The stocks served like the pillory to hold up offenders to public infamy. The first authentic mention of them is in a statute of Edward III., by which they were to be applied to unruly labourers. Soon after this they were established by law in every village, often near the parish church. They were the punishment for brawling, drunkenness, vagrancy, and all disorderly conduct. Wood-stealers or “hedge-tearers” were set in the stocks about the year 1584 for a couple of days with the stolen wood in front of them. The story goes that Cardinal Wolsey, when a young parish priest, was put in the stocks at Lymington by Sir Amyas Poulett, for having exceeded at a village feast. The old chap’s books contain numerous references to the stocks of course. Welch Taffy, “the unfortunate traveller,” was put into the stocks for calling a justice of the peace a “boobie;” and “Simple Simon,” when he interfered in a butter-woman’s quarrel, was adjudged to be drunk and put into the stocks between the two viragoes, who scolded him all the time. The story of Lord Camden when a young barrister having a desire to try the stocks, and his being left in them by an absent-minded friend for the part of the day, is probably well known. The stocks were not wholly abolished till a few years ago.[109] The Stokesley stocks were used within thirty years of the present time, and as late as 1860 one John Gambles of Stanningly was sentenced to sit in the stocks for six hours for Sunday gambling, and actually endured his punishment.[110] Stocks are still to be seen at Heath near Wakefield, Painswick in Gloucestershire, and other places. In all cases the physical discomfort of the stocks no less than that of the pillory, was generally aggravated by the rude horseplay of a jeering and actively offensive mob. A reference to the inconvenient attentions of the bystanders at such an exhibition will be found in an old chapbook, entitled ‘The True Trial of the Understanding,’ in which among other riddles the following is given:
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 on the populace, principally those of the female sex, that they pelted her till they put out both her eyes.[111]
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 Tumbrell, 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 see-saw. That at Wooton Basset was of the tumbrell 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 culprit was paraded through the town before immersion. The punishment was primarily intended for scolds, shrews, and “curst queens,” but it was also applied to female brewers and bakers who brewed bad ale, and sold bad bread. It was inflicted pursuant to sentence in open court, but in some parts the bailiffs had the power within their own jurisdictions, and the right of gallows, tumbrell, and pillory was often claimed by lords of the Manor. The greatest antiquity is claimed for this sort of punishment. Bowine declares that it was used by the Saxons, by whom it was called “Cathedra in qua rixosæ mulieres sedentes aquæ demergebantur.” No doubt the ducking was often roughly and cruelly carried out. We have in the frontispiece of an old chapbook, which relates how “an old woman was drowned in Ratcliffe highway,” a pictorial representation of the ceremony of ducking, and it is stated that she met her death by being dipped too often or too long. That the instrument was in general use through the kingdom is proved by numerous entries in ancient records. Thus Lysons, in his ‘Environs of London,’ states that at a court of the Manor of Edgware in 1552 the inhabitants were presented for not having a tumbril and a ducking-stool as laid down by law. In the Leominster town records the bailiff and chamberlains are repeatedly brought up and fined either for not providing “gumstoles” or not properly repairing them, while in the same and other records are numerous statements of bills paid to carpenters for making or mending these instruments. The use of them moreover was continued to very recent times. A women was ducked under Kingston Bridge for scolding in 1745. At Manchester, Liverpool, and other Lancashire towns the stool was in use till the commencement of this century. So it was at Scarborough, where the offender was dipped into the water from the end of the old pier. But the latest inflictions seemingly were at Leominster, where in 1809 a woman named Jenny Pipes was paraded and ducked near Kerwater Bridge, while another Sarah Leeke was wheeled round the town in 1817, but not ducked, the water being too low.
The ducking-stool was not always an effectual punishment. It appears from the records of the King’s Bench that in the year 1681 Mrs. Finch, a notorious scold, who had been thrice ducked for scolding, was a fourth time sentenced for the same offence, and sentenced to be fined and imprisoned. Other measures were occasionally taken which were deemed safer, but which were hardly less cruel. The “branks,” or bridle, for gossips and scolds, was often preferred to the ducking-stool, which endangered the health, and moreover gave the culprit’s tongue free play between each dip. The branks was a species of iron mask, with a gag so contrived as to enter the mouth and forcibly hold down the unruly member. “It consisted of a kind of crown or framework of iron, which was locked upon the head and was armed in front with a gag,—a plate or a sharp-cutting knife or point.”[112] Various specimens of this barbarous instrument are still extant in local museums, that in the Ashmolean at Oxford being especially noticeable, as well as that preserved in Doddington Park, Lincolnshire. The branks are said to have been the invention of agents of the Spanish Inquisition, and to have been imported into this country from the Low Countries, whither it had travelled from Spain.
The brutality of the stronger and governing to the weaker and subject sex was not limited to the ducking-stool and branks. It must be remembered with shame in this more humane age[113] that little more than a hundred years ago women were publicly whipped at the whipping-post by the stocks, or at any cart’s tail. The fierce statute against vagrants of Henry VIII.’s and Elizabeth’s reign made no distinction of sex, and their ferocious provisions to the effect that offenders “should be stripped naked from the middle upwards, and whipped till the body should be bloody,” long continued in force. Men with their wives and children were flogged publicly, and sometimes by the order of the clergyman of the parish. Girls of twelve and thirteen, aged women of sixty, all suffered alike; women “distracted,” in other words out of their minds, were arrested and lashed; so were those that had the small pox, and all who walked about the country and begged.[114] The constable’s charge for whipping was fourpence, but the sum was increased latterly to a shilling. The whipping-post was often erected in combination with the stocks. A couple of iron clasps were fixed to the upright which supported the stocks, to take the culprit’s hands and hold him securely while he was being lashed. A modification of this plan has long been used at Newgate for the infliction of corporal punishment, and it may still be seen in the old ward at the back of the middle yard.
Ferocious as were most of the methods I have detailed of dealing with offenders against the law, they generally, except by accident, fell short of death. Yet were there innumerable cases in those uncompromising and unenlightened ages in which death alone would be deemed equal to the offences. Rulers might be excused perhaps if they were satisfied with nothing less than a criminal’s blood. As Maine
