the ducking- stool for scolds 17th centuary Ducking-stools and cucking-stools are chairs formerly used for punishment. They were
Ducking-stools and cucking-stools are chairs formerly used for punishment. They were both instruments of social humiliation/censure, primarily for the offence of scolding or back biting, and less often for sexual offences like having an illegitimate child or prostitution. They were technological devices which formed part of the wider method of law enforcement through social humiliation. A common alternative was a court order to recite one’s crimes or sins after Mass or in the market place on market day, or informal action such as a skimmington ride. They were usually of local coolwith no standard design. Most were simply chairs into which the victim could be tied and exposed at her door or the site of her offence. Some were on wheels like a tumbrel that could be dragged around the parish. Some were put on poles so that they could be plunged into water, hence "ducking" stool. The equivalents for men were the stocks, although these were not gender specific. There does seem to have been a difference in usage between a ducking stool and a cucking stool. Although both were primarily forms of public exposure and humiliation, the cucking stool seems to have involved no water, with the victim raised up in the air on show. The ducking-stool was a strongly made wooden armchair (the surviving specimens are of oak) in which the culprit was seated, an iron band being placed around her so that she should not fall out during her immersion. The earliest record of the use of such is towards the beginning of the 17th century, with the term being first attested in English in 1597. It was used both in Europe and in the English colonies of North America. 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.
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Photo credit: © 19th era / Alamy / Afripics
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