Wasn't tarring and feathering almost always fatal in the end? I mean, take some guy (be he con-artist, revenuer, scalawag, witch, errant time traveller, or whatnot), and pour or paint boiling hot tar all over his body. Now. Go get one. I'll wait. Tar has to be pretty dern hot to flow freely enough to paint or pour, right? Normally it flows at a rate of like one drop per seven years or so (according to the world's most boring experiment, started at U of Sidney [2], I think, and duplicated at Rice U. in Texas- not that they publicize it- but I seen it!). It's pretty much a big black rock at room temperature. Sure, it's fun to drop on people for a while, but it has no lasting entertainment value. To have a good rousing tarring, you'd want it to flow nicely, like paint, or at least molasses. Otherwise, the crowd gets bored, and goes home to make hand shadows or molest the sheep or whatever their normal eventide wont. So you have this poor schmoe. (Even if he is an utter bastard beforehand, being tarred and feathered earns him poor schmoe status, in my opinion.). He's covered in superhot tar. It's burning him head to toe. And he's inhaling scalding, noxious tar fumes to boot. Assuming he survives the immediate treatment long enough to be ran out of town on a rail (whatever the twinking foop that means), he's still got to get the stuff off of him somehow. Say that he finds a friendly 18th century sawbones who peels it off of him with a cheesegrater and applies batter-fried leeches, or whatever his issue of the Colonial AMA Newsletter dictates that week. Now he's got second and third degree burns head-to-foot, and a doctor who's still skeptical about this new-fangled "soap" thing those young whippersnappers back East keep rabbiting on about. And that's best case. Life expectancy? Not long enough to get a good office betting pool going, anyway. And old Ollie, the sadistic bastard, decided he'd dump some chicken dung encrusted feathers all over the guy to seal the deal. Ollie always was a bit of a jerk, though. Charged too much for good tarrin' feathers, too.
It's kind of like the pillory, or the stocks. I always get those confused. One of those things kids can stand on while they wave at the passing knight, while Queen's stately "We are the Champions" plays and naked Chaucers make speeches, I think. [2] Anyhow, some guy gets convicted of looking at Goody Goodwife's ankles (which are admittedly mighty bodacious), or kiping an apple, or something. He's sentenced to spend a few days in the stocks, in town square. There, the townspeople spend the next few days and nights stoning him, beating him, taunting him with tainted water, and doing whatever else they can think of to vent their frustrations with the general suckiness of life, and the high cost of HMO leeching insurance.
In short, it looks like Hollywood has lied to us, again. Of course, Wes Craven doesn't do Westerns, at least last time I checked. So I guess tarring and feathering will never really reach the appropriate horror status it deserves. And Prince Albert (or whatever his name was) stopped the crowd before that fake knight guy got to be beaten to death with cabbages, to the tune of "We Will Rock You." So I guess we'll never get that cinema veritas I keep hearing about, now.
[1] I have since learned it was actually the University of Queensland, in Australia. At least I got the continent right. More information on the experiment can be found here.
[2] I watched the movie A Knight's Tale a little while before writing this essay. If you haven't seen it, well, this will make no sense to you. Basically, it was a movie about a young man that fakes being a knight so that he can break into the exciting, fast paced world of medieval professional jousting. It had a soundtrack that included rock classics by such luminaries as Queen and War ("Low Rider"). In short, it was seriously messed up. And that's even if we discount being treated to several shots of Geoffrey Chaucer's bare ass. Yes, that Chaucer. Like I said, "Messed up."