restraining evil--stocks for men, a ducking-stool for women, and a pound
for beasts;" yet 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. The last person set in the Rugby ducking-stool was a
brutal husband who had beaten his wife. Brewers of bad beer and bakers
of bad bread were deemed of sufficiently degraded ethical standing to be
ducked. Unruly paupers also were thus subdued.

That intelligent French traveler, Misson, who visited England about the
year 1700, and who left in his story of his travels so much valuable and
interesting information of the England of that day, gives this lucid
description of a ducking-stool:

"The way of punishing scolding women is pleasant enough. They fasten an
armchair to the end of two beams twelve or fifteen feet long, and
parallel to each other, so that these two pieces of wood with their two
ends embrace the chair, which hangs between them by a sort of axle, by
which means it plays freely, and always remains in the natural
horizontal position in which a chair should be, that a person may sit
conveniently in it, whether you raise it or let it down. They set up a
post on the bank of a pond or river, and over this post they lay, almost
in equilibrio, the two pieces of wood, at one end of which the chair
hangs just over the water. They place the woman in this chair and so
plunge her into the water as often as the sentence directs, in order to
cool her immoderate heat."

The adjectives pleasant and convenient as applied to a ducking-stool
would scarcely have entered the mind of any one but a Frenchman. Still
the chair itself was sometimes rudely ornamented. The Cambridge stool
was carved with devils laying hold of scolds. Others were painted with
appropriate devices such as a man and woman scolding. Two Plymouth
ducking-stools still preserved are of wrought iron of good design. The
Sandwich ducking-stool bore the motto:

"Of members ye tonge is worst or beste
An yll tonge oft doth breede unreste."

We read in Blackstone's _Commentaries_:

"A common scold may be indicted, and if convicted shall be sentenced to
be placed in a certain engine of correction called the trebucket,
castigatory, or ducking-stool."

The trebuchet, or trebucket, was a stationary and simple form of a
ducking machine consisting of a short post set at the water's edge with
a long beam resting on it like a see-saw;