No account of the minor physical punishments formerly inflicted would be complete without reference to the methods of coercing ill-conditioned females. These were mostly of the same character as the pillory and stocks. Chief among them was the ducking or cucking-stool, a scourge for scolds, and once as common in every parish as the stocks. Other varieties of it were known under the names of tumbrel, the gumstole, the triback, the trebucket, and the reive. It may be described briefly as consisting of a chair or seat fixed at the end of a long plank, which revolved on a pivot, and by some simple application of leverage upset the occupant of the chair into a pond or stream. Mr. Cole, 1782, describes one which was hung to a beam in the middle of a bridge. The Leominster stool, which is still preserved, is a plank upon a low substantial framework, having the seat at one end, and working like an ordinary seesaw: that at Wooton Basset was of the tumbrel order, and was a framework on a pair of wheels, with shafts at one end, the stool being at the other. In this, as in the Leicester "scolding cart," and other forms of tumbrels, the culprit was paraded through the town before immersion. The punishment was primarily intended for scolds, shrews, and "curst queens," but it was also applied to female brewers and bakers who brewed bad ale, and sold bad bread. It was inflicted pursuant to sentence in open court, but in some parts the bailiffs had the power within their own jurisdictions, and the right of gallows, tumbrel, and pillory was often claimed by lords of the manor. The greatest antiquity is claimed for this sort of punishment. Bowine declares that it was used by the Saxons, by whom it was called "Cathedra in qua rixosæ mulieres sedentes aquæ demergebantur." No doubt the ducking was often roughly and cruelly carried out. We have in the frontispiece of an old "Chap" book, which relates how "an old woman was drowned in Ratcliffe highway," a pictorial representation of the ceremony of ducking, and it is stated that she met her death by being dipped too often or too long. That the instrument was in general use through the kingdom is proved by numerous entries in ancient records. Thus Lysons, in his "Environs of London," states that at a court of the Manor of Edgware in 1552 the inhabitants were presented for not having a tumbrel and a ducking-stool as laid down by law. In the Leominster town records the bailiff and chamberlains are repeatedly brought up and fined either for not providing "gumstoles" or not properly repairing them, while in the same and other records are numerous statements of bills paid to carpenters for making or mending these instruments. The use of them, moreover, was continued to very recent times. A woman was ducked under Kingston Bridge in 1745 for scolding. At Manchester, Liverpool, and other Lancashire towns the stool was in use till the commencement of this century. So it was at Scarborough, where the