"Promotion lately was bestowed
Upon a person mean and small:
Then many persons to him flowed,
Yet he returned no thanks at all.
But yet their hands were ready still
To help him with their kind good-will."
The answer is, a man pelted in the pillory.
Worse sometimes happened, and in several cases death ensued from ill-usage in the pillory. Thus when John Waller, alias Trevor, was pilloried in 1732, in Seven Dials, for falsely accusing innocent men, so as to obtain the reward given on the conviction of highwaymen, so great was the indignation of the populace that they pelted him to death. The coroner's inquest returned a verdict of wilful murder, but against persons unknown. In 1763 a man who stood in the pillory at Bow, for an unnatural crime, was killed by the mob. Ann Marrow, who had been guilty of the strange offence of disguising herself as a man, and as such marrying three different women, was sentenced to three months' imprisonment, and exposure on the pillory, at Charing Cross. So great was the resentment of
the populace, principally those of the female sex, that they pelted her till they put out both her eyes.[167:1]
No account of the minor physical punishments formerly inflicted would be complete without reference to the methods of coercing ill-conditioned females. These were mostly of the same character as the pillory and stocks. Chief among them was the ducking or cucking-stool, a scourge for scolds, and once as common in every parish as the stocks. Other varieties of it were known under the names of tumbrel, the gumstole, the triback, the trebucket, and the reive. It may be described briefly as consisting of a chair or seat fixed at the end of a long plank, which revolved on a pivot, and by some simple application of leverage upset the occupant of the chair into a pond or stream. Mr. Cole, 1782, describes one which was hung to a beam in the middle of a bridge. The Leominster stool, which is still preserved, is a plank upon a low substantial framework, having the seat at one end, and working like an ordinary seesaw: that at Wooton Basset was of the tumbrel order, and was a framework on a pair of wheels, with shafts at one end, the stool being at the other. In this, as in the Leicester "scolding cart," and other forms of tumbrels, the