74. Ancient Wiltshire Customs. 
beam was worked up and down, like a see-saw, and so the person 
in the seat was ducked. When the machine was not in use, the 
end of the beam which came on land was secured to a stump in the 
ground, by a padlock, to prevent the village children from ducking 
each other in sport, and perhaps drowning each other. 
Mr. Curwood favoured me with a drawing of this Cucking Stool, 
of which he said he had a most distinct recollection, and I now send 
it herewith. 
I afterwards showed this drawing to Mr. Bellamy, who was 
for many years Clerk of Assize on the Oxford Circuit, and had 
filled several very important legal offices, and had travelled the 
circuit for more than sixty years. He said that he had never 
seen a Cucking Stool with the seat still attached to it, but he had 
seen several with the transverse beam still fixed at the top of the 
post, and that the post without the beam was still remaining at the 
edges of village ponds, in many places in the midland counties, 
when he first went the circuit. Mr. Bellamy died in the year 
1846. 
It is therefore pretty clear, that about one hundred, or one 
hundred-and-fifty years ago, Cucking Stools were as common on 
village greens as the stocks are now. 
In the early part of the reign of Queen Anne, Mrs. Hannah 
Saxby, the wife of Mr. Joseph Saxby, a mercer at Westerham in 
Kent, [but whose name in all the law books is printed Foxby, | had 
been convicted upon an indictment for being a common scold; and 
it appears from her case, in the 6th volume of Modern Reports, 
(n. 11,) that the Court of Queen’s Bench, in Michaelmas Term, 
2 Anne, (1702,) held the indictment bad, in arrest of judgment, 
because the indictment charged her with being Communis Calum- 
niatriz, instead of Rixatrix ; and the report adds “ the punishment 
of a scold is ducking ;” and Lord Holt said “ it were better ducking 
in a Trinity than in a Michaelmas Term.” 
This prosecution having thus failed, Mrs. Saxby must have been 
again indicted, as Mr. Sergeant Salkeld, in his Reports, (vol. 1, p. 
266,) under the date of Trinity Term, 3 Anne (1704) states, in the 
case which he styles Regina v. Foxby, that “the defendant was 
