Curious Punishments of Bygone Days

								

interesting information of the England of that day, gives this lucid
description of a ducking-stool:
"The way of punishing scolding women is pleasant enough. They fasten an
armchair to the end of two beams twelve or fifteen feet long, and
parallel to each other, so that these two pieces of wood with their two
ends embrace the chair, which hangs between them by a sort of axle, by
which means it plays freely, and always remains in the natural
horizontal position in which a chair should be, that a person may sit
conveniently in it, whether you raise it or let it down. They set up a
post on the bank of a pond or river, and over this post they lay, almost
in equilibrio, the two pieces of wood, at one end of which the chair
hangs just over the water. They place the woman in this chair and so
plunge her into the water as often as the sentence directs, in order to
cool her immoderate heat."
The adjectives pleasant and convenient as applied to a ducking-stool
would scarcely have entered the mind of any one but a Frenchman. Still
the chair itself was sometimes rudely ornamented. The Cambridge stool
was carved with devils laying hold of scolds. Others were painted with
appropriate devices such as a man and woman scolding. Two Plymouth
ducking-stools still preserved are of wrought iron of good design. The
Sandwich ducking-stool bore the motto:


"Of members ye tonge is worst or beste
An yll tonge oft doth breede unreste."
We read in Blackstone's Commentaries:
"A common scold may be indicted, and if convicted shall be sentenced to
be placed in a certain engine of correction called the trebucket,
castigatory, or ducking-stool."
The trebuchet, or trebucket, was a stationary and simple form of a
ducking machine consisting of a short post set at the water's edge with
a long beam resting on it like a see-saw; by a simple contrivance it
could be swung round parallel to the bank, and the culprit tied in the
chair affixed to one end. Then she could be swung out over the water and
see-sawed up and down into the water. When this machine was not in use,
it was secured to a stump or bolt in the ground by a padlock, because
when left free it proved too tempting and convenient an opportunity for
tormenting village children to duck each other.
A tumbrel, or scold's-cart, was a chair set on wheels and having very
long wagon-shafts, with a rope attached to them about two feet from the
end. When used it was wheeled into a pond backward, the long shafts were
suddenly tilted up, and the scold sent down in a backward plunge into
the water. When the ducking was accomplished, the tumbrel was drawn out
of the water by the ropes. Collinson says in his History of
Somersetshire, written in 1791: "In Shipton Mallet was anciently set up
a tumbrel for the correction of unquiet women." Other names for a like
engine were gumstool and coqueen-stool.
Many and manifold are the allusions to the ducking-stool in English