The finger pillory is a simple device for restraining the finger?and thus the body?of someone who has been fingered as being a miscreant.
The drawing and description shown here (see Figure 1) are from the book The Archeological Album; or Museum of National Antiquities, edited by Thomas Wright, illustrated by F.W. Fairholt, London, Chapman and Hall, 1845.
(That’s an excerpt from the article “The Meaning of the Finger,” published in air 13:5.)