The Ducking Stool: Colonial Cure for the Common Scold

Introduction: In this article, James Pylant describes a form of humiliation and punishment used by our colonial ancestors to chastise “public scolds.” James is an editor at GenealogyMagazine.com and author for JacobusBooks.com, is an award-winning historical true-crime writer, and authorized celebrity biographer.

“No brawling wives, no furious wenches,
No fire so hot, but water quenches.”

These lines are from a poem published in 1780 about the ducking stool, what historian Alice Morse Earle called “an engine of punishment specially assigned to scolding women.”

One of the earliest references to this punishment found in GenealogyBank’s Historical Newspaper Archives is in the Tree of Liberty newspaper from 1801, in which a newspaper publisher (the “Printer”) complains about a scolding woman and asks a judge (the “Justice”) what can be done to stop her.

This article reports:

Printer: Here is a most abominable woman, that comes before my door, & stands in the street; and calls me all manner of names in a foul-mouthed, low manner of her own. Shall I cudgel her, or take the law of her – what can be done?

Justice: (Consulting Blackstone) Let me see, 4 Black. 168. “A common Scold communis rexatrix (for our law Latin confines it to the feminine gender) is a public nuisance to her neighborhood. For which offense she may be indicted; and if convicted shall be sentenced to be placed in a certain engine of correction, called the trebucket, castigatory or cucking stool, which in the Saxon language is said to signify the scolding stool: though now it [the term] is frequently corrupted into ducking stool, because the residue of the judgment is, that when she is so placed therein, she shall be plunged in the water for her punishment.”

Although there was more than one version of the ducking stool, it typically was a sturdy chair fastened to the end of a beam, which rotated on a pivot of a post anchored to the ground along the edge of a pond or river. “The woman was placed in the chair with her arms drawn backward; a bar was placed across her back and in front of her elbows; another bar held her upright, and there were cords to tie her securely in,” read a description in Chambers’s Encyclopedia. It worked like a seesaw, with the stool’s operator pulling a chain and immersing the chair into the water below.

In December 1662, the General Assembly of Virginia passed an act to punish women who caused scandals:

“Whereas oftentimes many brabling women often slander and scandalize their neighbors for which their poore husbands are often brought into chargeable and vexatious suites, and cast in greate damages; Bee it therefore enacted by the authority aforesaid that in actions of slander occasioned by the wife as aforesaid after judgment passed for the damages the women shall be punished by ducking…”

Similarly, in Massachusetts, the colonial legislature passed a law in May 1672 for the punishment of scolds:

“Whereas, There is no express punishment (by law hitherto established) affixed to the evil practice of sundry persons by exhorbitancy of the tongue in reviling and scolding; it is therefore ordered that all such persons convicted before any court or magistrate that hath proper cognizance of the case, shall be gagged, set in a ducking stool and dipped over head and ears three times, in some convenient place of fresh or salt water, as the court or magistrate shall judge meet.”

The ducking stool was a colonial carryover from a centuries-old English practice. For example, in 1405, in the Wiltshire village of Colerne, “Maud, wife of John Mullman, was presented as a common scold and disturber of the peace and was to be punished by ducking.” But Maud ducked out on the ducking when her husband paid a fee to “relax” the judgment.

Betsy Walker’s experience in the ducking stool was recorded in 1635 by Thomas Hartley in Virginia.

However, it was not until March 1661-2 that Virginia enacted a law requiring that, “in every county,” the court shall “sett up a pillory, a pair of stocks, and a whipping post, neere the courthouse, and a ducking-stoole in such a place as they shall think convenient.”

In York County on 25 January 1711, the court directed the sheriff to cause a “ducking stool or Cage to be Erected at Will:sburg.” Similarly, court records in other counties in the Old Dominion ordered the construction of these chairs of punishment.

At the December 1746 court term in Winchester, justices were to “erect a ducking-stool” in the style of one in Fredericksburg. This six-foot wide, seven-foot-deep pit with a stonewall and a roof was “chiefly to punish unruly females; but sometimes to sober the drunken men of the day,” wrote county court clerk T. K. Cartmell in 1908. It is unknown when justices retired the chair; its last mention was in a 1790 court order.

In Augusta County in 1751, the sheriff was ordered to hire a worker to build a ducking stool. Historian Joseph A. Waddell could find no record of the stool’s use. He noted that soon after it was constructed (or at least was ordered), one Anne Brown appeared in court and called Judge William Wilson a “rouge,” vowing to “give it to him with the devil” once he stepped down from the bench. Mrs. Brown was arrested, but records do not indicate that she was assigned a session with the dreaded stool. Waddell concluded that during construction, someone failed to realize there was no water deep enough for its use within reach of the courthouse.

As Cartmell noted, men also took a seat on the ducking stool. According to Alice Morse Earle, “men as well as women-scolds were punished by being set in the ducking-stool, and quarrelsome married couples were ducked tied back-to-back.” Wife-beaters, brewers of bad beer, bakers of bad bread, and unruly paupers also experienced baptismal seating.

Gradually, courts discharged the ducking stool. The discomfort and public humiliation of a “public ducking” was still mentioned as a punishment for a “common scold” in this 1818 newspaper article.

Yet when New Yorker Catherine Fields received a conviction for the same offense in 1821, she was fined six cents.

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Note on the header image: replica ducking stool at Leominster, England; last used in 1809. Credit: John Phillips; Wikimedia Commons.