Above all, she must not be heard. The brank—also known as a scold’s bridle, or a witch’s bridle—was a sixteenth-century torture device used to muzzle a defiant or cranky woman, her head and jaw clamped into a metal cage. Some of the bridles, which were made of iron, included tongue depressors that would be inserted into the woman’s mouth; some of those had spikes on the bottom to pierce the tongues of the insubordinate.
