{"id":23085,"date":"2013-07-03T00:01:19","date_gmt":"2013-07-03T07:01:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.todayifoundout.com\/?p=23085"},"modified":"2013-07-03T02:10:54","modified_gmt":"2013-07-03T09:10:54","slug":"the-stocks","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.todayifoundout.com\/index.php\/2013\/07\/the-stocks\/","title":{"rendered":"The Stocks"},"content":{"rendered":"
Dan Lewis runs the wildly popular daily newsletter Now I Know<\/a> (\u201cLearn Something New Every Day, By Email\u201d). To subscribe to his daily email, click here<\/a>..<\/div>\n

\"stocks\"<\/a>For a few centuries ending in the late 1800s, stocks were common in town centers in the United States and Europe. The device, used as a way to humiliate those who violated cultural norms or laws, was typically reserved for relatively minor infractions otherwise punishable by a fine. The offenders\u2019 arms were placed between the two slabs of wood, which in turn were locked. Their legs were often shackled at the ankles, and in some cases, the stocks themselves had a third hole for the offender\u2019s neck. Regardless, the stocks immobilized the offender, allowing townsfolk to hurl garbage (and worse) at them and generally shame those subjected to such punishment.<\/p>\n

Stocks, while common in colonial America, were not the end goal, though \u2014 they were simply a means to the end desire of being able to subject a ne\u2019er-do-well to public ridicule. In early colonial Boston, for example, the city\u2019s magistrates used something called\u00a0bilboes<\/a>\u00a0\u2013 iron ankle restraints which, like stocks, prevented the shamed person from moving much. But in Boston\u2019s case, the bilboes became unusable,\u00a0according to History.org<\/a>, so the town went to replace them. Iron was expensive, so Boston hired a carpenter named Edward Palmer to fashion a set of wooden stocks. He delivered, as promised, charging the town one pound, 13 shilling, and seven pence.<\/p>\n

But that price? Exorbitant by the standards of the day. The pound-shilling-pence system was not base-ten; rather, there were 12 pence in a shilling and 20 shillings in a pound. Palmer\u2019s stocks, therefore, cost the equivalent of 403 pence. But according to\u00a0a North Carolina authority on the value of money during colonial times<\/a>, a wood bed frame would run about eight shillings, or about 96 pence. Palmer\u2019s stocks were overpriced. And that wasn\u2019t looked kindly upon by Boston\u2019s magistrates.<\/p>\n

So what did the magistrates do? They gave Palmer the honor \u2014 or, dishonor \u2014 of being his creation\u2019s first user. The high price of the stocks was deemed to be extortion. Boston fined Palmer five pounds, much more than he had billed them for, and sentenced him to an hour in the stocks he had just created.<\/p>\n

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