Ducking stool

A ballad, dating from about 1615, called "The Cucking of a Scold", illustrates the punishment inflicted to women whose behaviour made them be identified as "a Scold":

Then was the Scold herself,
In a wheelbarrow brought,
Stripped naked to the smock,
As in that case she ought:
Neats tongues about her neck
Were hung in open show;
And thus unto the cucking stool
This famous scold did go.^[5]

The cucking-stool, or Stool of Repentance, has a long history, and was used by the Saxons, who called it the scealding or scolding stool. It is mentioned in Domesday Book as being in use at Chester, being called cathedra stercoris, a name which seems to confirm the first of the derivations suggested in the footnote below. Tied to this stool the woman—her head and feet bare—was publicly exposed at her door or paraded through the streets amidst the jeers of the crowd.^[6]

The term cucking-stool is known to have been in use from about 1215. It means literally "defecation chair", as its name is derived from the old verb cukken and has not quite been rid of in many parts of the English speaking world as "to cack" (defecate) (akin to Dutch kakken and Latin cacāre [same meaning]; cf. Greek κακός/κακή ["bad/evil, vile, ugly, worthless"]), rather than, as popularly believed, from the word cuckold.^{[citation needed]}

Both seem to have become more common in the second half of the sixteenth century. It has been suggested this reflected developing strains in gender relations, but it may simply be a result of the differential survival of records. The cucking-stool appears to have still been in use as late as the mid-18th century, with Poor Robin's Almanack of 1746 observing:

Now, if one cucking-stool was for each scold,
Some towns, I fear, would not their numbers hold.

 

The ducking-stool was a strongly-made wooden armchair (the surviving specimens are of oak) in which the offender was seated, an iron band being placed around them so that they should not fall out during their immersion. The earliest record of the use of such is towards the beginning of the 17th century,^[6] with the term being first attested in English in 1597. It was used both in Europe and in the English colonies of North America.^[7]

Usually, the chair was fastened to a long wooden beam fixed as a seesaw on the edge of a pond or river. Sometimes, however, the ducking-stool was not a fixture but was mounted on a pair of wooden wheels so that it could be wheeled through the streets, and at the river-edge was hung by a chain from the end of a beam. In sentencing a woman the magistrates ordered the number of duckings she should have. Yet another type of ducking-stool was called a tumbrel. It was a chair on two wheels with two long shafts fixed to the axles. This was pushed into the pond and then the shafts released, thus tipping the chair up backwards. Sometimes the punishment proved fatal and the subject died.^[6]

In medieval times until the early 18th century, ducking was a way used to establish whether a suspect was a witch.^[8] The ducking stools were first used for this purpose but ducking was later inflicted without the chair. In this instance the subject's right thumb was bound to her left big toe. A rope was tied around the waist of the accused and she was thrown into a river or deep pond. If she floated, it was deemed that she was in league with the devil, rejecting the baptismal water. If she sank, she was "cleared. And dead".^{[9][better source needed]}

The tumbrel of a ducking stool is in the crypt of the Collegiate Church of St Mary, Warwick. There is also a ducking chair in Canterbury, where the High Street meets the River Stour.^[10]

A surviving ducking stool is on public display outside the Criminal Museum (Kriminalmuseum)^[11] in Rothenburg ob der Tauber, a well-preserved medieval town in Bavaria, Germany.

 

A complete ducking stool is on public display in Leominster Priory, Herefordshire. The town clock, commissioned for the Millennium, features a moving ducking stool depiction.^{[citation needed]}

Christchurch, Dorset, continues to house a replica ducking stool, at the site where punishments were once carried out.^[12]

There is a reference from about 1378 to a ducking stool as wymen pine ("women's punishment"),^[13]

A type of ducking stool can be seen briefly in the film Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975).

In the 1944 Powell and Pressburger film A Canterbury Tale, an American soldier stopping over at the town hall in fictional Chillingbourne (a village near Canterbury), is puzzled by an antique piece of furniture that he spots; the local magistrate informs him that it is a ducking stool.

In the Laurel and Hardy feature film Babes in Toyland, Laurel and Hardy are sentenced to the ducking stool, followed by banishment to Boogeyland, for burgling Barnaby's house.^{[citation needed]}

The last recorded cases are those of a Mrs Ganble at Plymouth (1808); Jenny Pipes, a "notorious scold" (1809), and Sarah Leeke (1817), both of Leominster. In the last case, the water in the pond was so low that the offender was merely wheeled around the town in the chair.^[6] The common law offence of common scold was extant in New Jersey until struck down in 1972 by Circuit Judge McCann who found it had been subsumed in the provisions of the Disorderly Conduct Act of 1898, was bad for vagueness and offended the 14th Amendment to the US Constitution for sex discrimination. Long before this decision, the punishment of ducking, together with all other forms of corporal punishment, had become unlawful under the provisions of the New Jersey Constitution of 1844 or even as early as 1776.^[14]

• Dunk tank
• Village stocks
• Waterboarding