a very heavy penalty, when it is remembered that a man might have knocked out his enemy's eye for a matter of a fifty-shilling fine. William the Conqueror was averse to hanging, or otherwise killing criminals; but it could hardly have been on humanitarian grounds, for he enacted that "their eyes be plucked out, or their hands be chopped off, so that nothing may remain of the culprit, but a living trunk, as a memorial of his crime." Under Henry the First, coiners of false money were punished .by the loss of their right hands, and other mutilations of various kinds were in common use. In 1160 we hear of heretics who had refused to abjure their faith being handed over by the church to the civil authorities, to be branded with a hot iron on the forehead, have their clothes torn off from the waist upward, and be whipped through the public streets. Boycotting was at that time a legal prac tice, whatever it may be now, for the said heretics were not only forbidden to enter the houses of orthodox believers, but even to purchase the necessaries of life. The popular notion of the Crusaders, as an army of Bayards, sans peur et sans ref>roche." is hardly consistent with the code of crim inal law which Richard Cceur de Lion enacted for the especial behoof of those he set out for Holy Palestine. If any one of them was convicted of theft, boiling pitch was to be poured over his head, then a pillow full of feathers shaken over him, and he was to be abandoned at the first port the vessel touched. Whoever killed another on board ship was to be tied to the corpse and cast into the sea; whoever killed another on shore was to be tied to the corpse and buried with it. A blow was to be punished by three duckings in the sea, and the use of a knife in a quarrel caused the aggressor to lose one of his hands. While the Lion-hearted vas thus dealing
with his warriors on the high seas, his brother John was behaving as unmercifully at home. The terrible ways in which he showed his displeasure may be instanced by the case of the Archdeacon of Norwich. For some slight offence he caused the poor churchman to be encased in a sheet of lead, which fitted round him like a cloak, and, after a lingering and painful death, became his coffin. In the reign of Edward the Third, a London tailor convicted of contempt of court was condemned to lose his right hand and be imprisoned in the Tower for life. The general severity of punishment, however, seems to have had no corresponding effect in suppressing crime. "When Henry the Third ascended the throne," says Mr. Fike, "a gibbet with a robber hanging in chains, a petty thief in the pillory, a scold on a cuck ing-stool, or a murderer being drawn on a hurdle to the gallows, were spectacles as familiar to the Londoner of that day as a messenger from the telegraph office is to us." Now and again one comes across the record of an arbitrary or obsolete punish ment to which even the modern humanitarian may give a qualified approval. The four teenth century custom of punishing a Lon don baker who gave short weight is an in stance in point. The delinquent had a loaf of his own bread hung around his neck, and was exposed, to be pelted by his defrauded (customers, in the pillory. For a third of fence his oven would be pulled down and he compelled to abjure his trade in the city for ever. Similarly, in a story of retaliatory pun ishment told by Sir Walter Scott, the natural man will find a pleasant spice of poetical jus tice. A poor widow, who had received some injury from the head of her clan, determined to walk from Ross to Edinburgh to see the king—James the First—and obtain redress. The cruel chief, hearing of her intention, had her brought before him, and, making the brutal jest that she would need to be well shod for her journey, nailed her shoes to her
