Hold yer tongue

Whilst use of the scold’s bridle was never a legalised form of punishment, it was used by town councils, kirk sessions and barony courts in Scotland, who assumed a right to inflict it. These institutions were set up by men; it was men who sat on the sessions; and it was men who passed the judgements.

Once the bridle was placed on the woman, she was then led through the streets by the beadle or chained to the market cross. Apart from the obvious fear and pain of wearing it, the bridle was intended to humiliate the wearer. Bystanders would jeer, hurl insults, throw objects, spit at and even urinate on women whilst chained. Perhaps even more cruelly, a woman who was forced to wear the bridle at home, as a deterrent to her children, would present a terrifying picture, with the distortion of her features and probable laceration of her tongue and lips.

This barbarous instrument of torture has the dubious honour of being responsible for the saying ‘hold your tongue’ – it is a visceral reference to the metal plate that held down a woman’s tongue.

The scold’s bridle at Craigievar was catalogued as part of Project Reveal. Shockingly, the description of the purpose of the object was: ‘The branks were used to discourage a blethering woman’. Why should we be concerned about this description? Just because it’s International Women’s Day?

This description was added by a young man in 2019. It may be that the description was lifted from another source, to add a layer of identification to the object; or he may have written it at the time. But irrespective of the source, the use of the colloquial ‘blethering’ (and its inclusion within a 21st-century digital storage facility or database) is a reminder that the negative stereotyping of women is invidiously alive and well today.

The bridle at Craigievar and other examples are hardly ever mentioned other than as an objects of shock value or even amusement. The Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, the National Museum of Scotland, the towns of Lichfield, Shrewsbury, Leicester and Chester all have examples of branks. Currently, none of them explore the dark and deeply misogynistic element of the bridle, or question its psychological impact on the victim and the message it conveyed to all those who witnessed this type of punishment.

Many institutions, such as museums and heritage bodies, are just beginning to be held accountable for the objects they display and how they are described. In 2019, a group of vociferous women in Northern Ireland had to petition Armagh County Museum to address a concern about the interpretation of a scold’s bridle which was on display. The group protested that ‘Violence Against Women is No Laughing Matter’ as a response to the presentation of the object in a jocular and dismissive tone. The subtitle of the exhibit was: ‘Gossiping women meet their match!’ Whilst the display raised the question of why the torture was reserved for women, it refused to engage with it and ended the description by saying: ‘in the modern era of political correctness it is perhaps best not to pursue the matter further!’

The group of women insisted the museum should clarify that the bridle was a torture device and that it fitted into a gendered pattern of discrimination aimed solely at silencing women in Northern Ireland, which was still continued. The bridle was reserved for women because they had transgressed a gendered behavioural norm: that women should be silent, and that speaking was the preserve of men. The women highlighted the fact that there had been no outcry regarding the presentation of the artefact in 2019, indicating how accepted and mainstream casual attitudes to violence against women remain.

Whilst modern society has dispensed with the use of the bridle, women’s tongues are still consistently and collectively silenced in many ways. Dame magazine published an article entitled ‘We Have Always Silenced Women’ in 2017. It raised the spectre of women not being believed, even when it takes courage to speak up. In the era of the Me Too movement, many women came forward with sexual assault allegations and were disbelieved, ridiculed, critiqued or simply shut down.

Many women struggle with speaking up, not just at home but also in the workplace. Women might recognise having to stop themselves from saying something that they’d really like to say, using the expression: ‘I had to bite my tongue’. This is another expression with its origin in the scold’s bridle and its literal suppression of speech.

A newly adopted phrase called hepeating describes a moment when a woman has shared an idea or comment which has been overlooked or ignored by a senior colleague, but that same idea or comment is then appropriated by a male colleague who is praised for it. Many women have commented that this happens to them every day, both at work and in their social lives.

It is generally acknowledged that the scold’s bridle has been consigned to history. On International Women’s Day we might reflect that, whilst this metal contraption has been relegated to a collection of curiosities, women are still having to fight to be heard.

• Fifty years after winning the legal right to equal pay, women still face a median gender pay gap of 15.9%, while 40% of women of ethnic minorities live in poverty.
• Up to 3 million women and girls in the UK experience rape, domestic violence, stalking or other violence each year.
• 31% of the funding from local authorities to prevent violence against women was cut between 2017 and 2018. On a typical day, 230 women seeking refuge from abuse were turned away by Women’s Aid due to a lack of space.
• Whilst we all endured lockdowns during 2020 and 2021, the BBC reported on the shadow pandemic highlighted by the UN– this was a 20% rise in the reporting of domestic abuse in the UK.

Just how far have we come?