The frequency of these repairs suggests the stool was in regular use-a supposition supported by William Andrews’ 1899 book Bygone Punishments, which details the history of ducking stools and similarly obsolete devices, from the Scottish Maiden to the drunkard’s cloak.ĭucking wasn't intended to be fatal, but overzealous authorities sometimes botched the punishment. In the borough of Barnsley in South Yorkshire, for example, parish accounts show nine entries for repairs of two stools between 17. Much more information is available about the ducking stools themselves: their upkeep, how much was spent on their construction. While ducking was reserved largely for women, cucking stools were used to punish both men and women.įew records about the women who were ducked survive. … It’s misogynist, and it’s vile.”ĭucking stools were also distinct from cucking stools, which an 18th-century writer in Cornwall described as “a seat of infamy, where strumpets and scolds, with bare feet and head, were condemned to abide the derision of those that passed by.” The two terms are often used interchangeably, but cucking stools represented a less severe punishment, as victims weren’t dunked in water. Still, the scholar adds, both practices involve “throwing women into water in order to harass them in some way. Swimming a suspected witch is a test,” says Gibson. Subjects who sank were deemed innocent but could still wind up dead if they weren’t rescued from the water in time.Ī 1910 reenactment of a ducking in Leominster A separate test, known primarily as “ swimming” a witch, involved throwing a bound victim into a body of water to see whether they’d float (a sure sign of guilt in the early modern imagination). Though the women who ended up on the ducking stool risked being accused of witchcraft, the punishment-contrary to popular misconception-wasn’t used to determine whether someone was a witch. “They have their roots in fear of women's speech and fear that women will attack other people in their community, that they gossip too much, that their voices are dangerous, that they may, in extreme circumstances, also be witches.” “There were various rituals for silencing women,” says Marion Gibson, a scholar of Renaissance and magical literature at the University of Exeter.
Largely forgotten today, the practice speaks to the lengthy history of policing women’s voices- a trend that continues today. And her public humiliation was far from unique: Between the mid-16th and early 19th centuries, an untold number of women in England (as well as Scotland and colonial America) underwent ducking as a punishment for speaking out of turn. What is known is that she was a woman of limited financial means who likely worked in the local wool-based industry. Records of Pipes’ ducking are few and far between, a mixture of local folk history and short passages in history books.
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Ducked in full view of her friends, family and neighbors, Pipes ended her ordeal by unleashing “oaths and curses on the magistrates,” according to one eyewitness.Īn anti-suffrage postcard featuring a ducking stool The punishment wasn’t designed to be fatal (though it sometimes was), but rather a humiliating spectacle aimed at discouraging whatever behavior precipitated it. Like other ducking victims, she was sentenced to be plunged as many times as needed to “cool her immoderate heat,” in the words of French writer Francois Misson. Pipes’ tormentors tied her chair to the end of a long, maneuverable wooden arm-the preferred mechanism for dipping troublesome women in water. Her crime was simple: She was a common scold, accused of speaking ill of her husband once too often.
Though it probably would have been of little comfort to her, Pipes was about to make history by becoming the last woman in England to be “ ducked,” or immersed in water while tied to an apparatus known as a ducking stool. Strapped with irons to a wooden chair, she was held high above the crowd and wheeled toward Kenwater Bridge. If local legend is to be believed, these are the words that Jenny Pipes heard as she was paraded through the English town of Leominster in 1809.
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