flogging, a beating administered with a whip or rod, with blows commonly directed to the person’s back. It was imposed as a form of judicial punishment and as a means of maintaining discipline in schools, prisons, military forces, and private homes.
The instruments and methods of flogging have varied. Children in schools and homes have been beaten with sticks, rods, straps, whips, and other objects. Elsewhere the lash was widely used, usually with pain-inflicting elaboration, as in the cat-o’-nine-tails. This was constructed of nine knotted cords or thongs of rawhide attached to a handle. The Russian knout, consisting of a number of dried and hardened thongs of rawhide interwoven with wire—the wires often being hooked and sharpened so that they tore the flesh—was even more painful and deadly. A particularly painful, though not so deadly, type of flogging was the bastinado, generally used in Asia, which involved blows delivered to the soles of the feet with a light rod, knotted cord, or lash. Flogging was formerly executed with great brutality. The backs of the condemned were frequently lacerated, and salt was poured into the wounds to increase the pain.
In England the Whipping Act of 1530 authorized the whipping of thieves, blasphemers, poachers, men and women guilty of minor offenses, and even the insane. Victims were tied to the end of a cart until the 1590s, when the whipping post was introduced.
During the 19th century, imprisonment gradually replaced corporal penalties as a punishment for crime, but the courts retained the power to order whippings in cases involving violent crimes (see prison). This power was terminated in England, Scotland, and Wales by the Criminal Justice Act of 1948, although corporal punishment for mutiny, incitement to mutiny, and gross personal violence to an officer of a prison when committed by a male person was permitted in England and Wales until 1967.
The whip was used in 18th-century Denmark and Holland; German felons were flogged out of town, and warders in the French penal colonies in the 1920s employed riding whips. The Japanese used three lengths of bamboo bound together, which caused multiple lacerations, and although judicial torture in that country was abolished in 1873, captured Koreans and Formosans were still beaten in this fashion, as were Allied prisoners of war in World War II. Throughout history whips have been a terrible symbol of slavery.