Curious Punishments of Bygone Days

								

literature. In a volume called Miscellaneous Poems, written by
Benjamin West and published in 1780, is a descriptive poem entitled The
Ducking-stool, which runs thus:


"There stands, my friend, in yonder pool
An engine called the ducking-stool;
By legal power commanded down
The joy and terror of the town.
If jarring females kindle strife,
Give language foul, or lug the coif,
If noisy dames should once begin
To drive the house with horrid din,
Away, you cry, you'll grace the stool;
We'll teach you how your tongue to rule.
The fair offender fills the seat
In sullen pomp, profoundly great;
Down in the deep the stool descends,
But here, at first, we miss our ends;
She mounts again and rages more
Than ever vixen did before.
So, throwing water on the fire
Will make it but burn up the higher.
If so, my friend, pray let her take
A second turn into the lake,
And, rather than your patience lose,
Thrice and again repeat the dose.
No brawling wives, no furious wenches,
No fire so hot but water quenches."
In Scotland "flyting queans" sat in ignominy in cucking-stools. Bessie
Spens was admonished: "Gif she be found flyteing with any neighbour, man
or wife, and specially gains Jonet Arthe, she shall be put on the
cuck-stule and sit there twenty-four hours." A worthless fellow, Sande
Hay, "for troublance made upon Andro Watson, is discernit for his
demerits to be put in the cuck-stule, there to remain till four hours
after noon." The length of time of punishment--usually twenty-four
hours--would plainly show there was no attendant ducking; and this
cuck-stool, or cucking-stool, must not be confounded with the
ducking-stool, which dates to the days of Edward the Confessor. The
cuck-stool was simply a strong chair in which an offender was fastened,
thus to be hooted at or pelted at by the mob. Sometimes, when placed on
a tumbrel, it was used for ducking.
At the time of the colonization of America the ducking-stool was at the
height of its English reign; and apparently the amiability of the lower
classes was equally at ebb. The colonists brought their tempers to the
new land, and they brought their ducking-stools. Many minor and some
great historians of this country have called the ducking-stool a Puritan
punishment. I have never found in the hundreds of pages of court records
that I have examined a single entry of an execution of ducking in any
Puritan community; while in the "cavalier colonies," so called, in
Virginia and the Carolinas, and in Quaker Pennsylvania, many duckings
took place, and in law survived as long as similar punishments in
England.
In the Statute Books of Virginia from Dale's time onward many laws may
be found designed to silence idle tongues by ducking. One reads:
"Whereas oftentimes many brabling women often slander and scandalize
their neighbours, for which their poore husbands are often brought into