Baffle. This was formerly a punishment of infamy inflicted on recreant knights, one part of which consisted in hanging them up by the heels, to which Falstaff probably refers in “1 Henry IV.” (i. 2), where he says to the prince, “call me villain, and baffle me.” And, further on (ii. 4): “if thou dost it half so gravely, so majestically, both in word and matter, hang me up by the heels for a rabbit-sucker, or a poulter’s hare.”[842] In “2 Henry IV.” (i. 2), the Chief Justice tells Falstaff that “to punish him by the heels would amend the attention of his ears.” And in “All’s Well that Ends Well” (iv. 3), where the lord relates how Parolles has “sat in the stocks all night,” Bertram says: “his heels have deserved it, in usurping his spurs so long.”
Spenser, in his “Fairy Queen” (vi. 7), thus describes this mode of punishment:
“And after all, for greater infamie
He by the heels him hung upon a tree,
And baffl’d so, that all which passed by
The picture of his punishment might see.”
The appropriate term, too, for chopping off the spurs of a knight when he was to be degraded, was “hack”—a custom to which, it has been suggested, Mrs. Page alludes in the “Merry Wives of Windsor” (ii. 1):[843] “What?—Sir Alice Ford! These knights will hack, and so thou shouldst not alter the article of thy gentry.”[844]
Mr. Dyce,[845] however, says the most probable meaning of this obscure passage is, that there is an allusion to the extravagant number of knights created by King James, and that hack is equivalent to “become cheap or vulgar.”
It appears, too, that in days gone by the arms, etc., of traitors and rebels might be defaced. Thus, in “Richard II.” (ii. 3), Berkeley tells Bolingbroke:
“Mistake me not, my lord; ’tis not my meaning
To raze one title of your honour out.”
Upon which passage we may quote from Camden’s “Remains” (1605, p. 186): “How the names of them, which for capital crimes against majestie, were erased out of the public records, tables, and registers, or forbidden to be borne by their posteritie, when their memory was damned, I could show at large.” In the following act (iii. 1) Bolingbroke further relates how his enemies had:
“Dispark’d my parks, and fell’d my forest woods,
From mine own windows torn my household coat,
Raz’d out my impress, leaving me no sign.”
Bilboes. These were a kind of stocks or fetters used at sea to confine prisoners, of which Hamlet speaks to Horatio (v. 2):