Cœur de Lion, in the year 1190, went to the Crusades with Philip Augustus of France, his army joined that of his royal ally at Vezelai according to agreement. The two armies did not remain long together, in consequence of the numerous quarrels that arose, and the French King went away with his men to the Holy Land, leaving Richard to follow. While at Chinon, a small town in the province of Touraine, Richard issued divers orders for the better regulation of his soldiers during their coming voyage on the Mediterranean. Among these orders was the following remarkable one:—
“Latro autem de furto convictus tondeatur ad modum campionis, et pix bulliens super caput ejus effundatur, et pluma pulvinaris super caput ejus executiatur ad cognoscendum eum, et in primâ terrâ quâ naves applicuerint projiciatur.”
This singular piece of Latin may be freely translated as follows:—The convicted thief, after having his hair clipped close after the fashion of a prize-fighter, shall first have boiling pitch poured upon his head, and then have bed-feathers shaken out over it, as a mark to know him by; and that, in this condition, he shall be set ashore on the first land where the ships shall touch.
Whether this punishment was ever inflicted, or whether the dread of it kept all our English Crusaders honest, is more than we can say. Who knows but the curious traveller in search of old legends may yet find, among the inhabitants of some coast town or island in the Mediterranean, a tradition, distorted and garbled by centuries of repetition, of the sudden appearance among their forefathers of a strange bird, which discoursed in an unknown tongue, and whose body was that of a man, albeit its head was covered with downy feathers.
King Richard’s Plumeopicean enactment does not seem to have met with much favour in England, as it found no place in our statute-book. It was apparently purely nautical, and did not apply to his army while on dry land. If any trace of it still exists, we should naturally expect to find it among sailors. It is not impossible that the mystic and unpleasant ceremony which accompanies the visit of Great Neptune to ships crossing the Equator, is, in fact, a faint shadow of the “pix bulliens,” if not of the “pluma pulvinaris,” of Cœur de Lion. My supposition as to the nautical origin and character of tarring and feathering is singularly confirmed by the circumstance that the first recorded outrage of this kind was perpetrated by a body of sailors. It is a long stride from the Crusades of the twelfth century to our North American colonies in the eighteenth; but nevertheless we must make it. On the 1st of November, 1773, the inhabitants of Pownalborough, a small New England town, were aroused by a loud cheering in the streets, and on going to investigate the cause, they saw “about thirty sailors surrounding an object which had more the appearance of the devil than any human being.” The diabolical figure was a Mr. John Malcolm, a revenue officer, who had incurred the hatred of the sailors, as well as everybody else with whom he was brought officially into contact, by an undue severity in the exercise of the power with which he was invested. He had been taken from a Mr. Bradbury’s house, where he was staying, after a stout resistance, and “being disarmed of sword, cane, hat, and wig, he was genteelly tarred and feathered;” his tormentors then marched him through the streets, and let him go.
An odd feature in Mr. Malcolm’s case is this,—in less than three months he was tarred and feathered again! On the 25th of January, 1774, he was bullying a small boy in Fore Street, Boston, when a gentleman named Hughes remonstrated with him; high words arose, they called each other rascals:—“Any how,” says Hughes, “I was never tarred and feathered.” Whereupon Malcolm struck him a blow on the forehead, which stretched him on the ground in an insensible condition. A mob assembled round Malcolm’s house; he was foolish enough to defy them. “You say,” he shouted, “I was tarred and feathered, and that it was not done in a proper manner; damn you, let me see the man that can do it better; I want to see it done in the new-fashioned manner.” (This would seem to indicate that some change had been introduced into the practice). The mob seized him, put him in a cart, and, “stripping him to buff and breeches, gave him a modern jacket;” they then proposed an oath to him, whereby he was to swear to renounce his commission, and never to hold another inconsistent with the liberties of his country; and, on his obstinately refusing, they carted him to the gallows, passed a rope round his neck, and threw the other end over the beam, as if they intended to hang him. He still defied his persecutors, until a sound basting with a rope’s end, [they use cowhide now-a-days] followed by a threat to cut off his ears, forced him to comply with their demand. The mob destroyed his house and furniture, but he escaped on board the Active, a British man-of-war, which brought him to England. It is said that the well-disposed part of the people of Boston offered him 300l. as compensation for his sufferings and loss, but I am inclined to doubt this.
In 1773 our North American colonies were in a ferment, and determined to resist by force the importation of the East India Company’s tea from England. The ladies entered warmly into the scheme, and in one place no less than fifty-seven of them had a meeting, and agreed not to use any more India tea. They requested a gentleman who had lately bought some to return it; and, on his ready compliance, they “treated him to a glass of their country wine, and dismissed him highly pleased.” Happy man! such politeness deserved its reward. All the men were not so polite, and some even went so far as to ridicule the proceedings of these ladies, styling them the Matrons of Liberty, and representing them as being secretly most anxious to have their accustomed tea, and complaining bitterly that their husbands had deprived them of it, while still retaining their own flip and punch. Probably the men required the Hip and punch to rouse them to the requisite pitch for carrying out the rough measures which they now began to adopt. An inflammatory handbill was distributed in Philadelphia, calling upon the Delaware pilots to prevent the arrival of a ship laden with tea, which was expected at that