Who were the culprits who thus suffered?  Falstaff states that he only just escaped the punishment of being set in the stocks for a witch.  Witches usually received severer justice, but stocks were often used for keeping prisoners safe until they were tried and condemned, and possibly Shakespeare alludes in this passage only to the preliminaries of a harsher ordeal.  Drunkards were the common defaulters who appeared in the stocks, and by an Act of 2 James I they were required to endure six hours’ incarceration with a fine of five shillings.  Vagrants always received harsh treatment unless they had a licence, and the corporation records of Hungerford reveal the fact that they were always placed in the pillory and whipped.  The stocks, pillory, and whipping-post were three different implements of punishment, but, as was the case at Wallingford, Berkshire, they were sometimes allied and combined.  The stocks secured the feet, the pillory “held in durance vile” the head and the hands, while the whipping-post imprisoned the hands only by clamps on the sides of the post.  In the constable’s accounts of Hungerford we find such items as:—­

    “Pd for cheeke and brace for the pillory 00,02,00
    Pd for mending the pillory 00,00,06
    Pd the Widow Tanner for iron geare for the whipping post 00,03,06”

Whipping was a very favourite pastime at this old Berkshire town; this entry will suffice:—­

    “Pd to John Savidge for his extraordinary
    paines this yeare and whipping of severall persons 00,05,00”

John Savidge was worthy of his name, but the good folks of Hungerford tempered mercy with justice and usually gave a monetary consolation to those who suffered from the lash.  Thus we read:—­

    “Gave a poore man that was whipped and sent
    from Tythinge to Tythinge 00,00,04”

Women were whipped at Hungerford, as we find that the same John Savidge received 2d. for whipping Dorothy Millar.  All this was according to law.  The first Whipping Act was passed in 1530 when Henry VIII reigned, and according to this barbarous piece of legislation the victim was stripped naked and tied to a cart-tail, dragged through the streets of the town, and whipped “till his body was bloody.”  In Elizabeth’s time the cart-tail went out of fashion and a whipping-post was substituted, and only the upper part of the body was exposed.  The tramp question was as troublesome in the seventeenth century as it is to-day.  We confine them in workhouse-cells and make them break stones or pick oakum; whipping was the solution adopted by our forefathers.  We have seen John Savidge wielding his whip, which still exists among the curiosities at Hungerford.  At Barnsley in 1632 Edward Wood was paid iiijd. “for whiping of three wanderers.”  Ten years earlier Richard White received only iid. for performing the like service for six wanderers.