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 tumbril 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 women was ducked under Kingston Bridge for scolding in 1745. 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 offender was dipped into the water from the end of the old pier. But the latest inflictions seemingly were at Leominster, where in 1809 a woman named Jenny Pipes was paraded and ducked near Kerwater Bridge, while another Sarah Leeke was wheeled round the town in 1817, but not ducked, the water being too low. The ducking-stool was not always an effectual punishment. It appears from the records of the King’s Bench that in the year 1681 Mrs. Finch, a notorious scold, who had been thrice ducked for scolding, was a fourth time sentenced for the same offence, and sentenced to be fined and imprisoned. Other measures were occasionally taken which were deemed safer, but which were hardly less cruel. The “branks,” or bridle, for gossips and scolds, was often preferred to the ducking-stool, which endangered the health, and moreover gave the culprit’s tongue free play between each dip. The branks was a species of iron mask, with a gag so contrived as to enter the mouth and forcibly hold down the unruly member. “It consisted of a kind of crown or framework of iron, which was locked upon the head and was armed in front with a gag,--a plate or a sharp-cutting knife or point.”[112] Various specimens of this barbarous instrument are still extant in local museums, that in the Ashmolean at Oxford being especially noticeable, as well as that preserved in Doddington Park, Lincolnshire. The branks are said to have been the invention of agents of the Spanish Inquisition, and to have been imported into this country from the Low Countries, whither it had travelled from Spain.