Punishment by public humiliation was once a common practice, Robin Longbottom writes

FROM the Saxon period through to the end of the 19th century, punishment by public humiliation was commonplace.

Perhaps the most familiar reminder today are the stocks, several of which still survive in the area.

In Keighley, the stocks stood in front of the church gates in Church Green, conveniently located close to many inns and beer houses.

Whilst the stocks in Keighley are long gone, those in Haworth still stand at the top of Main Street. The Keighley Visitor, a temperance magazine published during the 1850s, reported that on May 8, 1856, two men from Cullingworth – David Lambert and Timothy Barcroft – were fined five shillings each for being drunk at Haworth. If they failed to pay, they were to be confined in the stocks for six hours. Confinement in the stocks was not limited to drunkenness; the Visitor recorded that Joseph Spence, also known as Boxer, had been sentenced to sit in the stocks in Keighley for gambling. The stocks in Keighley were eventually removed in the mid 1860s.

Public whipping was also commonplace into the 18th century. The Keighley parish registers record that in 1662 one Thomas Rownson was set in the stocks and whipped. This punishment was not only confined to men, but women too were subjected to it and those of ill-repute could be tied to the tailgate of a cart and whipped out of town.

The small square in Sun Street at Haworth, where it meets Cold Street, is commonly known as Ducking Stool, a reminder of the punishment meted out to women who were judged to be scolds and gossips. In Medieval times the punishment was known as the 'cucking stool' and took the form of a chair or pole to which a woman could be tied and either carried through the streets or exhibited at the door to her cottage. If there was a deep enough pond or river nearby the woman could also be ducked into it, first having been fastened into a chair at the end of a long pole that could be raised up and down. Disreputable tradesmen were also known to have suffered a similar fate.

These three examples of public punishment were generally meted out following a summary conviction by a justice of the peace, but occasionally other forms of punishment were inflicted by the public at large. One such act of retribution was tarring and feathering, usually imposed upon a person deemed to have offended society. Whilst no records survive of anyone being subjected to it in the immediate Keighley area, it is recorded that a man was “handsomely tarred and feathered” in Otley in 1777 for drinking to the health of George Washington during the American War for Independence. Another man in Idle suffered the same fate the following year.

A more frequent punishment was known as 'Riding the Stang'. Stang is an old dialect word for a pole and in circumstances where rows between husband and wife became intolerable, neighbours would procure one and a person would be lifted astride it to proclaim the offender's names. Occasionally a straw effigy would be tied to the pole. A local mob would then parade through the neighbourhood making a great hullabaloo. Joseph Craven in his History of Stanbury, published in 1907, recounts one such incident. Here a couple had been fighting for five days because the husband could not “mak' her do”. The neighbours therefore got a long pole and raised a straw effigy on it. After parading it through the street to the accompaniment of clashing pots and pans, the effigy was burned near the offending party's house.

Fortunately, the barbaric practice of public humiliation is now confined to history.