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Chris Green is The History Chap; telling stories that brings the past to life.

Flogging was the principle punishment in the British Army for nearly 200 years.

Even the Duke of Wellington was a supporter.

So how harsh was it? And, why (and when) did it end?

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For nearly 200 years, flogging was the disciplinary backbone of the British Army. 

From the passage of the Mutiny Act in 1689 to its abolition in 1881, corporal punishment shaped the experience of every soldier who wore the redcoat. 

The men who fought at Blenheim under Marlborough, who held the line at Waterloo under the Duke of Wellington, who endured the Peninsular and Crimean Wars, who fought in the American Revolutionary War — all were products of a system in which the lash was the primary instrument of military discipline.

Fans of Bernard Cornwell's Sharpe's Rifles will know this world. Richard Sharpe was sentenced to 2,000 lashes; Sergeant Harper bore the scars of sixty he didn't deserve. Cornwell wasn't exaggerating. During the Napoleonic Wars, British Army courts martial routinely handed down sentences of 500 lashes — and a thousand was not unheard of. Offences ranged from desertion and mutiny to the breathtakingly trivial: being deficient of a razor earned 200 lashes; improper use of barrack bedding, 400.

In this video, I trace the full story of flogging in the British Army. It begins with a legal rabbit hole — the Mutiny Act of 1689, passed after the Royal Scots mutinied at Ipswich and the government discovered it had no legal power to punish them. 

From there, I explore the brutal mechanics of the punishment itself: the cat o' nine tails, the regimental ceremony, the drummers and farriers who delivered the lashes, and the men who endured them.

I cover the key turning points — the scandal of Private Frederick White's death at Hounslow in 1846, the Duke of Wellington's response as Commander-in-Chief, and the long parliamentary campaign that finally ended with abolition under the Childers Reforms of 1881. 

Despite Private Hook being warned in the film "Zulu" that stealing Dr Witt's brandy was a flogging offence, by the time of Rorke's Drift the practice was already dying. 

But the story doesn't end in 1881. Corporal punishment continued in military prisons until 1907, and the replacement — Field Punishment Number One, which soldiers called "crucifixion" — wasn't abolished until 1923.

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