PILLORY. This was a' mode of punishment by public exposure of the offender on a platform or scaffold long used in most countries of Europe, originating probably with the Anglo-Saxons, one of whose methods of punishment as described by Strutt is nearly identical with the instrument which eventually became known as the pillory. The etymology is not quite clearly made out. It is most probably connected with pillar, Fr. pilier, Μ. H. German Pfilaere, but there are forms with an initial s (Prov. espitlori, Low Lat. spilorium) which this derivation does not explain. The more usual French term is not pilori but le carcan. The Germans have Preller. Heals-fang or halsfang (Anglo-Saxon for a catching of the neck) was the old English name. The word was also sometimes applied to the pecuniary mulct paid in commutation of the punishment. No punishment has been inflicted in so many different ways as that of the pillory. Sometimes the machine was constructed so that several criminals might be pilloried at the same time, but it was commonly capable of holding only one. Douce (Illustrations of Shakespeare) gives six representations of distinct varieties of this instrument. In Griffiths (Chron. of Newgate) and in a learned and exhaustive account of the pillory by Jewitt (Reliquary, April 1861), examples will also be found, and notably of the pillory for women, which differed in form from that in use for male offenders. It would appear that it had not always been customary to subject women to this form of punishment; for them the thew or the tumbrel, which latter was probably the same as the ducking or cucking stool often spoken of in the early English laws in conjunction with the pillory, was reserved. These varieties are all reducible, however, to the simplest form of the pillory as ...