Key with a misterious story

Fabe

Hi folks . Writing from Buenos Aires Argentina . Inherited a verry old house ( 1872). The original owner was comissioned to make an exact replica of a key that belonged to a jesuit jailhouse that operated in the area several hundred years earlier. m including a picture of the replica . its the same exact size and the orignal is in a museum. There is no further information . Its the jesuit jail that im interested in. Hoping you folks might be able to shed some light on the style or manufacture and perhaps its age or period .

Billy B Edwards Jr. CML

Fabe wrote
Hi folks . Writing from Buenos Aires Argentina . Inherited a verry old house ( 1872). The original owner was comissioned to make an exact replica of a key that belonged to a jesuit jailhouse that operated in the area several hundred years earlier. m including a picture of the replica . its the same exact size and the orignal is in a museum. There is no further information . Its the jesuit jail that im interested in. Hoping you folks might be able to shed some light on the style or anufacture and perhaps its age or period .

I’m not much help with provenance, but it looks very Spanish to me and appears to be a casting made by the lost wax method since there doesn’t seem to be a casting joint line where they are typical.
BBE.

[unknown]

Fabe

Thanks for the reply. Any idea what a lock that this key opened might loo like ? The key is about 12 inches long , I cant fathom how a key this large existed !
Fabe

Dean Nickel

Keep in mind that some of the older locks were mounted to the inside of the door. So the key had to be big enough to go thru the door to lock or unlock the door. Also on a jail I would think the locks were bigger so that group of guys couldn’t break down the door easily. This more than likely was the main door and not a cell door as the jailer might have used padlocks or just a simple bolt if the cell door was solid.

Adrian Weber

Jail keys were and are still bigger in size because they have to be operated many many times a day. Both the key and the whole locking mechanism, levers etc. is bigger than on a normal lock. These locks have to survive thousands of openings, sometimes even more than 50.000 openings through the years.

Very interesting replica key you have there 🙂
The original one was probably a forged.