Curious Punishments of Bygone Days

								

In 1639 Edward Palmer made for Boston with "planks and woodwork," a pair
of stocks.
Planks and woodwork were plentiful everywhere in the new world, and iron
and ironworkers at first equally scarce; so stocks soon were seen in
every town, and the bilboes were disused, sold perhaps for old iron,
wherein they again did good service. In Virginia the bilboes had a short
term of use in the earliest years of the settlement; the Provost-marshal
had a fee of ten shillings for "laying by the heels;" and he was
frequently employed; but there, also, stocks and pillory proved easier
of construction and attainment.
I would not be over-severe upon the bilboes in their special use in
those early colonial settlements. There had to be some means of
restraint of vicious and lawless folk, of hindering public nuisances,
and a prison could not be built in a day; the bilboes seemed an easy
settlement of the difficulty, doing effectually with one iron bar what a
prison cell does with many. It was not their use, but their glare of
publicity that was offensive. They were ever placed on offenders in the
marketplace, in front of the meeting house on lecture day, on market
day; not to keep prisoners in lonely captivity but in public obloquy;
and as has here been cited, for what appear to us to-day slight
offenses.

II
THE DUCKING STOOL

The ducking stool seems to have been placed on the lowest and most
contempt-bearing stage among English instruments of punishment. The
pillory and stocks, the gibbet, and even the whipping-post, have seen
many a noble victim, many a martyr. But I cannot think any save the most
ignoble criminals ever sat in a ducking-stool. In all the degrading and
cruel indignities offered the many political and religious offenders in
England under the varying rules of both church and state, through the
fifteenth, sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the ducking-stool played
no part and secured no victims. It was an engine of punishment specially
assigned to scolding women; though sometimes kindred offenders, such as
slanderers, "makebayts," "chyderers," brawlers, railers, and women of
light carriage also suffered through it. Though gruff old Sam Johnson
said to a gentle Quaker lady: "Madam, we have different modes of
restraining evil--stocks for men, a ducking-stool for women, and a pound
for beasts;" yet men as well as women-scolds were punished by being set
in the ducking-stool, and quarrelsome married couples were ducked, tied
back-to-back. The last person set in the Rugby ducking-stool was a
brutal husband who had beaten his wife. Brewers of bad beer and bakers
of bad bread were deemed of sufficiently degraded ethical standing to be
ducked. Unruly paupers also were thus subdued.
That intelligent French traveler, Misson, who visited England about the
year 1700, and who left in his story of his travels so much valuable and