Theme: Commons

DEFINITION: SCOLDING, SCOLD, SCOLDS, SHREWS

(disturbing the peace and harmony of the commons)

A medieval offense; women who were verbally disputative; who incited or agitated against the public peace.

Related Terms: Ducking Stool, Common Scold, Scold. The convicted were called common scolds, or just scolds or even shrews.

“A troublesome and angry woman who, by brawling and wrangling amongst her neighbours, breaks the public peace, increases discord and becomes a public nuisance….”

Andrews, in his book Old Time Punishments explains why the medieval English even cared about scolding and scolds:

“It is clear, from a careful study of the history of medieval times, that virtue and amiability amongst the middle and lower classes, generally speaking, did not prevail. The free use of the tongue gave rise to riots and feuds to such an extent that it is difficult for us to realize at the present day. A strong feeling against scolding woman came down to a late.”

He also quotes from a 1467 Leicester city ordinance which provided that:

“… scolds to be punished by on a cuck-stool before their own doors and then carried to the four gates of the town.”

Usual punishment for scolding was either cucking stool or a ducking stool or even the imposition of a brank for a period of time. For men who incited unrest or were disputative, the typical punishment was a period of time in the stocks or the brank.

Scolding and bad speech were coded as feminine offences by the late medieval period. Women of all marital statuses were prosecuted for scolding, though married women featured most frequently, while widows were rarely labelled scolds.

Women who were also charged with other offences, such as violence, nightwandering, eavesdropping or sexual impropriety were also likely to be labelled scolds.

Individuals were frequently labelled ‘common scolds’, indicating the impact of their behaviour and speech on the whole community.

Men accused of scolding were often charged alongside their wives. Helen, wife of Peter Bradwall scolded Hugh Welesson and Isabel, his wife, in Middlewich in 1434, calling Isabel a “child murderer” and Hugh a “skallet [wretched] knave”. Isabel and Hugh also scolded Helen, calling her a “lesyng blebberer” (lying bletherer).

All parties were fined for the offences, though Hugh and Isabel were fined jointly. Like women, male scolds were often accused of many other offences, such as fornication, theft, illegal trading, and assault.

Karen Jones identified 13 men prosecuted for scolding in Kent’s secular courts, compared to 94 women and 2 couples.

LATER PUNISHMENTS OF SCOLDING

Later legal treatises reflected the dominance of scolding as a female offence. In the Commentaries on the Laws of England, Blackstone says of this offence:

A common scold, communis rixatrix, (for our law-latin confines it to the feminine gender) is a public nuisance to her neighbourhood. For which offence she may be indicted; and, if convicted, shall be sentenced to be placed in a certain engine of correction called the trebucket, castigatory, or cucking stool, which in the Saxon language signifies the scolding stool; though now it is frequently corrupted into ducking stool, because the residue of the judgment is, that, when she is so placed therein, she shall be plunged in the water for her punishment.

— Bl. Comm. IV:13.5.8, p. *169

The prescribed penalty for this offence involved dunking the convicted offender in water in an instrument called the “cucking stool”. The cucking stool, according to Blackstone, eventually became known as a ducking stool by folk etymology.

The Domesday Book notes the use of a cucking stool at Chester, a seat also known as cathedra stercoris, a “dung chair”, whose punishment apparently involved exposing the sitter’s buttocks to onlookers. This seat served to punish not only scolds, but also brewers and bakers who sold bad ale or bread, whereas the ducking stool dunked its victim into the water. Francois Maximilian Misson, a French traveller and writer, recorded the method used in England in the early 18th century:

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 ducking stool, rather than being fixed in position by the river or pond, could be mounted on wheels to allow the convicted woman to be paraded through the streets before punishment was carried out.

Another method of ducking was to use the tumbrel, which consisted of a chair on two wheels with two long shafts fixed to the axles. This would be pushed into the ducking pond and the shafts would be released, tipping the chair up backwards and ducking the occupant.

A scold’s bridle, known in Scotland as a brank, consists of a locking metal mask or head cage that contains a tab that fits in the mouth to inhibit talking. Some have claimed that convicted common scolds had to wear such a device as a preventive or punitive measure.

Legal sources do not mention them in the context of the punishment of common scolds, but there are anecdotal reports of their historical use as a public punishment.

In 17th-century New England and Long Island, scolds or those convicted of similar offences—both men and women—could be sentenced to stand with their tongue in a cleft stick, a more primitive but easier-to-construct version of the scold’s bridle, but the ducking stool also made the trip across the Atlantic.