By F. A. Carrington, Esq. 



41 



coat, hand-cuffs and bilboes, and other obsolete appliances of 

 discipline. To the same curious observer of olden usages I owe the 

 fact, that within comparatively recent memory the brank was used 

 for punishing disorderly females at Manchester. Mr. Greene, in a 

 communication to the Society of Antiquaries in 1849, accompanying 

 the exhibition of the branks from Lichfield and Hamstall Ridware, 

 Staffordshire, advanced the supposition that the punishment of the 

 scold's-bridle had been peculiar to that county j 1 its use was, however, 

 even more frequent in the Palatinate, as also in the northern counties 

 and in Scotland. Pennant, in his Northern Tour in 1772, records its 

 use at Langholm, in Dumfriesshire, where the local magistrates had 

 it always in readiness ; it had been actually used a month previous 

 to his visit, till the blood gushed from the mouth of the victim. 2 

 Several other examples of the brank have been noticed in North 

 Britain ; it is indeed mentioned, with the jougs, by Dr. Wilson, in 

 his " Prehistoric Annals of Scotland," as a Scottish instrument of 

 ecclesiastical punishment, for the coercion of scolds and slanderous 

 gossips. The use of such bridles for unruly tongues occurs in the 

 Burgh Records of Glasgow, as early as 1574, when two quarrel- 

 some females were bound to keep the peace, or on further offending 

 — " to be brankit." In the records of the Kirk Session, Stirling, 

 for 1600, " the brankes " are mentioned as the punishment for a 

 shrew. In St. Mary's Church, at St. Andrews, a memorable 

 specimen still exists, displayed for the edification of all zealous 

 Presbyterians, on a table in the elders' pew. It is known as the 

 " Bishop's Branks," but whether so styled from the alleged use of 

 such torment by Cardinal Beaton, in the sufferings of Patrick 

 Hamilton and other Scottish martyrs who perished at the stake in 

 the times of James V., or rather, in much later times, by Arch- 

 bishop Sharp, to silence the scandal which an unruly dame promul- 

 gated against him before the congregation, popular tradition seems 

 to be unable to determine 3 . A representation of the " Bishop's 



1 Proceedings of Soo. Ant., vol. ii., p. 8. 

 2 Tour in Scotland, vol. ii., p. 91. 

 3 The incident is related in the Life of Archbishop Sharp. See also Howie's 

 Judgment on Persecutors, p. 30, Biographia Scoticana, as cited by Jamieson. 

 v. Branks. 



