Cucking stool

[…] 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.

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.

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.