Shame and scandal

Across Europe, rituals used to be enacted against traditional targets of communal resentment or hostility – lechers, promiscuous women, nagging wives, adulterers, swindlers, misers and so on. These rituals, intended to shame and humiliate their victims, were known in different parts of England as skimmington rides, skimmity, rough music and riding the stang; in France as charivari; and in Germany as Katzenmusik. In a skimmington ride, ¹ the victim would be visited by a boisterous crowd, and

in full cry the ‘Skimmington’ would parade an effigy of the ridiculed victim seated backwards on a donkey or a wooden pole; or the victim’s person would be hauled about and made to ‘ride the stang’, in which case he or she might be roughly treated or ducked into a convenient pond or dung-heap.

(Pearson 1983, 197)