It’s the late Middle Ages in that green and often not so pleasant land known as
England. In a small rural village next to the River Wensum in the East of the country
a woman has been accused of a reprehensible crime, well, she has a litany of accusations against her.
Following continuous bickering with her neighbor over the disappearance of a buxom Greylag goose,
under the common law, the accused has been indicted for excessive arguing
and of being a public nuisance. If that wasn’t bad enough, another blemish on her character are
allegations made by a local woman that she’s an incorrigible strumpet! As a threat to public peace
and the general decency of the village the menfolk deliberate on a punishment befitting the crimes.
Will it be forced silence through the iron muzzle or the dreaded and sometimes deadly cucking stool?
Her male judges opt for the second choice, a popular punishment that provides a morning’s
entertainment for mostly downtrodden people whose happiness is sometimes derived
from another person’s humiliation and pain. Is that a true story? Well, not exactly - we
might have embellished a bit with the vanishing goose. Still, it’s based on centuries of
recorded history. Quite extreme versions of this punishment even happened in the U.S., something
we’ll discuss at the end. But first let’s talk about England, where the punishment was born.
In the Middle Ages when people lived in very small towns and villages the authorities had
some strange laws regarding maintaining public peace. After the Norman Conquest of 1066 when
the English were forced to bow to their new French rulers, a common-law was set up.
Basically, if you committed a serious crime, the punishment might be death or at the very least
losing your property. But there were also what you might call medieval misdemeanors, crimes today
that might only lose you a few friends, or get you doxxed or ghosted or deleted on social media.
Yep, in the Middle Ages, it was a crime to speak out, to argue a lot, to troll, and certainly to
fly a flag of justice. The laws mostly applied to peasants of course, so if a poor person spoke up
and announced “Poor Lives Matter” their existence would no doubt have been hard going from thereon.
Not only people fighting for justice were punished, though. Merely talking too much about
a subject, especially if you were a woman, could result in an arrest by the village mob. These
people were a kind of police called “Watchmen.” Someone accused of quarreling about a missing
goose could be arrested for being a “common scold.” Someone who gossiped about someone
else could also be called a scold. The meaning of that word back then was defined as, “A clamorous,
rude, mean, low, foul-mouthed woman.” It depended on the nature of the perceived crime,
but as you’ll see in today’s show, the guilty person might get away with some cuts and bruises
and a red face, but they might also die as a result of their punishment. Merely speaking
one’s mind could get someone in serious trouble. Before we talk about the creative device of the
cucking stool, you might want to know what other kinds of crimes could lead to a person
being called a common scold. The punishment by the way would be handed down in something
called the manorial courts, which were courts for peasants. It was kind of comparable to
the justice system now, whereby you could say poor folks get a manorial public defender...
In the 14th century, you could be accused of being a scold for a number of things, but mostly there
were four reasons, at the time written in the law in the language of Latin. In those days in
England Old English was considered crude. French was the language of the moneyed and educated
and Latin was reserved for laws and other serious matters. Ok, so the four terms were, “objurgator”,
“garulator”, “rixator” and “litigator.” That basically translates as “talking negatively”,
“talking too much”, “having arguments” and “criticizing people or things too much”.
You’re now thinking, well, that’s about every person I know who posts on social media,
but if you think Facebook’s community standards relating to certain types of speech are strict,
non-virtual community standards in Middle Ages England were downright despotic.
The punishments were dished out a lot when conditions for the poor were bad.
That’s because they were apt to complain and argue when they were literally starving.
If a peasant was found walking around his village moaning about hard times and abject inequality,
he or she wasn’t applauded for talking about the oppressive landowner and his flagrant neglect
of human rights. That peasant was punished for his views, even though that opinion was humane
and relatable to other peasants. The common law was partly designed to keep the poor in line.
The wealthy feared rebellion, for good reason. Throughout history, women were the victims of
this law many more times than men. That doesn’t mean only women fought for human rights, far
from it, it was because society was incredibly, unbelievably, sexist. If the rich kept the poor
in line, everybody kept women in line. If peasant women actually reached the age of 25, their life
expectancy during much of the late Middle Ages due to the mortal hazards of childbirth,
they rarely learned a craft and as one historian put it, “had little control over their own lives.”
Cheating on a spouse was a sure way to end up in the local courts. The crime of
adultery usually resulted in the husband being paid some compensation from the cuckolder,
although semi-lawful revenge-killing wasn’t unheard of, especially if the
couple was caught in the act, a term called “in flagrante delicto”. The courts would often rule
that the murder took place under mitigating circumstances. Still, for the most part,
it was the woman who took the blame and she’d more often than not be accused of being a scold.
Even walking around at night could get a woman in trouble,
and if she was found eavesdropping on someone or God forbid talking to another guy,
she would likely find herself on the wrong end of the law.
The first instances of these punishments were written about in the Domesday Book, a manuscript
finished in 1086 which was ordered by King William the Conqueror. He basically wanted to know what
was going on in the land he had conquered and so asked for a survey of the entire country.
It is in this book that we first hear about the cucking stool, or something close to it.
The book talks about “cathedra stercoris” which can loosely be translated as a punishment chair.
A small crime, such as talking out of line, could result in a man or a woman being
strapped to a chair with their bare buttocks showing. They would then be paraded through
the village or town while locals jeered them. The whole process was intended to embarrass the
accused. This might also happen to brewers and bakers who’d sold poor quality beer or bread.
That doesn’t sound too bad really compared to some of the punishments we’ve talked about before,
but that was perhaps the least extreme version of the cucking stool.
This went on for centuries and was the go-to punishment for people who talked or acted out
of line, especially women. As we said, it was employed more frequently during tough times
when folks complained about work, life, lack of food, etc. According to historians, speech
considered bad was especially prevalent during the Black Death, which isn’t really surprising
given that around half the population of England was wiped out – mostly in the poorer, rural areas,
where the vast majority of people lived. In the 16th century, something else was added
to the mix in the world punishing scolds, and that was called the “branks” or the “Scold's bridle.”
This was the iron muzzle we talked about, something today you might associate with
sadomasochism or the “Saw” movie franchise. It was almost always reserved for women of
the poorer classes. It seems for a while it superseded the cucking stool, but the latter
would be back with a vengeance soon enough. As for the Scold's bridle, it served the same
purpose more or less than the cucking stool had in the earlier centuries,
only due to it having a plate that held down the wearer’s tongue, the condemned woman could
not speak. It was also very uncomfortable. Can you imagine sleeping while wearing an
iron muzzle that continuously makes you drool? Again, arguing or criticizing might get a woman in
trouble, but even excessive nagging at her husband could end up with her being fastened inside
one of those horrid contraptions. To add to the discomfort, a spike was added to the bridle so if
the woman did try and mutter something her tongue might get pierced. This kind of punishment didn’t
really make it over the pond to the New World, although there is some evidence of it being used
on slaves who had been accused of being unruly. It was in England and Scotland, though, were the
Scold’s Bridle was popular with local authorities. Some of the bridles have been preserved, with one
having an inscription on it dedicated to a man named Chester. The inscription goes like this,
“Chester presents Walton with a bridle, to curb women's tongues that talk too idle.”
As the tale goes, a woman’s gossip led to Chester losing a lot of money.
There’s some evidence the Scold's Bridle was still used from the 16th to the 19th century,
but the cucking stool made a comeback, only this time with some fearsome technological advances.
This time water was involved. Thus, the cucking stool became the ducking stool.
A French writer in the 18th century named Francois Maximilian Misson
wrote that the punishment was “pleasant enough”, although we’re guessing he never tried it himself,
especially on a day in freezing cold January. His explanation of the contraption was basically
a chair fastened to two long poles, which were both connected to an axle. The person
was strapped to the chair so they wouldn’t fall out into the water and then the chair
was ducked in the water. How many times that person was ducked depended on the crime,
or in Misson’s words, as long as it took to cool down her “immoderate heat.” His example featured
a woman because as you know it almost always happened to women. If men were charged with a
breach of the peace, they were likely put in the stocks and pelted with garbage or beaten.
The cucking victim didn’t escape the jeers of the madding crowd,
either. The chair would often be connected to some wheels so prior to her being ducked in the water
she was wheeled through town in front of people calling her out for being a gossip, a flirt,
a back-biter, or something else. The water was supposed to tame the woman, or even purify her.
You might now be thinking that the ducking stool doesn’t sound so bad
and in more clement weather you might actually pay for a go on a ducking stool, but hold your
tongue for a while because it gets worse. You only need to hear this poem written in
1780 to know this punishment wasn’t exactly a barrel of laughs. Part of it went like this:
“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 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.”
This brings us to another kind of ducking stool, one which didn’t exactly ensure the women didn’t
drown. It was similar to what we’ve already discussed, except the shafts that held the
chair could be released. According to the Encyclopedia Britannica, once the chair and
its occupant fell into the water she might not make it out again. Since the chair always faced
the punishers, the woman fell into the water backward. It was quite the shock of course.
You have to remember that in those days people were terrified of water and not many folks knew
how to swim. That was one reason why people feared being ducked so much.
Ducking also happened in what would one day become the United States of America.
We found this text that was taken from the Statute Books of Virginia:
“Whereas oftentimes many brabbling women often slander and scandalize their neighbors,
for which their poor husbands are often brought into chargeable and vexatious suits
and cast in great damages, be it enacted that all women found guilty be sentenced to ducking.”
If you’re wondering what “brabbling” means, it’s to stubbornly argue about trifling matters.
We found another case in the New World dated 1634, in which Betsey, the wife of John Tucker,
is accused of employing the “violence of her tongue” to make his house as well as her
neighborhood “uncomfortable.” She was at first ducked for half a minute, but according to the
text, she didn’t repent. She was subsequently ducked for thirty seconds another five times,
after which she cried out, “Let me go Let me go, by God's help I'll sin no more.”
A man writing from Boston in 1686 said the ducking stool was an “effectual
remedy to cure the noise that is in many women's heads”. In case you’re wondering,
there’s no evidence that the ducking stool was ever used to kill a woman accused of witchcraft.
Accused witches, men, and women, usually received far more cruel and unusual punishments.
In Philadelphia, in 1708, the Common Council asked that a ducking stool be built not just
for argumentative women, but for women accused of being drunk and disorderly. Fast-forward to 1824
and a court in Philadelphia said it wouldn’t duck a woman due to the fact the practice was
obsolete and not in the “spirit of the time.” Nonetheless, around that time a Miss Palmer from
Georgia was ducked three times in the Oconee River for nothing more than being “glib of the tongue.”
More than one ducking could indeed kill a person. According to the historian Geoffrey Abbott,
repeated duckings “routinely proved fatal, the victim dying of shock or drowning.”
It was in the early 19th century that the ducking stool was outlawed in the UK
and in the U.S., replaced by general sex discrimination of a more modern kind.
Now you need to watch this, “Skinned Alive - Worst Ways to Die.” Or, have a look at this,
“The Brazen Bull (Worst Punishment in the History of Mankind).”