Flagellation - The English Vice

Birch Rods, Canes, Cat'o Nine Tails...

I went on the London's Naughty West End Tour with my Dom friends, and felt like sharing  a thing or two about flagellation and Theresa Berkley. I like the practice, I like masochists, I like Her, and I like the horse.

Flagellation was named "the English Vice" by French prostitutes who encountered wealthy English travelers. Growing out of the country’s long-standing reliance on corporal punishment in schools and institutions, it has deep roots in Britain. By the late seventeenth century, London already contained a small network of rooms dedicated to erotic flagellation, operated by women often called “correctress” or “governess.” These establishments attracted a clientele that ranged from clerks to members of Parliament.

Perhaps the most famous was Theresa Berkley, active in the 1820s and 1830s, who accumulated what today would ammount to £12,000,000. Her establishment functioned with unusual organization for the era: specially designed equipment, consistent clientele, and a reputation that reached far beyond London. Proving capacity for capital investment and a clientele willing to pay for novelty, she invented the adjustable Berkley Horse, a bench where to restrain her clients during flagellation session

During the Victorian era, when the public became increasingly moralistic, the underground scene expanded. Numerous clandestine publishers in Soho, Covent Garden, and Holywell Street, produced works centered on disciplinary fantasies. Titles such as The Romance of Chastisement or Exhibition of Female Flagellants were circulated in private editions. There was also a steady presence of women offering “correctional services” advertised in coded language.

By mid-twentieth century, periodicals such as Janus, Roué, and Kane revived the earlier Victorian themes and created a bridge between the historic underground and contemporary fetish culture. These magazines standardized the iconography of the English vice with emphasis on ritualized forms of power exchange.

Among the tools: Birch Rods, Canes, Cat'o Nine Tails, Branches... Maybe you should try on your own skin. Enquire.