One can hardly conceive a punishment more degrading to the offender, or less calculated to refine the spectators, and yet it seems to have been common in every part of England, and there are few places where a brank or scold's bridle is not shown as the effective mode in which our fathers curbed an unruly tongue. Cicily Pewsill's case still lingers in tradition, as the last occasion of its application in Warrington, and it will soon pass into history.—Beamont's "Warrington in the Thirteenth Century."
SCOLD'S BRIDLE AT HOLME.
Dr Whitaker, the historian of Whalley, formerly possessed a scold's brank, which had evidently done much duty. Dr Plott says:—"This artifice is much to be preferred to the ducking-stool, which not only endangers the health of the party, but gives liberty of tongue betwixt every dip. . . . The offender, by order of the magistrate, when the brank is fastened with a padlock behind, is led round the town by an officer, to her shame." The present occupier of Holme is not aware what has become of his grandfather's brank.
THE CUCK-STOOL OR DUCKING-STOOL.
As recently as the beginning of the eighteenth century this machine for the punishment of scolds was in use in the parish and town of Liverpool. It was a chair suspended by a long pole over some pool of water; and the scolding woman being tied fast in the chair, could be ducked more or less deeply in the pond, as those on its bank raised their end of the pole. It is, says Baines,
