Recently catalogued documents from the Poole Borough collection reveal historic attitudes to public punishment.
The Tudor period was a bad time to be a criminal! Death sentences could be handed out for everything from murder to theft and even begging. In an era when public executions were common, and even seen as a form of entertainment, punishments for minor offences could be similarly harsh. Pillories, stocks, ducking stools and other implements of torture and public humiliation would have been in use in most towns, for the punishment of misdemeanours and even bad behaviour!
The instruments of punishment
In August 1524, Poole embraced Tudor corporal punishment. The earliest existing Bailiff’s accounts in the Poole Borough Archive record the delivery and construction of both a pillory and a ‘conking stool’, sent from Sturminster Newton,
‘Paid to Lensey the 18th day of August for the carriage of the pillory and conking stool from Sturminster Newton Castle to Poole. . . 8s’
The pillory, similar to the ‘stocks’, was generally a wooden construction used to restrain offenders by the head and hands. They were often set up in public areas such as market places, where crowds would gather to jeer at and abuse them.
An early version of trading standards
The pillory in Poole likely stood on the upper part of Market Street. Its placement was recalled for many years through the original street name ‘Pillory Street’, renamed Market Street in around the early 1700s. The pillory was often used as punishment for bakers, ale sellers and other tradesmen who were dishonest or sold poor products.
Cucking and ducking
Cucking stools and ducking stools were a harsher form of punishment. The former was a stool on which the offender was secured and then paraded around the town to face public abuse and humiliation. The latter involved securing the wrongdoer, generally a woman, in a chair attached to a beam set up near a body of water, and repeatedly ‘ducking’ them in. This punishment could sometimes result in death. Ducking stools were infamously used around Europe as a method to identify witches in the 17th century, but were more commonly used to punish ‘scolds’ – women who caused a nuisance by frequently arguing with their neighbours or their husbands!
Poole clearly possessed one of these items, although unusually, the town accounts refer to the apparatus as a conking stool [kongkyng stowll]. The nature and cost of the materials used might suggest that Poole had a ducking stool, likely set up at a convenient place on the quay,
‘Paid for the making of the iron work for the conking stool and for hauling up of the timber . . .5s 3d’
Amazingly, there is evidence of ducking stools being used in England as late as the early 1800s and pillories were still in use until outlawed in 1837.
For more information
The bailiffs accounts of John Mann, archive reference: DC-PL/DA/2/2, are available to view for free in the Dorset History Centre searchroom.
H.P. Smith, The History of the Borough of the Town and County of Poole, (1951). Available in the local studies library at Dorset History Centre.