THE HISTORY OF THE ROD
The line between pain and pleasure is as thin as the tail of a whip, and this classic work is the definitive history of flagellation through the ages. As it shows, flagellation is much more than a punishment it is also intimately tied to discipline and eroticism, has a romantic and even comic side, and has also been used for medical purposes. No one is above the bite of the birch or rod convent nuns were chastised severely, queens have been flogged, and even favourites of the sultan have had to endure the whip in the great seraglios. The author deals in great detail with whipping in ancient Egypt, Greece and Rome, the favourite parts of the body for whipping, flagellation and discipline in monasteries and convents, whipping in prisons, the rod in Russia, flagellation in America, whipping in Europe and the Far East, the flogging of slaves, military flogging, school punishments and the birch in the boudoir, all enlivened with colourful anecdotes. There is a chapter on the instruments of whipping, a selection of ribald and erotic poems on whipping, a section on eccentric forms of whipping such as that practised on prostitutes, many detailed line drawings, descriptive accounts and a full index. The work shows the fundamental place whipping has always played in human history, both publicly and in private, and continues to play today.
The late Rev WILLIAM M. COOPER was an expert on the history of flagellation and discipline.
THE BEAUTIFUL MADAME LAPUCHIN.
Knouted by Order of Elizabeth, Empress of Russia.
THE HISTORY OF THE ROD
FLAGELLATION AND THE FLAGELLANTS IN ALL COUNTRIES FROM THE EARLIEST PERIOD TO THE PRESENT TIME
WILLIAM M. COOPER
First published in 1869 by John Camden Hotten.
This edition first published in 2009 by
Routledge
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John Camden Hotten 1869
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 10: 0-7103-0733-0
ISBN 13: 978-0-7103-0733-0
Publishers Note
The publisher has gone to great lengths to ensure the quality of this reprint but points out that some imperfections in the original copies may be apparent. The publisher has made every effort to contact original copyright holders and would welcome correspondence from those they have been unable to trace.
PRELIMINARY.
T HE writer, now that his work is concluded, is not inclined to dwell on the difficulties under which he laboured in the preparation of the present volume. Although this History of the Rod may be regarded as a compilation, still the task required more than an ordinary expenditure of time and trouble. The facts and anecdotes brought together in the following pages were found to be very widely scattered, and frequently accompanied by details which on no possible pretence could now be openly published
Est et fiddi tuta silentio
Merces.
HOR.
Indeed, it would have been simply impossible to have given the chronicle of Conventual and Monastic Discipline entire: the coarseness, the brutality, the refined cruelty often exercised, were of a character so objectionable, that no good end could have been accomplished by giving every circumstance and every detail narrated in these old records. The writers aim has been to lay before the student interested in the progress of civilisation as full an account of the use of the Rod as propriety on the one hand and as history on the other demanded.
No apology is offered for what is recorded in this book: it was neither compiled for the prurient nor the prudish, the writers sole aim being to give (to the best of his ability) a true History of the Rod as an instrument for correctional purposes in the Church, the State, and the Family.
W. M. C
CONTENTS.
ILLUSTRATIONS.
PLATE
Frontispiece: Madame Lapuchin
Vignette : GladiatorsAncient Roman Flagellum
I T is recorded of an old-fashioned schoolmaster that in the course of fifty years he administered to his pupils nearly half-a-million canings, and a hundred and twenty-four thousand proper floggings! This pedagogue, who in the days of Solomon would have been a man after that wise kings own heart, may be taken as the type of a class of teachers who flourished in the good old daysrigid disciplinarians who never spared the rod nor spoiled the child. Happy schoolboys of the present day have but a faint notion of those times, or of the severities undergone at school by their fathers and grandfathers. Flagellation, except for garrotters, has gone nearly out of fashion in this country, and the birch of to-day is but the ghost of what it was a hundred years since, and the rod even of that period was only a faint shadow of the terrible whips and scourges of a much earlier age.
Nor was the Rod in early times confined to schoolboys; it had, from small beginnings, become a symbol of authority at which even bearded men trembled, and, as any one may read, was wielded with tyrannical power by the kings and conquerors of antiquity; for the practice of flagellating the human body dates from the earliest ages of mankind, and has been chronicled by the most ancient authors. Without doubt, the destinies of mankind have been greatly influenced by the scourge, and the curiosities of flagellation form an interesting chapter in the progress of human civilization.
Records of various kinds of corporal chastisement inflicted during the most remote pagan ages are still extant, the heathens having made a most industrious use of the scourge, frequently practising with relentless severity on the backs of their unfortunate captives. The extended use of the whip, however, is due to more Christian times. The ancient Persians were familiar with the Rod: the nobles of the kingdom even were not spared when flagellations were going the round, whilst a satirical custom prevailed then, as it does even yet in some eastern countries, of the punished having to return grateful thanks for the punishmentan observance of etiquette which at a not very remote period, we believe, was insisted upon by hard-hearted lady teachers
Flick-em, flap-em, over the knee,
Say, Thank you, good dame, for whipping of me.
After a time, in Persia, nobles were spared the indignity of a personal application of the scourge, it being arranged in the case of such grandees that future punishments should be inflicted on their clothes instead of their bare bodies, thus rendering the whipping in their case much pleasanter than it would otherwise have been, leading to the belief that it was at that time the proverb originated, of one law for the rich and another for the poor.
