25 to 100 pounds and was so large that the person couldn’t even reach their own mouth to eat. That meant they had to rely on family members or sympathetic strangers to feed them. Photographs from the 1870s show just how enormous these contraptions could be.

The convicted heretics of the Spanish Inquisition donned the sanbenito, a yellow tunic painted with crosses, flames, or demons to indicate the severity of their offense, and a tall paper hat known as a coroza. The condemned were paraded through the streets of cities on the occasion of the autos-da-fé (acts of faith), held between the 15th century and 1834. After the ceremony, the garment was hung in the condemned’s parish church with their name attached, bringing shame to their family for generations.

In English and Scottish law courts, women found guilty of being “common scolds” (i.e., for making disruptive arguments in public) were put in the branks, an iron head-frame with a mouthplate that pressed on the tongue, and led round town on a leash to prevent them from speaking. It was a punishment in vogue in the late 16th through 18th centuries, not in the Middle Ages.

Three meat sellers, including William le Clerk, were convicted in London in the autumn of 1320 of selling rotting meat. Sentenced to the pillory, they were made to stand there while their rotten meat was burned beneath them, and the city’s Letter-Book records the smoke and smell wafting up around them.

Roger Clerk of Wandsworth was a fake doctor. He made 12 pence from a man in 1382 for prescribing a worthless piece of parchment as a remedy for the man’s sick wife. When the Lord Mayor and aldermen convicted him of fraud, they had him marched backwards around London on a horse without a saddle, with two uroscopy flasks (used by real physicians to examine urine samples) hung around his neck.

In 1441, Eleanor Cobham, Duchess of Gloucester, was convicted of consulting with astrologers and an alleged witch to predict when King Henry VI would die. Her noble standing saved her from execution, though her lower-class accomplice, Margery Jourdemayne, was burned instead. Over three days in November, Eleanor went from church to church in London wearing a simple white dress and bare feet, holding a lit candle. Afterward, she was given a life sentence in prison.

English writer William Prynne was punished not once, but twice for publishing pamphlets that angered the authorities. In 1633–34, he was tried over a pamphlet attacking the theater and had parts of his ears cut off. Then, in 1637, he was brought before the Star Chamber again, this time for pamphlets attacking Archbishop William Laud and Anglican bishops. His second punishment was even worse: the remaining parts of his ears were cut off, he was fined £5,000, and both of his cheeks were branded with the letters “S.L.” for “Seditious Libeller.”

The London baker John Brid and others had built a trapdoor into the side of their kneading table so that an accomplice sitting underneath could pinch off dough for customers as they baked. In 1327, this fraud was revealed to officials, and the Mayor’s court had the bakers marched through the streets and pilloried with slabs of the stolen dough around their necks. The case is recorded in the Liber Albus.

In the Alsatian city of Mulhouse, convicted slanderers were forced to carry the Klapperstein or “gossip stone.” The Klapperstein was a 20- to 26-pound block of stone that was sculpted into an ugly face with its tongue sticking out. It was suspended from a chain around the neck. From the 15th century to 1781, those convicted of defamation had to carry the gossip stone as they walked through town on market days. Records indicate both men and women were subjected to this punishment.

In 14th- and 15th-century England, the penalty for perjury involved having a heavy whetstone placed around the neck of the perjured individual before being led through town, or locked up in the pillory, sometimes wearing a sign spelling out their false statement. A whetstone is used to sharpen blades, symbolizing a tongue sharpened by lies. I have to admit, it’s a pretty good metaphor.

In Puritan New England and Presbyterian Scotland, where nonreligious activity on Sundays was prohibited and enforced in public, those found whistling, working, or collecting shellfish were put in the stocks, which restrained the ankles while sitting, as opposed to the pillory, which kept people upright. The courts would put them in front of the church to be seen and chastised by the congregation as they entered for service.

Imagine being forced to show the world that you’re struggling financially. Well, England’s 1697 Badging Act did just that. Everyone who received poor relief from the parish, including spouses and children, was required to wear a red or blue piece of cloth with a large “P” and the initial of their parish on their right shoulder. I think I would die of embarrassment; times are hard enough! Failure to do so would mean losing poor relief or being sent to hard labor. This law remained in force until 1810.

In Newcastle upon Tyne and some parts of Germany, in the 16th and 17th centuries, drunken habitual offenders were packed into a bottomless wooden cask with a hole for their head and arms, and paraded around the market streets. This is mainly reported in Ralph Gardiner’s 1655 account and appears to have been a local practice rather than English national policy.

When a wife dominated or beat her husband in early modern rural England, neighbors responded with a public shaming ceremony known as the Skimmington Ride, a folk custom recorded as late as 1917 in Dorset. But they weren’t shaming the woman. Nope, they were shaming the man…the victim! A crowd would gather outside the couple’s house and bang on pots and pans. Then they took the husband, or a volunteer stand-in neighbor, put him backwards on a donkey or long pole, and paraded him through the streets.

Scottish Kirk Sessions used the Stool of Repentance, a raised seat facing the pulpit, to chastise people who had engaged in premarital sex. In 1784, poet Robert Burns sat upon it. Offenders were forced to sit on it in sackcloth for several Sundays while the minister delivered sermons condemning their sin. The affluent could pay “buttock mail,” a form of fine, to avoid it. A few eighteenth-century Scottish ministers worried that the resulting shame would cause unmarried women to run away or conceal their pregnancies.

At the height of France’s 1944 Liberation, mobs and resistance members dragged out some 20,000 women called les tondues (shorn women) for suspected “horizontal collaboration” with the German occupiers. Accused women would be seized in public town squares and shorn; often they were also branded with a swastika made of tar, and then paraded barefoot down the streets to be spat upon and photographed. None of these activities was ever official government policy.

This content was created with the help of AI.