Curious Punishments of Bygone Days

								

we would inform them that the late lamented and distinguished Judge
Early decided, some years since, when a modern Xantippe was brought
before him, that she should undergo the punishment of lustration by
immersion three several times in the Oconee. Accordingly she was
confined to the tail of a cart, and, accompanied by the hooting of a
mob, conducted to the river, where she was publicly ducked, in
conformity with the sentence of the court. Should this punishment be
accorded Mary Cammell, we hope, however, it may be attended with a more
salutary effect than in the case we have just alluded to--the unruly
subject of which, each time as she rose from the watery element,
impiously exclaimed, with a ludicrous gravity of countenance, 'Glory to
God.'"
It is doubtful whether these Georgia duckings were done with a regularly
constructed ducking-stool; the cart was probably run down into the
water.
One of the latest, and certainly the most notorious sentences to ducking
was that of Mrs. Anne Royal, of Washington, D. C., almost in our own
day. This extraordinary woman had lived through an eventful career in
love and adventure; she had been stolen by the Indians when a child, and
kept by them fifteen years; then she was married to Captain Royall, and
taught to read and write. She traveled much, and wrote several
vituperatively amusing books. She settled down upon Washington society
as editor of a newspaper called the "Washington Paul Pry" and of
another, the "Huntress"; and she soon terrorized the place. No one in
public office was spared, either in personal or printed abuse, if any
offense or neglect was given to her. A persistent lobbyist, she was
shunned like the plague by all congressmen. John Quincy Adams called her
an itinerant virago. She was arraigned as a common scold before Judge
William Cranch, and he sentenced her to be ducked in the Potomac River.
She was, however, released with a fine, and appears to us to-day to have
been insane--possibly through over-humored temper.

III
THE STOCKS

One of the earliest institutions in every New England community was a
pair of stocks. The first public building was a meeting-house, but often
before any house of God was builded, the devil got his restraining
engine. It was a true English punishment, and to a degree, a Scotch; and
was of most ancient date. In the Cambridge Trinity College Psalter, an
illuminated manuscript illustrating the manners of the twelfth century,
may be seen the quaint pictures of two men sitting in stocks, while two
others flout them. So essential to due order and government were the
stocks that every village had them. Sometimes they were movable and
often were kept in the church porch, a sober Sunday monitor. Shakespeare
says in King Lear:



       "Fetch forth the stocks
You stubborn ancient knave!"
In England, petty thieves, unruly servants, wife-beaters, hedge-tearers,