Common Scold - Historical Prosecutions

Historical Prosecutions

A plaque on the Fye Bridge in Norwich, England claims to mark the site of a "cucking" stool, and that from 1562–1597 "strumpets" and common scolds suffered the punishment of dunking there. In the Percy Anecdotes, published pseudonymously in 1820, the authors state that "How long the ducking-stool has been in disuse in England does not appear." The Anecdotes also suggest penological ineffectiveness as grounds for the stool's disuse; the text relates the 1681 case of a Mrs. Finch, who according to this account had received three convictions and duckings as a common scold. On her fourth conviction, the King's Bench declined to dunk her again, and instead ordered her to pay a fine of three marks, and ordered her imprisoned until payment took place.

The Percy miscellany also quotes a pastoral poem by John Gay (1685–1732), who wrote that:

I'll speed me to the pond, where the high stool

On the long plank, hangs o'er the muddy pool,

That stool the dread of ev'ry scolding quean.

and also a 1780 poem by Benjamin West, who wrote that:

There stands, my friend, in yonder pool,

An engine call'd a ducking-stool;

By legal pow'r commanded down,

The joy and terror of the town.

If jarring females kindle strife. . .

While these literary sources do not prove that the punishment still took place they do provide evidence that it had not been forgotten.

In The Queen v. Foxby, 6 Mod. 11 (1704), counsel for the accused stated that he knew of no law for the dunking of scolds. Lord Chief Justice John Holt of the Queen's Bench apparently pronounced this error, for he announced that it was "better ducking in a Trinity, than a Michaelmas term", i.e. better carried out in summer than in winter. The tenor of Holt's remarks however suggests that he found the punishment an antiquarian curiosity and something of a joke. The last recorded uses of the stool for ducking involve a Mrs. Ganble at Plymouth (1808) and Jenny Pipes, a notorious scold from Leominster (1809). In 1817 Sarah Leeke, also from Leominster was sentenced to be ducked but the water in the pond was so low that the authorities merely wheeled her round the town in the chair.

The English common law as received by the law of the United States included the offence of being a common scold. In 1829, a Washington, D.C. court found the American anti-clerical writer Anne Royall guilty of being a common scold, the outcome of a campaign launched against her by local clergymen. Despite the construction of the traditional engine of punishment by sailors at the Navy Yard, the court ruled the punishment of the cucking-stool obsolete, and instead improvised a fine of ten dollars. In 1972, a prosecution for being a common scold was brought in the case of State v. Palendrano in which the defendant was charged in relation to a disturbance. The New Jersey Superior Court ruled the law was void because of its vagueness.