“Sir, in my heart there was a kind of fighting,
That would not let me sleep: methought I lay
Worse than the mutines in the bilboes.”
This punishment is thus described by Steevens: “The bilboes is a bar of iron with fetters annexed to it, by which mutinous or disorderly sailors were anciently linked together. The word is derived from Bilboa, a place in Spain where instruments of steel were fabricated in the utmost perfection. To understand Shakespeare’s allusion completely, it should be known that, as these fetters connect the legs of the offenders very close together, their attempts to rest must be as fruitless as those of Hamlet, in whose mind ‘there was a kind of fighting that would not let him sleep.’ Every motion of one must disturb his partner in confinement. The bilboes are still shown in the Tower of London, among the other spoils of the Spanish Armada.”[846]
Brand.—The branding of criminals is indirectly alluded to in “2 Henry VI.” (v. 2), by Young Clifford, who calls the Duke of Richmond a “foul stigmatick,” which properly meant “a person who had been branded with a hot iron for some crime, one notably defamed for naughtiness.” The practice was abolished by law in the year 1822.
The practice, too, of making persons convicted of perjury wear papers, while undergoing punishment, descriptive of their offence, is spoken of in “Love’s Labour’s Lost” (iv. 3), where Biron says of Longaville:
“Why, he comes in like a perjure, wearing papers.”
Holinshed relates how Wolsey “so punished a perjure with open punishment and open paper-wearing that in his time it was disused.”
Breech. This old term to whip or punish as a school-boy is noticed in the “Taming of the Shrew” (iii. 1):
“I am no breeching scholar in the schools;
I’ll not be tied to hours nor ’pointed times”
—breeching being equivalent to “liable to be whipped.”
In “Merry Wives of Windsor” (iv. 1), Sir Hugh Evans tells the boy page: “If you forget your ‘quies,’ your ‘quæs,’ and your ‘quods,’ you must be preeches” (breeched).