On Sunday evening, an alleged drug dealer was tarred and feathered in a Belfast street as passers-by looked on. His balaclava-wearing attackers then tied him to a lamp-post and put a placard around his neck that read: "I'm a drug dealing scumbag." Images were taken on a mobile phone and released to the media. Politicians who condemned the assault described it as a lamentable return to 1970s Northern Ireland when such so-called "punishment attacks" were visited on women accused by the IRA of fraternising with police or British soldiers.

Tarring and feathering is an ancient punishment, first referred to officially in 1189, when Richard the Lionheart ruled that any robber found sailing with his army of crusaders to Jerusalem "shall be first shaved, then boiling pitch shall be poured upon his head, and a cushion of feathers shook over it so that he may be publicly known; and at the first land where the ships put in he shall be cast on shore."

The practice has since been used to punish London bailiffs, nuns and friars in Madrid, French-women suspected of fraternising with Nazi soldiers, and Joseph Smith, founder of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, who was tarred and feathered for alleged acts of depravity against a 15-year-old girl in 1832 by her brothers. It was also used in the last century by the Ku Klux Klan against African-Americans.

When tarring and feathering was widely used in the American Revolution by both colonists and patriots, victims were often stripped and forced to watch tar boil over a fire. When they attempted to clean themselves after the attack, blistered skin would often come off with the tar.

A similar practice called pitchcapping was later used by British authorities to torture Irish rebels in 1798. It involved placing a conical cap filled with boiling pitch on a bound victim's head until it cooled and hardened. The pitch would then be removed, taking away skin from the victim's head and leaving them scarred.

Why was tarring and feathering revived in Belfast on Sunday? "The community responded in the way that it did because it had no confidence in the police," said Frankie Gallagher of the Ulster Political Research Group, a body connected to the Ulster Defence Association, a loyalist paramilitary organisation that has denied involvement in the attack. Margaret Ritchie, Northern Ireland's social development minister, said: "This type of behaviour has no place in civilised society."