DUCKING

This article appears in Volume V08, Page 631 of the Encyclopedia Britannica.

Encyclopedia Britannica - Main :: DRO-ECG

DUCKING and CUCKING STOOLS, chairs used for the punishment of scolds, witches and prostitutes in bygone days. The two have been generally confused, but are quite distinct. The earlier, the Cucking-stool2 or

Stool

STOOL

of Repentance, is of very ancient date, and was used by the

Saxons

SAXONS

, who called it the Scealding or Scolding

Stool

STOOL

. It is mentioned in Domesday Book as in use at Chester, being called cathedra stercoris, a name which seems to confirm the first of the derivations suggested in the foot-note below. Seated on this stool the woman, her head and feet bare, was publicly exposed- at her

door

DOOR (corresponding to the Gr. Bbpa,. Lat. fores or valvae; the English word, with other forms common in allied languages, comes from the same Indo-European stem as the Gr. Obpa and Lat. fares)

or paraded through the streets amidst the jeers of the crowd. The Cucking-stool was used for both sexes, and was specially the punishment for dishonest brewers and bakers. Its use in the case of scolding women declined on the introduction in the middle of the 16th century of the Scold's Bridle (see

BRANKS

BRANKS (probably akin to Irish brancas, a halter; Ger. Pranger, fetter, pillory)

), and it disappears on the introduction a little later of the Ducking-stool. The earliest record of the use of this latter is towards the beginning of the 17th century. It was a-strongly made wooden armchair (the surviving specimens are of oak) in which the

culprit

CULPRIT

was seated, an iron band being placed around her so that she should not fall out during her immersion. 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 wasnot 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. In sentencing a woman the magistrates ordered the number of duckings she should have. Yet another type of Ducking-stool was called a tumbrel. It was a chair on two wheels with two long shafts fixed to the axles. This was pushed into the pond and then the shafts released, thus tipping the chair up backwards. Sometimes the punishment proved fatal, the unfortunate woman dying of shock. Ducking-stools were used in England as

late

LATE

as the beginning of the 19th century. The last recorded cases are those of a Mrs Ganble at Plymouth (1808); of Jenny Pipes, " a notorious scold " (1809), and Sarah Leeke (1817), both of Leominster. In the last case the water in the pond was so low that the victim was merely wheeled round the town in the chair.
See W. Andrews, Old Time Punishments (Hull, 1890) ; A. M.

Earle

EARLE, JOHN (c. 16o1-1665)
EARLE, RALPH (1751-1801)

, Curious Punishments of Bygone Days (Chicago, 1896) ; W. C. Hazlitt, Faiths and Folklore (London, 1905) ; Llewellynn Jewitt in The Reliquary, vols. i. and ii. (186o1862) ;

Gentleman

GENTLEMAN (from Lat. gentilis, " belonging to a race or gens," and " man "; Fr. gentilhomme, Span. gentil hombre, Ital. gentil huomo, in its
original
- ORIGINAL
and strict signification, a term denoting a man of good family, the Lat. generosus (its invariable transl

's Magazine for 1732.

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