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Updated: June 19, 2025
This last Court, I learn from mine uncle, did not condemn her, as some of the evidence was old, and not reliable. Uncle saith she was a wicked old woman, who had been often whipped and set in the ducking-stool, but whether she was a witch or no, he knows not for a certainty. November 8. Yesterday, to my great joy, came my beloved Cousin Rebecca from Boston.
"Or, maw be," resumed Gaffer Solomons, encouraged to a fourth suggestion by the success of its predecessor, "maw be some o' the misseses ha' been making a rumpus, and scolding their good men. I heard say in my granfeyther's time, arter old Mother Bang nigh died o' the ducking-stool, them 'ere stocks were first made for the women, out o' compassion like!
Then the stocks and the wooden cage were in frequent use, though "barbarous and cruel" punishments were forbidden in 1641. Scolds and railers were set on a ducking-stool and dipped over head and ears three times, in running water, if possible. Mrs. Oliver, a troublesome theologian, was silenced with a cleft stick applied to her tongue.
A bridle, something like a bit for a restive horse, was in use for the curbing of scolds; but this was a later invention than the cucking-stool, or ducking-stool.
In the one dwelt a man who had been transported for a grievous crime, whether justly or not I cannot say, but his visage was such as to condemn him, and he was often in his cups and had spent many days in the stocks, and had made frequent acquaintance with the whipping-post, and with him dwelt his wife, an old dame with a tongue which had once earned her the ducking-stool in England.
"It is a long journey," said he, "from Plymouth rock to Norfolk Bay. Between the two points we find the changes that nearly three centuries have brought. In that time the old order has changed. We no longer burn witches or torture slaves. And to-day we neither spread our cloaks on the mud for ladies to walk over nor treat them to the ducking-stool.
If virtue is merely an inflammation against our neighbour's sins, what man on earth is so mean as to be incapable of it? To be virtuous in this fashion is as easy as lying. Those who abstain from it do so not out of lack of heart, but from choice. We have read of the popularity of the ducking-stool in former days for women taken in adultery.
"Good wives," said a hard-featured dame of fifty, "I will tell you a piece of my mind. It would be greatly for the public behoof, if we women being of mature age and church members in good repute like Ann Linkon might speak our minds of such baggage as Dorothe Stevens without being adjudged and sent to the ducking-stool as she is to be done.
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