THE DUCKING STOOL
Exactly 400 years ago, Bristol’s city fathers paid for a new ducking stool, a device which was almost exclusively used for punishing women. Eugene Byrne looks at what we know about it.
Device was almost exclusively used to punish women in Bristol
THE ducking stool is one of those things that even those with no interest in history know a little about. It was a chair used to dip women in water, right?
Well yes, though there are mentions of men being ducked, but none that we know of in Bristol. It’s all rather mysterious, the more so because the records are so scant. But let’s see what we do know …
It’s not to be confused with the “cucking stool”
THE ducking stool and the cucking stool were two broadly different things. The cucking stool was a chair to which people – men and women – were tied and put on public display as a form of humiliation for various offences, such as drunkenness, dishonest trading and some sexual offences (though the latter were more usually dealt with by church courts). It was in widespread use in the Middle Ages but its victims were not generally immersed into water; it was more like the pillory or the stocks used in later centuries.
We don’t appear to have any record of it being used here. We do know from an old medieval manuscript that Bristol’s way of dealing with fraudulent tradesmen was to parade them through the streets on the back of one of the famous sleds that were used to move goods around the city. There’s an illustration in a medieval manuscript of a baker being punished in this way, with the offending loaf (adulterated or under-weight, probably) hanging from his neck.
‘Cucking,’ by the way, is not related to ‘cuckold.’ It comes from an Old English word for defecating, and may be because the offenders bare bottom was exposed on the stool. Face it – your ancestors were ill-mannered, vulgar people.
We know they were ducking by Tudor times
THE ducking stool usually took the form of a wooden chair on the end of a stout pole, sometimes with a counterweight. The pole was on a pivot post which was either fixed at the water’s edge or which was on a wheeled platform which could be moved from one location to another. The offender was strapped into the chair which was then swung out over the water and plunged in. This was usually done three times.
The earliest Bristolian mentions of the ‘ducking’ stool come from Tudor times. In Elizabeth I’s reign local records mention money paid for its upkeep. By the 1600s its use was widespread through England and Scotland (and the American colonies), almost exclusively for punishing women, most usually for being a ‘common scold.’
And what, pray tell, is a common scold?
THIS catch-all term described anyone who disturbed the peace of the community through arguing, quarrelling, spreading malicious gossip and so on. We might consider this trivial nowadays, but think of some types of internet troll, for example, as the equivalent of the common scold.
People who post malicious accusations or offensive comments online – particularly in local forums, Facebook groups etc. Look at it this way and you might think there are a few modern “scolds” – male or female - we’d all like to see strapped to a chair and dipped into the Froom.
Why the ducking stool became a form of punishment almost exclusively for women is a mystery, there are all manner of academic and feminist theories available. The simplest answer is probably that while it was humiliating, it wasn’t especially violent.
Men sentenced to the stocks or the pillory could be pelted with all manner of things by the mob - not just rotting vegetables – and many were seriously injured and even killed.
It could be dangerous, mind
PUBLIC punishments were one of the few forms of entertainment available to our ancestors; they turned out in their thousands for hangings on St Michael’s Hill and just as they threw all manner of noxious items at offenders in the stocks, we have to imagine that this was a mob which often yelled for blood. Or in the case of the ducking stool, we can be sure that on some occasions at least they demanded that the women not be merely dipped, but left under the water for a while.
Local accounts from 1625 note: “Paid for cords and aqua vitae for the women that were cuckte, 7d.” That is, something had to be used to revive women – plural – who had been sentenced to the stool and had come close to drowning. “Cords” is presumably cordials of some kind, while aqua vitae could be any sort of distilled spirit, but possibly brndy.
Where was Bristol’s stool?
THE history of Bristol’s ducking stool comes out into the open in the summer of 1621 – exactly 400 years ago – when the magistrates ordered that a new one be erected on the north bank of the Froom, close to the Weir. Whether or not the old one was in the same place is not clear.
This was upstream of much of the city, so the water would be relatively clean. It was also close to a place where women did their
washing.
A few weeks later, the stool got its first use when a woman from Redcliff was strapped in, stuck out over the river and ducked three times by the city beadles, the minor officials whose job was to keep order in the city.
They were paid two shillings for this service, but when the woman in question offended once more and was ducked once more, their fee was reduced to one shilling and sixpence. Plainly it was thought that the beadles didn’t have to exert themselves that much as we learn that three years later they were only getting eightpence even though that time they dealt with two women.
Puritans don’t seem to have liked it
USE of the ducking stool in Bristol
seems to have fallen into disuse by the time of the Civil War, possibly because of the puritans’ disapproval not so much of cruelty, but of any spectacle which delighted the mob. It was revived with the restoration of the monarchy in 1660 and a new stool was set up in its usual place at a cost of £2 12s, 6d.
We learn that a woman known as “Goodwife Orchard” was ducked in 1661 for being a “disorderly scold”. In 1664 two women were ducked, in 1666 seven, three the year after that, three in 1669 and two in 1670.
We don’t know what happened later
THE stool was repaired and painted in 1692 but mentions of its use are few, partly because the records have been lost or destroyed, but partly also because magistrates seem to have been increasingly
reluctant to order its use and juries less willing to convict common scolds. We do know that as late as 1754 a local carpenter was paid £9 for making a new one but whether it was ever used is unknown.
The final legend
THERE’S a famous tale which tells of the final use of Bristol’s ducking stool. In 1718-ish, the mayor, Edmund Mountjoy, who was widely known to be hen-pecked by
his wife, was out for a walk one evening when he came across a woman berating her own husband.
Being a magistrate, he ordered that she be ducked. Mistress Blake – we don’t know her full name –
endured her punishment, but on emerging from the water ridiculed Mountjoy in front of the crowd for ducking another man’s wife because he didn’t have the courage
to duck his own.
She and her husband then hired a hot-shot lawyer from London and sued him for assault, and won. Mountjoy’s fellow city fathers enjoyed fun at his expense by inviting him to dinners at which the menu always included … ‘cold duck.’
Because of this (the story goes), Bristol’s ducking stool fell into disuse, and was later bought by an enterprising huckster who turned it into dozens of snuff boxes, claiming that they would protect buyers from shrewish wives.
There is, alas, no evidence to confirm the truth of this story. The 19th century historian John Latimer asserts that it’s apocryphal. But then you wouldn’t expect those terribly patriarchal Victorians to like such a feminist fable, would you?