Dictionary

cucking stool

Noun

cucking stool (plural cucking stools)

(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, Sir Walter Scott, Tales of the Crusaders, Volume 1: The Betrothed (Scott novel), page 103 ↗,
  “Now, hold thy tongue, with a wanion" said the monk; 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, 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, tumbrel

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