Steve Santini 17 Mar 2010
#5Very old and is not limited to France.
Germans were making such cuffs, (ones that held the wrists in two parts of a loop with a metal divider between tha hands), in the late Medieval period.
A number of years ago I was afforded a great opportunity at the Medieval Kriminal Museum in Rothenburg Germany when the curator gave a private tour to myself, my wife, and our daughter and then actually opened up some of the display cases to allow me to handle and closely examine a number of iron restraints.
One of the ones that caught my interest had the same loop to capture both wrists and with a metal bar in between.
Unlike the screw activated ones from France, this one had an ajoined lock box below the wrist loops and the key was a barrel type operating a simple and primitive warded lock.
The Rotherburg museum has another as well that is similiar in design.
After having handled this rare and unusual cuff and hearing about it from the director, I am 100% convinced that Houdini's so called, "Spanish Execution Manacle" was not Spanish at all but was a late Medieval German cuff.
When I was finding and acquiring restraints for The National Museum of Crime and Punishment in Washington, D.C., I found and purchased for them another so shaped German manacle but this one locked with a padlock.
By and large the French ones seem to favor a screw locking mechanism while all of the German variations I have seen either have a built on warded lock or secure by means of a padlock.
There is also a Dutch model with a screw lock on display at a Medieval justice museum in the Netherlands.
Steve Santini
