— Also termed brake.
“The rack … to extort a confession from criminals, is a practice of a different nature …. And the trial by rack is utterly unknown to the law of England; though once when the dukes of Exeter and Suffolk … had laid a design to introduce the civil law into this kingdom as the rule of government, for a beginning thereof they erected a rack for torture; which was called in derision the duke of Exeter’s daughter, and still remains in the tower of London: where it was occasionally used as an engine of state, not of law, more than once in the reign of queen Elizabeth.” 4 William Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England 320–21 (1769).
