Curious Punishments of Bygone Days

								

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 and other sea-tales we
read of "bilboo-bolts" on sailors.
The Massachusetts magistrates brought bilboes from England as a means of
punishing refractory or sinning colonists, and they were soon in
constant use. In the very oldest court records, which are still
preserved, of the settlement of Boston--the Bay colony--appear the
frequent sentences of offenders to be placed in the bilboes. The
earliest entry is in the authorized record of the Court held at Boston
on the 7th of August, 1632. It reads thus: "Jams Woodward shall be sett
in the bilbowes for being drunk at the Newe-towne." "Newe-towne" was the
old name of Cambridge. Soon another colonist felt the bilboes for
"selling peeces and powder and shott to the Indians," ever a
bitterly-abhorred and fiercely-punished crime. And another, the same
year, for threatening--were he punished--he would carry the case to
England, was summarily and fearlessly thrust into the bilboes.
Then troublesome Thomas Dexter, with his ever-ready tongue, was hauled
up and tried on March 4, 1633. Here is his sentence:
"Thomas Dexter shal be sett in the bilbowes, disfranchized, and fyned
£15 for speking rpchfull and seditious words agt the government here
established." He also suffered in the bilboes for cursing, for
"prophane saying dam ye come." Thomas Morton of Mare-Mount, that
amusing old debauchee and roysterer, was sentenced to be "clapt into the
bilbowes." And he says "the harmeles salvages" stared at him in wonder
"like poore silly lambes" as he endured his punishment, and doubtless
some of "the Indesses, gay lasses in beaver coats" who had danced with
him around his merry Maypole and had partaken of his cask of "claret
sparkling neat" sympathized with him and cheered him in his indignity.
The next year another Newe-towne man, being penitent, Henry Bright, was
set in the bilboes for "swearynge." Another had "sleited the magistrates
in speaches." In 1635, on April 7, Griffin Montagne "shal be sett in ye
bilbowes for stealing boards and clapboards and enjoyned to move his
habitacon." Within a year we find offenders being punished in two places