pleaded that a man is entitled to beat his wife with a stick no thicker than his thumb.  In Pennsylvania actual acquittals have been rendered.”

Among all classes children were severely whipped by their parents and others in authority over them.  It may be recalled that in the twelfth century when Abelard became tutor to Heloise, then about 18 years of age, her uncle authorized him to beat her, if negligent in her studies.  Even in the sixteenth century Jeanne d’Albert, who became the mother of Henry IV of France, at the age of 131/2 was married to the Duke of Cleves, and to overcome her resistance to this union the Queen, her mother, had her whipped to such an extent that she thought she would die of it.  The whip on this occasion was, however, only partially successful, for the Duke never succeeded in consummating the marriage, which was, in consequence, annulled. (Cabanes brings together numerous facts regarding the prevalence of flagellation as a chastisement in ancient France in the interesting chapter on “La Flagellation a la Cour et a la Ville” in his Indiscretions de l’Histoire, 1903.)

As to the prevalence of whipping in England evidence is furnished by Andrews, in the chapter on “Whipping and Whipping Posts,” in his book on ancient punishments.  It existed from the earliest times and was administered for a great variety of offenses, to men and women alike, for vagrancy, for theft, to the fathers and mothers of illegitimate children, for drunkenness, for insanity, even sometimes for small-pox.  At one time both sexes were whipped naked, but from Queen Elizabeth’s time only from the waist upward.  In 1791 the whipping of female vagrants ceased by law.  (W.  Andrews, Bygone Punishments, 1899.)

It must, however, be remarked that law always lags far behind social feeling and custom, and flagellation as a common punishment had fallen into disuse or become very perfunctory long before any change was made in the law, though it is not absolutely extinct, even by law, today.  There is even an ignorant and retrograde tendency to revive it.  Thus, even in severe Commonwealth days, the alleged whipping with rods of a servant-girl by her master, though with no serious physical injury, produced a great public outcry, as we see by the case of the Rev. Zachary Crofton, a distinguished London clergyman, who was prosecuted in 1657 on the charge of whipping his servant-girl, Mary Cadman, because she lay in bed late in the morning and stole sugar.  This incident led to several pamphlets.  In The Presbyterian, Lash or Noctroff’s Maid Whipt (1661), a satire on Crofton, we read:  “It is not only contrary to Gospel but good manners to take up a wench’s petticoats, smock and all”; and in the doggerel ballad of “Bo-Peep,” which was also written on the same subject, it is said that Crofton should have left his wife to chastise the maid.  Crofton published two pamphlets, one under his own name