On this day … 15 October 1666

Another court leet brought another glimpse into the daily life in seventeenth-century Preston, which might not have been so pleasant for uppity women. The town’s bailiffs were facing a fine for not erecting a cuckstool.

Here’s the Wikipedia description of their use:

‘Ducking stools or cucking stools were chairs formerly used for punishment of disorderly women, scolds, and dishonest tradesmen in medieval Europe and elsewhere at later times. The cucking-stool was a form of ‘wymen pine’, or “women’s punishment”, as referred to in Langland’s Piers Plowman (1378). They were instruments of public humiliation and censure both primarily for the offense of scolding or backbiting and less often for sexual offences like bearing an illegitimate child or prostitution.’

Here’s the court leet entry:

‘That ye late balives have not erected a coockstoole in some convenient place aboute the towne according to ye 77th prsentmt of the last Leete therefore wee Amerce them in xxs & that the now Balives shall erect and set one as afforesaid before the 25th of March next upon paine of xxs.’

This was just one of the ways that the town authorities had of controlling women. Another was the scold’s bridle, used as another form of ritual humiliation. Its use in Preston was described in an earlier post (19 April 2023) when Ellen Haworth was threatened with it:

‘Ellen Haworth, wife of Roger Haworth, for scowleinge and abuseing Mary, the wife of John Higham, with verry uncivell Language, to the bad example of others (if unpunished), as appeares by an Informacon, givien upon oath before Mr. Maior, Therefore to pay for this offence 2s. 6d., otherwise Mr. Maior is desired to cause the said Ellen punished by bridleinge her through the Towne or otherwise as Mr. Mair shall thinke fitt.’

The use of the cuckstool in Preston was a common form of punishment, for both men and women, as far back as the early fourteenth century, and probably from the time of the borough’s formation in the twelfth century.

We know this because although the surviving manuscript of the Preston Custumal, the town’s ‘creation document’, is believed to be of the later date, the rules and orders it contains can be traced back much earlier. Here’s what it has to say about the cuckstool:

‘Also if a Burgess is to be amerced in respect of bread and ale, the first, second, and third times he shall be amerced 12d., but the fourth time he shall pay the largest fine he is able to do or go to the cuckstool.’

Although here the punishment is prescribed for the men of the town, in later centuries it would seem to have been reserved for women. The Preston historian Anthony Hewitson found that there was ‘no instance on record of any local male person having been ducked’.

There certainly was a cuckstool in Preston in the seventeenth century, for a presentment to a court leet in 1656 records:

‘Ye now Bailifl’es shall cause to bee erected a cuckstoole over ye washingpoole, nere ye Almeshouses, att or before ye 25th of March next upon paine of xls. apeece.’

These would be the almshouses that used to stand in a large open space at the bottom of Church Street. A later presentment says the cuckstool was on Peel Moor, the name given to land now crossed by Deepdale Road. Putting the cuckstool over the washing pit handily combined women’s work and punishment

There were still reminders of that Preston cuckstool in the late eighteenth century when it gives the name to three fields marked on Lang’s 1774 plan of Preston. They are Cuckstool Pit Meadow, Further Cuckstool Pit Meadow and Cuckstool Meadow, and were located near the old infirmary and the Little Park on Deepdale Road.

And there were still traces in the nineteenth century, as Hewitson records:

‘A cuckstool remnant – the upright post on which the dipping plank or beam used to be worked ¬ was visible up to about 1826, at the side of a pit between Deepdale-road and the lower end of what is now East View.’

Even after the cuckstool was no longer used in Preston, public humiliation was provided by the pillory (last used in 1814) and the stocks in the churchyard (still in use in 1825).

---

Sources
David Berry’s transcription of the Preston Court Leet records: http://www.wyrearchaeology.org.uk/index.php/areas-of-interest/preston?view=article&id=162
Hewitson’s Preston Court Leet Records