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Tarring and feathering was a physical punishment, at least as old as the Crusades, used to enforce formal justice in feudal Europe and informal justice in Europe and its colonies in the early modern period, as well as the early American frontier, mostly as a type of mob vengeance (compare Lynch law).
Description
Both pine tar, used in early industry, and feathers from edible fowl sources (such as chickens) were plentiful. In a typical tar-and-feathers attack, the object of a crowd's anger would be stripped to the waist (if not below). Hot tar was either poured or painted onto the person while he (rarely she) was immobilized. Then the victim either had feathers thrown on him or was rolled around on a pile of feathers so that they stuck to the sticky tar. Often the victim was then paraded around town on a cart or a rail. The feathers would stick to the tar for days, making the person's sentence clear to the public. The aim was to hurt and humiliate a person enough to leave town and cause no more mischief.
The practice was never an official punishment in the United States, but rather a form of vigilante justice. It was eventually abandoned as society moved away from public, corporal punishment and toward rehabilitation of criminals.
There were examples of tarring and feathering during The Troubles in Northern Ireland. In these cases hospitals could clean the mess off quickly.
- A more brutal derivation called pitchcapping, designed to badly damage skin and flesh on the head, was used by British soldiers against suspected rebels during the period of the Irish Rebellion of 1798.
- In a milder form, avoiding wounds by fixing the tar on (under)clothing, it is still occasionally used, as a humiliating or jocular punishment, as for disobedient fraternity pledges (compare hazing).
First degree burns are sustained after a split second contact with a material that is 160ºF (~70ºC). The same is also sustained after thirty seconds of contact with 130ºF (~55ºC) material. The tar of that period was of such a quality that it only melted at very high temperatures, the average being 140ºF (60ºC).
History
The earliest mention of the punishment occurs in the orders of Richard I of England, issued to his navy on starting for the Holy Land in 1191. "Concerning the lawes and ordinances appointed by King Richard for his navie the forme thereof was this… item, a thiefe or felon that hath stolen, being lawfully convicted, shal have his head shorne, and boyling pitch poured upon his head, and feathers or downe strawed upon the same whereby he may be knowen, and so at the first landing-place they shall come to, there to be cast up" (transcript of original statute in Hakluyt's Voyages, ii. 21).
A later instance of this penalty being inflicted is given in Notes and Queries (series 4, vol. v.), which quotes one James Howell writing from Madrid, in 1623, of the "boisterous Bishop of Halberstadt," who, "having taken a place where there were two monasteries of nuns and friars, he caused divers feather beds to be ripped, and all the feathers thrown into a great hall, whither the nuns and friars were thrust naked with their bodies oiled and pitched and to tumble among these feathers, which makes them here (Madrid) presage him an ill-death." In 1696 a London bailiff, who attempted to serve process on a debtor who had taken refuge within the precincts of the Savoy, was tarred and feathered and taken in a wheelbarrow to the Strand, where he was tied to the maypole which stood by what is now Somerset House, as an improvised pillory.
The first recorded incident in America was in 1766: Captain William Smith was tarred, feathered, and dumped into the harbor of Norfolk, Virginia, by a mob that included the town's Mayor. He was picked up by a vessel just as his strength was giving out. He survived, and was later quoted as saying that "…* dawbed my body and face all over with tar and afterwards threw feathers on me". As with most other tar-and-feathers victims in the following decade, Smith was suspected of informing on smugglers to the British Customs service.
The punishment appeared in Salem, Massachusetts, in 1767, when mobs revenged themselves on low-level employees of the Customs service with tar and feathers. In October 1769, a mob in Boston attacked a Customs service sailor the same way, and a few similar attacks followed through 1774. Such acts associated the punishment with the Patriot side of the American Revolution.
In March 1775, a British regiment inflicted the same treatment on a Massachusetts man they suspected of trying to buy their muskets. There is no case of a person dying from being tarred and feathered in this period.
Metaphorical uses
The image of the tarred-and-feathered outlaw is so vivid that the expression remains a metaphor for a humiliating public castigation, many years after the practice disappeared. An example (in a story serial in a web forum) is: "The last episode was meant to be a cliffhanger, but readers' comments showed that they would tar and feather me if I did not quickly rescue the hero and show what happened next.".
Sources and External links
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"Tarring and feathering"