cage upon her head, and with the gag firmly pressed and locked against her tongue, the miserable creature, whose sole offence, perhaps, was that she had raised her voice in defence of her social rights against a brutal and besotted husband, or had spoken honest truth of some one high in office in the town, was paraded through the streets, led by a chain held in the hand of the bellman, the beadle, or the constable, or, chained to the pillory, the whipping-post, or market-cross, was subjected to every conceivable insult and degradation, without even the power left her of asking for mercy or of promising amendment for the future; and when the punishment was over, she was turned out from the town hall (or other place where the brutal punishment had been inflicted), maimed, disfigured, faint, and degraded, to be the subject of comment and jeering amongst her neighbors, and to be reviled by her persecutors.”

Mr. Andrews adds that the use of the brank was not sanctioned by law, but was altogether illegal; and he concludes his remarks on the subject by saying that “to everybody it must be a matter of deep regret that the instrument should ever have been used at all.”

Dr. Henry Heginbotham, of Stockport, England, says in speaking of the brank preserved in that town:  “There is no evidence of its having been actually used for many years; but there is testimony to the fact that within the last forty years the brank was brought to a termagant market-woman, who was effectually silenced by its threatened application.”

It is hard for those of us who live in New England to-day to believe that such cruelties were ever practised in a Christian land; but the evidence is too conclusive to admit of doubt.  Mr. Andrews, in the book referred to, gives engravings of a dozen or more different kinds of branks and bridles which can now be seen in England and Scotland.  At Congleton, Cheshire, a woman for scolding and abusing the town officers had the “town bridle” put upon her, and was led through every street in the town, as lately as the year 1824.

It is said that Chaucer wrote these lines: 

  “But for my daughter Julian,
  I would she were well bolted with a Bridle,
  That leaves her work to play the clack,
  And lets her wheel stand idle;
  For it serves not for she-ministers,
  Farriers nor Furriers,
  Cobblers nor Button-makers,
  To descant on the Bible.”

Mr. Andrews has confined his account of curious punishments mainly to England and Scotland.  Our Puritan ancestors must, we think, have seen some of the instruments of torture here described, and perhaps some of our great-great, etc., grandmothers may have been “ducked” or “silenced by a brank” many years before the sailing of the “Mayflower” or the “Lyon” or the “Angel Gabriel.”

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It was once the custom in New England for a sermon to be preached before the prisoner upon the day of his execution.  In the “Massachusetts Gazette,” Dec. 26, 1786, is the following notice:—­