15. The Scold’s Bridle prevented condemned women from talking, and sometimes severed the tongue altogether
Whilst perhaps the least physically painful of all the items on this list, the Scold’s Bridle, or Branks, provided a heady mixture of misogyny, physical torment, and public humiliation. The Scold’s Bridle was an iron framework which was placed over the female victim’s head, forcing a piece of iron into the mouth to prevent the tongue from moving and thus preventing the spread of gossip, husbands being nagged, or spells being cast. The Bridle would have to be worn in public to humiliate the victim, and some were elaborate affairs with ridiculous ears and appendages to increase this effect.
Being made of iron, the Scold’s Bridle weighed a lot and would cause great discomfort to the wearer. Some surviving examples were also eminently crueler than those described above. The iron appendage shoved under the tongue could be modified to ensure horrific injuries by the addition of spikes or simply being crudely sharpened. In these examples, the punished woman could not escape the tongue being severed or the mouth being lacerated, leading to lethal infection or a permanent hindrance to speech. Injuries aside, the shame of being thus punished in the small, close-knit communities of the past would be permanent.