Scottish Life in the 17TH Century. 295 



made. A few years later the changes brought about by the 

 restoration made his own church a proscribed sect, and he 

 became an exile and a prisoner for conscience sake. 



Besides fine and imprisonment, modes of punishment 

 peculiar to the time were then in use, and some of them were 

 quaintly appropriate to the nature of the offences. Thus a 

 scandal monger was exposed in public with the branks, a 

 wooden muzzle, upon her tongue; and a vixen was shaven at 

 the market cross. More common forms of chastisement were 

 the placing of culprits in the jougs, an iron collar which was 

 fastened to every market cross and church door, or in the 

 pillory. The latter was a savage punishment, the neck of the 

 person being enclosed in a wooden collar at a height which 

 just allowed him to touch the ground with his toes and conse- 

 quently caused the weight of his body to rest on the chin 

 and back part of the head. Scourgings were also resorted to, 

 and as an additional disgrace the delinquent was often carted 

 through the town. An instrument of punishment that was 

 commonly in use in Britain at this time was the ducking stool. 

 A strong chair was fixed to the end of a movable plank and 

 suspended over the river or a pool of water ; and by elevating the 

 other end of the plank the victim (generally a scolding or 

 drunken woman) was immersed as often as the sentence re- 

 quired. The ducking stool, however, was more of an English 

 than a Scotch institution ; and it does not seem to have been 

 established in Dumfries. 



The power of imposing the punishment of death was re- 

 stricted in ordinary times to the Privy Council and the Circuit 

 Court. Trial at the latter was by judge and jury. The judges 

 were not always trained lawyers. There were two justiciary 

 judges; but the courts seem to have been more frequently pre- 

 sided over by a number of landed proprietors, to whom a com- 

 mission for the purpose was issued by the Privy Council. The 

 Earl of Buccleuch and other members of the Scott family 

 figure in these commissions. The trials at these courts were 

 chiefly for cattle lifting and theft, both of which offences were 

 punished with death. The common mode of execution was by 

 hanging, but sometimes the criminal was allowed the less 

 degrading death of drowning in the Nith. A more revolting 

 form of death, that of burning, was reserved for those whose 

 crimes were viewed with special horror. Such were the 

 unfortunate creatures to whom the dark superstition of the time 

 ascribed powers of witchcraft. Belief in the possession of 

 magical powers by persons who might have incurred the dis- 

 pleasure of their neighbours was universal at this time. It 

 was not confined to the ignorant and the degraded ; but was 

 shared by the most learned and exalted in the land, and none 

 were more zealous in the discovery and persecution of reputed 



