cucking stool

English

Etymology

From about 1215. Origin uncertain. The variant ducking stool is a later (from 1597) corruption.

Noun

cucking stool (plural cucking stools)

1. (historical) A kind of chair to which a person (such as a scold or dishonest tradesman) was fastened in order to be punished and socially humiliated, usually by being pelted and hooted at by a mob in front of their own house, but sometimes being taken to water and ducked.
   • 1825 June 22, [Walter Scott], Tales of the Crusaders. […], volume I (The Betrothed), Edinburgh: […] [James Ballantyne and Co.] for Archibald Constable and Co.; London: Hurst, Robinson, and Co., →OCLC, page 173:

     […] while in the same breath the Fleming exclaimed, “Beware the cucking-stool, Dame Scant o' Grace,” while he conducted the noble youth across the court.

   • 1996, Judith M. Bennett, Ale, Beer, and Brewsters in England: Women's Work in a Changing World, 1300-1600, Oxford University Press, page 105:

     Whenever officers resorted to corporal punishment of brewers, then, it seems that cucking-stools were sometimes reserved for brewsters (as well as for other female offenders). Yet if the cucking-stool was more a female punishment and the pillory (or other fates) more often reserved for men, the distinctions in the middle ages were still fluid, and their significance is hard to gauge.

   • 2016, Brian Weiser, “Chapter 29: The Shamings of Falstaff”, in R. Malcolm Smuts, editor, The Oxford Handbook of the Age of Shakespeare, Oxford University Press, page 515:

     Orders to build cucking stools riddle local records.¹⁴ In Calne in 1675 the view of the hundred ordered the Lord of Calne to build a stool or face a forty-shilling fine.¹⁵ In 1684 the view raised the fine to thirty pounds, but by 1687 Calne still lacked a cucking stool.

Synonyms

• (stool used for punishment): castigatory, ducking stool, scolding stool, stool of repentance, trebuchet, tumbril

See also

• pillory
• stocks