Imagine
the poor wretch with her head so encaged, her mouth cut and bleeding
by this sharp iron tongue, none too gently fitted by her rough
torturers, and then being dragged about the town amid the jeers of the
populace, or chained to the pillory in the market-place, an object of
ridicule and contempt. Happily this scene has vanished from vanishing
England. Perhaps she was a loud-voiced termagant; perhaps merely the
ill-used wife of a drunken wretch, who well deserved her scolding; or
the daring teller of home truths to some jack-in-office, who thus
revenged himself. We have shrews and scolds still; happily they are
restrained in a less barbarous fashion. You may still see some
fearsome branks in museums. Reading, Leeds, York, Walton-on-Thames,
Congleton, Stockport, Macclesfield, Warrington, Morpeth, Hamstall
Ridware, in Staffordshire, Lichfield, Chesterfield (now in possession
of the Walsham family), Leicester, Doddington Park, Lincolnshire (a
very grotesque example), the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford, Ludlow,
Shrewsbury, Oswestry, Whitchurch, Market Drayton, are some of the
places which still possess scolds' bridles. Perhaps it is wrong to
infer from the fact that most of these are to be found in the counties
of Cheshire, Staffordshire, and Shropshire, that the women of those
shires were especially addicted to strong and abusive language.
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