By Ellie Jones, Cathedral Archivist
While sometimes used interchangeably to describe instruments of punishment by public humiliation, the cucking stool and ducking stool were not quite the same. A cucking stool was a stationary wooden chair, which may have been either fixed in a prominent public place or mounted on wheels to be paraded through the streets. The accused was tied to the chair and exposed to public mockery and physical abuse. By contrast, a ducking stool was a chair attached to a long wooden plank positioned over a body of water like a pond or stream. The offender was strapped in and repeatedly submerged.
The use of cucking stools is documented as far back the Domesday Book of 1086, which records its use in punishing dishonest brewers in Chester. Records in the Cathedral Archives show that there was a cucking stool in St Sidwell’s in the 16th and 17th centuries, but it is likely that there was one much earlier. Historically, as lords of the manor of St Sidwell’s, the Dean & Chapter managed various local matters relating to crime and punishment, maintaining the stocks, lock-up cages, and cucking stool there for centuries.
Folklore and popular imagination closely link the use of ducking stools to witchcraft trials. The theory being that suspects who floated were guilty, while those who sank were innocent. English witch trials rarely employed these devices, but relied on legal testimony which, if found guilty, may have been punishable by death.
Cucking and ducking stools were primarily used to punish dishonest traders or women labelled as “scolds”. The last recorded official use of a ducking stool in England occurred in Herefordshire in 1809, although the penalty wasn’t formally abolished under English law until 1967.
This year’s annual St Sidwell’s Day history celebration takes place on Monday 3 August. This manuscript forms part of a free drop-in display looking at aspects of life in St Sidwell’s in the 15th-18th centuries. Join us if you can between 1pm and 3pm on 3 August.
Photo: A tree from widow Marke’s ground in St Sidwell’s is granted for making a new cucking stool (March 1629)