Ducking stool was a macabre punishment

As Halloween approaches, our thoughts turn to some of the more macabre aspects of our history.

Many of those were connected to the suspicion of witchcraft – the notorious ‘swimming test’, for instance, with its nowin outcome for the poor woman accused of communing with the devil: she was bound by her thumbs to the opposite big toes and dropped into a handy body of water.

If she floated, she was a witch, and quite likely to be punished, often to the point of death. If she sank, she was innocent – but reliant on her accusers to get her out of the water before she drowned, which happened fairly often.

There’s a popular misconception that the ducking stool, this well-preserved example of which is in the care of Scarborough Museums and Galleries, was a punishment or test for a witch, but actually it was simply a particularly barbaric example of a maledominated society finding fiendish ways of tormenting women who didn’t fit their model of acceptable behaviour.

In fairly common use across England, Scotland and early colonial America from the mid-16th century until the early 19th century – just 200 years ago – the ducking stool was exclusively for the punishment of women (unlike the similar-sounding cucking stool, which was for men and women accused of a variety of petty crimes, and which didn’t involve water).

The poor victim was strapped into the chair, which was on a levered beam – sometimes the whole contraption was on wheels, sometimes in a fixed position.

Her accusers then, as one contemporary writer put it, ‘plunge her into the water as often as the sentence directs, in order to cool her immoderate heat’.

While not intended as a death sentence, it often was, with the victim dying from shock or drowning.

Offences punishable by ducking included prostitution, adultery and being a ‘common scold’ – something we might equate today with simply speaking one’s mind!

Brewers of bad beer and bakers of bad bread could also be ducked.

The ducking stool you see here was, it’s believed, last used in 1795 to punish a certain Mrs Gamble who was ducked ‘three times over the head and cars’ into the North Sea from the end of the pier.

Our picture shows it on display in our 2012 exhibition around folklore, Fears, Foes and Faeries.

Scarborough Museums and Galleries runs the Rotunda, Scarborough Art Gallery and Woodend.

Scarborough Museums and Galleries is a member of the Museums Association (the only organisation for all museums in the four nations of the UK, which campaigns for socially engaged museums) and adheres to its code of ethics.

Pictured is the ducking stool on display in a 2012 exhibition at Woodend (photo credit: Tony Bartholomew).