Ducking Stool

Ducking Stool, or Cucking Stool, in mediaeval England an instrument of punishment for scolding women. Strictly speaking, the delinquent was placed in a cucking stool at her own door as in a pillory, to be jeered at by the populace, or sometimes she was conducted round the town in it mounted on a handcart or tumbril; while the ducking stool proper was a chair mounted at the end of a pole, which projected over a pond or river, and by a kind of seesaw arrangement allowed the victim to be dipped repeatedly until her passions had been cooled. One or other of these instruments was possessed by Derby, Chester (where it is mentioned in Domesday Book), Leicester, Gravesend, Cambridge, Banbury, and other towns. A woman was actually clucked in the ducking-stool at Chesterfield in 1790, and at Leominster in 1809. (See Jewitt in the Reliquary, vol. i.; 1860.)