From the History of Punishment.

felons; offender; beheading; adultery; pillory; punishment; execution; deliberately;

condemned; ancient; medieval; guilty; legal; public

For the most history _______ has been both painful and ___ in order to act as deterrent to others. Physical punishments and public humiliations were social events and carried out in most accessible parts of towns, often on market days when the greater parts of the population were present. Justice had to be seen to be done.

One of the most bizarre methods of___ was inflicted in ancient Rome on people found______ of murdering their fathers. Their punishment was to be put in a sack with a rooster, a viper, and a dog, and then drowned along with the three animals. In ___________ Greece the custom of allowing man to end his own life by poison was extended only to full citizens. The philosopher Socrates died in this way. Condemned slaves were beaten to death instead. Stoning was the ancient method of punishment for_____ among other crimes.

In Turkey if a butcher was found guilty of selling bad meat, he was tied to a post with a piece of stinking meat fixed under his nose, or a baker having sold short weight bread could be nailed to his door by his ear.

One of the most common punishments for petty offences was the ————, which stood in the main square of towns. The ________ was locked by hands and head into trey device and made to stand sometimes for days, while crowds jeered and pelted the offender with rotten vegetables or worse.

In ________ Europe some methods of execution were_______ drawn out to inflict maximum suffering, were tied to a heavy wheel and rolled around the streets until they were crushed to death. Others were strangled, very slowly. One of the most; terrible punishments was hanging and quartering. The victim was hanged, beheaded and the body cut into four pieces. It remained a _________ method of punishment in Britain until 1814. Was normally reserved for those of high rank. In England a “bloc and axe” was the common method but this was different from France and Germany where the victim kneeled and the head was taken off with a swing of the sword.

Task 7. Answer the following questions:

1. Why did ancient punishment have to be painful?

2. What was the purpose of making punishments public?

3. What was the symbolic meaning of the punishment inflicted on the parents' murderers?

4. What punishments were most common in the East?

5. How did punishments reflect social status?

Supplementary Reading

Joseph Ignоce Guilation

A doctor and member of the French Legislative assembly, he suggested the use of the guillotine for executions in 1789. A physician and humanitarian, Guillotine was disturbed by vulgarity of public executions and petitioned for a single method of capital punishment to be used for all crimes demanding the death sentence. The guillotine consists of a heavy blade with a diagonal edge, which falls between two upright posts to cut off the victim's head cleanly and quickly.Similar machines had been used in various other countries including Scotland and Italy. The main idea was to make executions as quick and painless as possible. The first person execution by guillotine was the highwayman Pelletier in 1792, but the machine came into its own in 1793, during the reign of terror following the French revolution, when aristocrats were guillotined by the hundred. The device was nicknamed ‘Madame Guillotine’ after its sponsor.

Charles Lynch

Capitan Charles Lynch, of Virginia, author of the infamous lynch law, will forever be linked with “vigilante justice”. Lynch decided that he and his neighbours were too far from lawmakers and sheriffs to punish properly the vandals and robbers terrorizing the rural area. He encouraged the fellow citizens to sing a declaration he drafted, announcing the intention to 'take matters in their own hands '." If they (criminals) do not desist from their evil practices, we will inflict such corporal punishment on them, as to us shall seem adequate to the crime committed or the damage sustained." Although the death penalty was not always exacted, in most cases the punishment turned out to be hanging. In addition to the fact that many innocent victims suffered lynching, a certain amount of guilt among the lynches can be ascertained by the very technique for hanging criminals.

Lynch and his cohorts practiced a from of passive hanging. A rope was tied around a tree and the condemned man placed on a horse with the other side of the rope strung snugly around his neck. So the criminal was killed not by the captors tightening the noose, but the whim of the horse. When the horse moved far enough away from the tree, the rope choked the horseman.

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Grammar