Branks

These devices, which existed in a vast profusion of fantastical and sometimes downright artistic styles from about 1500 to 1800, were inflected on those who had permitted themselves, ill-advisedly, utterances displeasing to those in power. The victims, locked into the masks and staked out in the town square, were also treated roughly by the crowd. Painful beatings, besmearing with faeces and urine, and serious wounding, sometimes fatal, was their lot.