page_title: Tarring and feathering
section_title: History
hierarchical_section_title: Tarring and feathering / History
caption_attribution_description: Deutsch: Die Söhne der Freiheit, die einen Steuereintreiber unter dem Freiheitsbaum teeren und federn. English: A depiction of the tarring and feathering of Commissioner of Customs John Malcolm, a Loyalist, by five Patriots on 5 January 1774 under the Liberty Tree in Boston, Massachusetts. Tea is also being poured into Malcolm's mouth. The print shows the Boston Tea Party occurring in the background, though that incident had in fact taken place four weeks earlier. See The Bostonians paying the excise-man, or tarring and feathering.&#32;History Matters: The U.S. Survey Course on the Web, American Social History Project, Center for Media and Learning (CUNY Graduate Center) and the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media (George Mason University). Retrieved on 1 May 2011. Français&#160;: Caricature anglaise&#160;: John Malcolm passé au goudron et aux plumes, quatre semaines après la Boston Tea Party, à Boston. À l’arrière-plan, un arbre de la liberté, une corde et le Stamp Act affiché. עברית: תושבי בוסטון מזפתים ומכסים בנוצות איש מס בריטי ב-1774. Lietuvių: Amerikos lojalisto Džono Malkolmo viešas pažeminimas 1774 m. Bostone, su derva ir plunksnomis. Svenska: Propagandatryck från 1774 som visar hur en brittiskt tjänsteman bestryks med tjära och fjädrar fyra veckor efter tebjudningen i Boston. Man passar även på att hälla varmt te i hans mun.
context_page_description: Tarring and feathering is a form of public humiliation and punishment used to enforce unofficial justice or revenge. It was used in feudal Europe and its colonies in the early modern period, as well as the early American frontier, mostly as a type of mob vengeance.
  The victim would be stripped naked, or stripped to the waist. Wood tar was then either poured or painted onto the person while they were immobilized. Then the victim either had feathers thrown on them or was rolled around on a pile of feathers so that they stuck to the tar.
  The image of a tarred-and-feathered outlaw remains a metaphor for severe public criticism.
context_section_description: The earliest mention of the punishment appears in orders that Richard I of England issued to his navy on starting for the Holy Land in 1189. "Concerning the lawes and ordinances appointed by King Richard for his navie the forme thereof was this ... item, a thiefe or felon that hath stolen, being lawfully convicted, shal have his head shorne, and boyling pitch poured upon his head, and feathers or downe strawed upon the same whereby he may be knowen, and so at the first landing-place they shall come to, there to be cast up" (transcript of original statute in Hakluyt's Voyages, ii. 21).
  A later instance of this penalty appears in Notes and Queries (series 4, vol. v), which quotes James Howell writing in Madrid in 1623 of the "boisterous Bishop of Halberstadt ... having taken a place where there were two monasteries of nuns and friars, he caused divers feather beds to be ripped, and all the feathers thrown into a great hall, whither the nuns and friars were thrust naked with their bodies oiled and pitched and to tumble among these feathers, which makes them here (Madrid) presage him an ill-death." (The Bishop was apparently Christian the Younger of Brunswick.)
  In 1696, a London bailiff attempted to serve process on a debtor who had taken refuge within the precincts of the Savoy. The bailiff was tarred and feathered and taken in a wheelbarrow to the Strand, where he was tied to a maypole that stood by what is now Somerset House as an improvised pillory.
caption: The Bostonians Paying the Excise-Man, 1774 British propaganda print that depicts the tarring and feathering of Boston Commissioner of Customs John Malcolm. This was the second time that Malcolm had been tarred and feathered.
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