<P> Another device used to immobilise offenders was a birching table, used in Scotland, with two holes in it through which the offender's arms were inserted but otherwise left free and untied . The offender's feet were tied into position and a strap fastened immediately above the waist . </P> <P> Whatever position is adopted, care must be taken (e.g. by having the recipient's legs kept together) not to strike the back of the genitals . </P> <P> It was the most common school and judicial punishment in Europe up to the mid-19th century, when caning gained increasing popularity . According to some accounts, even the legendary sting of the cat o' nine tails was less feared than the birch in certain prisons . The birch was always applied to the bare buttocks (as also on the continent), a humiliation usually befalling boys (like the boy's cat, likewise on the naked posterior), the' adult' cat to the back or shoulders of adults--although in the 20th century judges increasingly ordered the birch rather than the cat, even for robbery with violence (the only offence for which adult judicial corporal punishment was ordered in the latter decades of its use in mainland Britain). </P> <P> Birching featured in the French Revolution . One leader of the revolution, Anne - Josèphe Théroigne de Méricourt, went mad, ending her days in an asylum after a public birching . On 31 May 1793 the Jacobin women seized her, stripped her naked, and flogged her on the bare bottom in the public garden of the Tuileries . </P>

When did birching stop in the isle of man