Scold's bridles and stocks of Cheshire trip

Posted by Tanos on Sat 17 May 08, 11:49 PM

Last month popi and I went on a day trip to museums with Scold's Bridles. For some reason, Cheshire has a several of these within a short distance of Manchester. We also took in some village stocks and a gibbet cage. These are interesting historically and as hard bondage, but they're inspiration for equipment to install at Bridgewood one day, and also for attachments for my headcage.

We made a longer Prisons Trip last year, and I'm following the same format with a map of the route and then short reviews of each museum or location.

The first visit was to the Warrington Museum and Art Gallery, which was the biggest of the day and a classic town museum: some local history, some local fossils and archaeology, cases of stuffed birds and their eggs, etc. Virtually the first gallery you come to has the crime and punishment exhibits.

This scold's bridle is included in a glass case along with handcuffs and truncheons. It was originally from Farnworth, a village to the west of Warrington itself, and includes a tongue-depressor and a chain at the back, for attaching the bridle to something fixed.

The museum also has a light set of stocks on wheels from Latchford. They have 6 ankle holes, and take the form of a wooden base with a long iron strap with half-holes provided by both the wood and metal. Since stocks punish via public humiliation and exposure, having mobile stocks means they can be used somewhere that is busy and perhaps relevant to the crime.

Finally Woolston gibbet cage which was used to expose the body of Edward Miles in 1792 on the the Manchester Road in Woolston where he murdered James Hogworth, a mail boy. This was the last use of a gibbet cage in the Warrington area. Coincidentally, Woolston was also the location of the first few Manchester Munches. Gibbet cages can now be bought from bondage suppliers, and although I've never seen one used outdoors, they lend themselves to it.

Next we went to Grappenhall just to the east of Warrington, which has a set of wooden stocks outside the church yard, in front of the pub. These stocks have stone pillars and wooden planks. The top one slides up in groves to allow the subject's ankles to be placed in the holes, and this design has the useful feature of limiting how high the plank can go and therefore how far it can fall - potentially onto the subject's legs. For BDSM use, a similar design with an even smaller range of movement would be even better in this respect, especially if being used unsupervised by a someone without the imagination to recognise that kind of risk.

After Grappenhall, we visited the small town of Lymm, which has a very similar set of stocks on the steps surrounding its market cross. The one, however, has a visible lockable hasp with a modern Squire padlock. (Just up the hill from the market cross is a small road called Domville Close, which I took a picture of just for the irony of it.)

The route then took us across the M6 to the other side of Cheshire, and first to the town of Congleton, which has a tiny one-room museum featuring one original and one apparent replica scold's bridle. Congleton has some kind of folklore (or urban myth) that houses had an attachment point next to the fireplaces to which the town scold's bridle could be attached if the housewife misbehaved.

Macclesfield has its bridle in the Macclesfield Museum in West Park (next to Sainsbury's car park) along with an iron girdle with Darby wrist cuffs.

Finally, we went to the new Staircase House museum in Stockport, which has a good exhibition about the functioning of the town, it's market and charter, byelaws, and the mixture of deterrent, punishment and entertainment that things like stocks and bridles represented. One of the 19th century displays has several sets of wrist and ankle cuffs, truncheons and a prison cell door.

The Stockport scold's bridle is the most unusual of the set. It has the usual features of tongue depressor (with spikes in this case), some sort of chain (at the front for leading), and bands over the head and round the beck. However, bright red paint is still visible on the metal, and there are two metal curls at the top, presumably to increase the ridiculousness and humiliation of being displayed in it. The chain also has the frayed end of a leather handle, as you have on a dog lead.

I'm collecting these and more pictures on the Scold's Bridles and Stocks sections of my homesite.

Edited Sat 18 Apr 09, 1:19 AM by Tanos