Pilori

The pilori is a device intended to expose one condemned to the infamy. It could take various forms: simple wood post or stone column. It comprises sometimes also a structure out of lantern being able to contain a man more or less upright. The simpler shape of the pilori was the yoke or cangue in the Far East, board bored of three holes where one wedged the head and the two hands of the torture victim so as to be able to walk it (Chinese photographs of cangues and Vietnameses).

Pilori also indicates the Supplice itself of which the duration was variable, energy of a few hours to several days. It could match various other sorrows.

Used since the the Middle Ages, the pilori will be definitively abolished in France only in 1848.

It was a Droit seigneurial, sometimes a simple post which the Lord made plant on the place of the village to mean that it had the right of justice on this stronghold.

In Eastern Belgium, the pilori will give rise to the perron, symbol of the capacity communal.
In France. The pilori bears also the name of scale, in particular in areas close to Paris. One finds it quoted in the usual ones of Beauvaisis, Sens, Auxerre. Condemned, to reach the floor where it will be exposed to the public, was to borrow a scale from where the name of this torment. “Lash which swears vilainement of God and Nostre Dame must be put in lesquel a hore day in the presence of the commun run, porce which it has shame” (Habit of Beauvaisis). Certain communes have a street of the scale.

Nowadays

Nowadays, in occident, it is used only by the sadomasochistic or at the time of festival commemorative of the Middle Ages and the rebirth.

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