ay would have provoked a civil war two centuries ago; while freedom
of judgment or expression in religious matters was ever sharply silenced
and punished in New England.

That ultra-sensitiveness which made a lampoon, a jeer, a scoff, a taunt,
an unbearable and inflaming offence, was of equal force when used
against the men of the day in punishment for real crimes and offenses.

In many--indeed, in nearly all--of the penalties and punishments of past
centuries, derision, scoffing, contemptuous publicity and personal
obloquy were applied to the offender or criminal by means of demeaning,
degrading and helpless exposure in grotesque, insulting and painful
"engines of punishment," such as the stocks, bilboes, pillory, brank,
ducking-stool or jougs. Thus confined and exposed to the free gibes and
constant mocking of the whole community, the peculiar power of the
punishment was accented. Kindred in their nature and in their force were
the punishments of setting on the gallows and of branding; the latter,
whether in permanent form by searing the flesh, or by mutilation; or
temporarily, by labeling with written placards or affixed initials.

One of the earliest of these degrading engines of confinement for public
exposure, to be used in punishment in this country, was the bilboes.
Though this instrument to "punyssche transgressours ageynste ye Kinges
Maiesties lawes" came from old England, it was by tradition derived from
Bilboa. It is alleged that bilboes were manufactured there and shipped
on board the Spanish Armada in large numbers to shackle the English
prisoners so confidently expected to be captured. This occasion may have
given them their wide popularity and employment; but this happened in
1588, and in the first volume of _Hakluyt's Voyages_, page 295, dating
some years earlier, reference is made to bilbous.

They were a simple but effective restraint; a long heavy bolt or bar of
iron having two sliding shackles, something like handcuffs, and a lock.
In these shackles were thrust the legs of offenders or criminals, who
were then locked in with a padlock. Sometimes a chain at one end of the
bilboes attached both bilboes and prisoner to the floor or wall; but
this was superfluous, as the iron bar prevented locomotion. Whether the
Spanish Armada story is true or not, bilboes were certainly much used on
board ship. Shakespeare says in _Hamlet_: "Methought I lay worse than
the mutines in the bilboes." In _Cook's Voyages_