George Jeffreys ran England’s court system during the reign of King James II. Known as the Bloody Judge, Jeffreys sentenced dozens of people to death. After Monmouth’s Rebellion, an attempt by the Duke of Monmouth to overthrow the king, was suppressed in 1685, Jeffreys sentenced hundreds of Monmouth’s supporters to slavery in the Caribbean. Others he sentenced to be whipped.
One of his victims was Lydia Linton a young barmaid. Lydia, a big English girl with blonde hair, blue eyes and a light complexion, raised a glass to toast the Duke of Monmouth, whom she saw as a liberator from high taxes and repression. After Monmouth’s rebellion was crushed, Lydia was arrested. Judge Jeffreys saw to it that Lydia would pay dearly for her indiscretion. He sentenced her to be stripped to the waist and then to be whipped through every market town in Dorsetshire.
Lydia now faced horrendous public pain and humiliation. There are 25 market towns in Dorsetshire, and public whippings were carried out on Market Day, which took place every two weeks.
Every time she was whipped, Lydia was stripped to the waist, her bare breasts exposed, her hands tied to the end of a cart, and then paraded through each town through streets crowded with shoppers.
Besides being stripped to the waist, Lydia had to endure her punishment barefoot. Although the jagged cobblestones gashed and bruised her bare feet, her lovely bare ankles enhanced her sex appeal.
No set number of lashes was mandated. Prisoners were to be whipped until their bodies were “bloody,” so Lydia was whipped at least until the lash drew blood.
For Lydia, being indecently exposed before the Market Day crowds was often worse than the whipping. Because most people in Dorset were loyal to the king, they did not look kindly upon a woman they considered a traitor. As Lydia was paraded naked before them, they taunted her, insulted her, made lewd comments about her bare breasts, feet and ankles, and pelted her with rotten fruit and rotten eggs as she danced by them, screaming under the lash. To them, Lydia was scum. She deserved to be publicly humiliated and tortured.
As Lydia made her way through the towns of Dorset, heralds alerted the public when she was coming to town. In the springtime, crowds gathered to watch Lydia’s vigorous dancing under the lash. Lydia’s bare breasts bobbed seductively and glistened with sweat during the hot summer months as she screamed in agony. In the autumn, shoppers stocking up for the winter months paused to watch Lydia, her back now a mass of bleeding welts, sing and do a barefoot dance. When winter set in, crowds watched Lydia as she shivered, snowflakes falling on her bare arms, shoulders and breasts, yet the sting of the lash on her bare back stimulated her to dance barefoot and sing, her bare breasts bobbing seductively, as blood ran down her back.
Following her punishment, Lydia Linton gained a reputation throughout the shire as a topless dancer—and it is a safe bet that she would never again insult the king.