FLAGELLANTS, The, Sylvester Hassell The custom of voluntary flagellation, as a means of self-purification or of the propitiation of the Deity, was practiced by the ancient Pagan Egyptians and Greeks and Romans; and, before being abandoned by the latter in the fifth century, was adopted by some Catholic Bishops in their courts. But, from the thirteenth to the fifteenth century, especially in the years 1260, 1349, and 1414, it raged in many countries of continental Europe as a religious mania. “All ranks, both sexes, all ages, were possessed with the madness— nobles, wealthy merchants, modest and delicate women, even children of five years old.
They stripped themselves naked to the waist, covered their faces that they might not be known, and went two by two, both day and night, in solemn, slow procession, from city to
city, with a cross and a banner before them, scourging themselves till the blood tracked their steps, and shrieking out their doleful psalms. Thirty-three days and a half, the number of years of the Lord’s sad sojourn in this world of man, was the usual period for the penance of each.
Sovereign princes, as Raymond of Toulouse, kings as Henry II of England, had yielded their backs to the scourge. Flagellation was the religious luxury of Saint Louis IX of France, who had his priest scourge him every Friday with an iron chain, and in Lent on Mondays and Fridays, and who wore in his girdle an ivory case of such scourges, such boxes being his favorite presents to his courtiers.
A year of penance was taxed at three thousand lashes. Dominic, with one hundred lashes; of the Mendicant Order, accompanied each Psalm with one hundred lashes; so that the whole Psalter, with fifteen thousand stripes, equaled five years’ penance. Dominicus Loricatus (wearing a shirt of mail next to his skin) could discharge, in six days, the penance of an entire century, by whipping of three hundred thousand stripes. Francis of Assisi, from self-flagellation, had made his skin one sore from head to foot, when he died. Scourging was considered a substitute for all the “sacraments of the church,” and even for the merits of Christ. It became so excessive and scandalous that even popes and Catholic governments suppressed the public exhibitions; but the merit of voluntary self-chastisement is still a doctrine of Roman Catholicism. (Hassell’s History pg 447)