Brutal torture device involved having metal cage round your head and walked through streets

While some historical torture devices leaned towards the elaborate and expensive, many of them stuck to being simple, cruel and humiliating.

Though there were certain contraptions such as the Brazen Bull, which required a lot of work to use or the dreaded rack which was basically a major installation in whichever dungeon had one, the simplest methods sometimes ended up being the worst.

A torture method first recorded as being used in 16th century Scotland known as the 'Scold's Bridle' was designed to punish and humiliate the wearer in front of everybody they knew.

This cruel contraption took the form of a simple cage, which could be fitted around the head, with a piece of metal that would slide into the mouth and press down on the tongue.

When a person was fitted with this device, also known as a 'Brank', they couldn't speak and it was most often used on women who were being punished for speaking.

Examples of the 'Branks', or 'Scold's Bridle' from 17th Century Scotland. (By Kim Traynor - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=17245735)

The first recorded use of this torture device was in 1567 in Scotland on a woman named Bessie Tailiefeir, who faced allegations of slandering a man named Thomas Hunter in Edinburgh.

She was sentenced to spend an hour with this device on her, and another woman who was subjected to this punishment was later able to write an account of what it was like.

In 1655 in Carlisle, a woman named Dorothy Waugh was punished for 'ungodly practices' and described it as 'like a steel cap and my hat being violently plucked off which was pinned to my head', which felt like a 'stone weight of iron upon my head'.

She described the metal bridle forced into her mouth as being 'so unreasonably big a thing for that place as cannot be well related', recounting that the whole ordeal was designed 'to keep me from speaking'.

A person forced into the Scold's Bridle could then have a leash attached to them and be forced to walk through streets so that people could see their humiliation.

Some of the devices had a spike placed in the length of metal that was pressed into the tongue, which could pierce it and cause a wound.

While wearing this, a person couldn't eat, speak or drink, and would be reliant upon their captor to release them from it.

There are other examples of the Scold's Bridle which took the form of a mask to cover the face of a punished individual.

All in all, it sounds like a rather horrible device, thankfully, we don't use it any more.