It became "quite common" for members of the Tractarian movement within the Anglican Communion to practice self-flagellation using a discipline.Historically speaking, in the 11th century, Peter Damian, a Benedictine Christian monk in the Roman Catholic tradition, taught that spirituality should manifest itself in physical discipline; he admonished those who sought to follow Christ to practice self-flagellation for the duration of the time it takes one to recite forty Psalms, increasing the number of flagellations on holy days of the liturgical calendar. For Damian, only those who shared in the sufferings of Christ could be saved. Throughout Christian history, the mortification of the flesh, wherein one denies themselves physical pleasures, has been commonly followed by members of the clergy, especially in Christian monasteries and convents; the 11th-century Dominicus Loricatus repeated the entire Psalter twenty times in one week, accompanying each psalm with a hundred lash-strokes to his back. The distinction of the Flagellants was to take this self-mortification into the cities and other public spaces as a demonstration of piety. Flagellantism
Flagellantism was a 14th-century movement, consisting of penitents in the Catholic Church. It began as a Christian pilgrimage and was later condemned by the Catholic Church as heretical. The followers were noted for including public flagellation in their rituals. This was a common practice during the Black Death, or the Great Plague. Spread in the 14th century
The first recorded incident was in Central Italy in Perugia, in 1259, the year after severe crop damage and famine throughout Europe.
Also referred to as the Phuket Vegetarian Festival, it is famous for its ritualised acts of flagellation, self-wounding, and trance-like ecstasies, as well as its vegetarian food-based fasting. References
Sources
Aberth, John (2010). From the Brink of the Apocalypse: Confronting Famine, War, Plague and Death in the Later Middle Ages (2nd ed.). Routledge. Cohn, Norman (1970). The Pursuit of the Millennium: Revolutionary Millenarians and Mystical Anarchists of the Middle Ages. Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-500456-6. Lea, Henry Charles (1922). A History of the Inquisition. Vol. II. The Macmillan Company. Schmidt, Muhammad Wolfgang G A, ed. (2017). "And on this Rock I Will Build My Church". A new Edition of Schaffs "History of the Reformation 1517-1648". Disserta Verlag. External links

"Flagellants" . Catholic Encyclopedia. 1913. "Flagellants" . Encyclopædia Britannica (11th ed.). 1911.