In early centuries public penance was ordered by the Church in cases where no form of secular punishment was considered appropriate. It had been first instituted by the Church of Rome, and according to the Shorter Oxford Dictionary is defined as ‘The sacred ordinance in which remission of sins is received by a penitent through the absolution of a priest, the necessary parts being contrition, confession, satisfaction and absolution.’ Richard III decided on this punishment for Jane Shore after he had failed to subdue her through allegations of witchcraft and for concealing the whereabouts of the Marquess of Dorset, a Woodville and therefore an enemy. Immorality in women was a charge seen to be deserving of penance in public, mere confession in a church not being regarded as punishment enough. As for Jane Shore, Richard had a strong case, for her life with Edward IV, Lord Hastings and possibly the Marquess of Dorset would surely be public knowledge, and she was charged with harlotry. Her short walk through the city streets ended in St Paul’s church, where according to old engravings the priests who had accompanied her were still by her side, so that the conditions of the ‘sacred ordinance’ were presumably met.
Richard knew that he could not order this punishment himself, but had to ask the Bishop of London to arrange it. In the past there had been one outstanding case of public penance when no other form of suitable punishment could be instituted. This occurred in the twelfth century after Henry II had angrily arranged the murder of the man he called ‘this turbulent priest’, Thomas à Becket, Archbishop of Canterbury. The Church insisted that the king must be punished, and since no secular punishment could be ordered it was decided that the king himself must carry out this penance, which he did close to Becket’s tomb in Canterbury Cathedral in 1174.
One other memorable case occurred much later, not long in fact before Jane Shore had been born. This was the punishment of Eleanor, Duchess of Gloucester, who had been accused of witchcraft in her attempt to help her husband Duke Humphrey move closer to the throne, perhaps ultimately to occupy it. She denied the charge and maintained that any witchcraft she had carried out was due to her efforts to conceive a child. Nobody believed her, and she was sentenced to public penance which involved being forced to walk to a church, clad only in a white sheet, an incident which Shakespeare included in Henry VI, Part II. She also had to carry a burning taper in her hand. Women of the middle and upper classes could not easily be punished otherwise, but those of the working class, including the infamous Margery Jourdemayne, who were seen as guilty of witchcraft, were burnt at the stake.
The end of the Middle Ages did not mean the end of public penance, but if it became less dramatic it seems to have been imposed frequently; so much so that the churchwardens’ accounts for Wakefield Cathedral recorded the loans of sheets for both women and men ‘to do penance in’, at a usual cost of six pence. Penance of this kind was demanded mainly for ‘immorality, cheating, defamation of character, disregard of the Sabbath and other transgressions’. In 1534 the vicar of a Hull church was punished for preaching a ‘heretical’ sermon. He had to walk round the church on a Sunday, ‘clad only in his shirt, barefooted and carrying a large faggot in his hand’.
Perhaps the dramatic aspect of the punishment helped to maintain the custom, just as it had helped Jane Shore, who had been punished as a so-called ‘harlot’ but earned the sympathy of the spectators. In Scotland, in the nineteenth century, any wrongdoers were made to sit on a stool throughout a church service, wearing a black shawl over their head, while sometimes a man would suffer a public rebuke from the minister.
In twenty-first-century Britain public penance has been replaced by public apology, as for instance at the blessing for the marriage in 2005 of Prince Charles, heir to the throne, and the former Mrs Camilla Parker Bowles. The more dramatic aspect of public penance as known in the past has not been forgotten in the English language, as witness the still extant phrase ‘to stand in a white sheet’, implying guilt, regret and apology.