Branding Iron

Description

Public shaming as a form of punishment for minor offences such as theft was practiced right up to the nineteenth century. The guilty person in such cases was publicly exposed and disgraced. Often the punishment was of limited duration. Pillorying, for example, entailed tying someone to a wooden post set up on the market square with a sign naming both the offender and the offence hung around his or her neck.
Branding rested on the same principle. A red-hot iron was used to burn a symbol – in this case Basel’s emblem, the Baselstab – onto the condemned person’s skin. Often, black gunpowder was then rubbed into the wound. Those punished in such a way remained branded their whole lives long. Being instantly identifiable, they could not re-enter places from which they had been banished. For the authorities, branding was a way of literally impressing their power to enforce law and order on ordinary people.