may
perhaps fix the date at which each parish provided its own means of
punishment of wrong-doers.

Though drunkenness was a vice infinitely more prevalent than it is
to-day, it was not because local authorities did not at least show the
form of their authority, but simply because they had no very efficient
police system to back it up. It was customary for instance for the
publican to have a table of penalties against "tippling" actually
posted up in his licensed house, so that both he and his customers
might see what might be the consequences, but as they often could not
read they were probably not much the wiser, except for a common idea
that the Parish Stocks stood outside on the village green, or in the
town street. The common penalty for tipplers continuing to drink in an
alehouse, was that such persons should forfeit 3s. 4d. for the use of
the Poor, and if not paid to be committed to the stocks for the space
of four hours; for being found drunk 5s., or six hours in the stocks.
As to swearing, a labourer was liable to be fined 1s. for every oath, a
person under the degree of a gentleman 2s., and for a gentleman 5s.

In times of disturbance, as at village feasts, it was no uncommon thing
to see the stocks full of disorderly persons--that is, with two or
three at once--and occasionally the constable's zeal in the use of this
simple remedy outran his discretion. At the Herts. Assizes in 1779,
before Sir Wm. Blackstone, a Baldock shoemaker, named Daniel Dunton,
obtained a verdict and L10 damages against the chief and petty
constable of Baldock for illegally putting him in the stocks.

There was, of course, an odd and comic side about the stocks as an
instrument of punishment, which cannot belong to modern methods. An
instance of this was brought home to the writer in the necessary
efforts at ransacking old men's memories for the purpose of some parts
of these Glimpses of the past. I was, for instance, inquiring of an
old resident of one of our villages as to what he remembered, and
ventured to ask him, in the presence of one or two other inhabitants,
the innocent question--"I suppose you have seen men put in the stocks
in your {85} time!" but before the old man could well answer, a younger
man present interposed, with a merry twinkle of the eye--"Yes, I'll be
bound he has, he's been in hi'self!" I am bound to say that, from the
frank manner in which my informant proceeded to speak of persons who
had been in t