<P> The victim would be stripped naked, or stripped to the waist . Hot tar was then either poured or painted onto the person while he was immobilized . Then the victim either had feathers thrown on him or was rolled around on a pile of feathers so that they stuck to the tar . </P> <P> The image of the tarred - and - feathered outlaw remains a metaphor for severe public criticism . </P> <P> The earliest mention of the punishment appears in orders that Richard I of England issued to his navy on starting for the Holy Land in 1189 . "Concerning the lawes and ordinances appointed by King Richard for his navie the forme thereof was this...item, a thiefe or felon that hath stolen, being lawfully convicted, shal have his head shorne, and boyling pitch poured upon his head, and feathers or downe strawed upon the same whereby he may be knowen, and so at the first landing - place they shall come to, there to be cast up" (transcript of original statute in Hakluyt's Voyages, ii. 21). </P> <P> A later instance of this penalty appears in Notes and Queries (series 4, vol . v), which quotes James Howell writing in Madrid in 1623 of the "boisterous Bishop of Halberstadt...having taken a place where there were two monasteries of nuns and friars, he caused divers feather beds to be ripped, and all the feathers thrown into a great hall, whither the nuns and friars were thrust naked with their bodies oiled and pitched and to tumble among these feathers, which makes them here (Madrid) presage him an ill - death ." (The Bishop was apparently Christian the Younger of Brunswick .) </P>

How do you get tar and feathers off your skin