Esther M. Zimmer Lederberg
Trying and Pillorying of the Vere Street Club
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Trying and Pillorying of the Vere Street Club
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Between 1720 to 1740, sodomites were sentenced to the pillory almost
every week. The pillory was usually situated atop a platform about
five or six feet above the ground. Thus a person sentenced (typically for an hour
at the pillory) could easily be seen by the surrounding mob. More importantly,
the person at the pillory could more easily be targeted. The mob could molest
the criminal. The mob yelled as it threw dirt, excrement, dead dogs, dead cats,
dead rats, turnips, potatoes, cabbage-stalks, at the criminal. Butchers provided
offal, blood, animal dung, fish entrails, rotten eggs. The mob threw brickbats,
stones, etc.
Criminals at the pillory often died, if not at the pillory, then in prison
a few days later. Stones often blinded the criminals, hurled with such force
that the clothes were torn off their bodies.
While the entertainment of the mob took place before the pillory, the pickpockets
worked the crowd, and prostitutes gathered customers, houses vacated by people in
the mob, come to torture the criminal, were easily robbed. Thus was official
justice served!
Some sodomites avoided the pillory when offered "Transportation", but there were
other possibilities: hanging, being burned at the stake, being beheaded, being
garrotted, or drowned in barrels of water.
Aristocrats and the wealthy often simply left London, escaping to the continent
(France or Italy), or used expensive lawyers to establish claimes that they were
mentally derranged (thus not subject to laws).
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