impossible now to fix the date when the chair of correction was first introduced into Liverpool, or to say when, by the improvement in female manners, it was no longer found to be necessary; but that it was in request as late as the year 1695 may be inferred from an item in the parochial expenditure of that year, which runs thus:—"Paid Edward Accres for mending the cuck-stool, fifteen shillings." For many ages the ducking-stool stood at the south end of the town of Ormskirk; but from the improvement in female manners, or the refinement in modern taste, it was removed in 1780. According to Blount, this cooling apparatus was in use in the Saxon era, when it was named the scealfing-stole, and described to be a chair in which quarrelsome women were placed, and plunged under water. The poet Gay celebrates this correctional chair, which was evidently in use in his time, in the following terms (Pastorals, iii. v. 105):—
"I'll speed me to the pond where the high stool
On the long plank hangs o'er the muddy pool—
That stool the dread of every scolding quean."
DUCKING-PITS, &c., AT BURNLEY.
This mode of punishing female offenders has long beenndisused in Burnley and the neighbourhood. The places, however, can still be identified. The pit for Burnley was formed on what is now termed Brown Hill. When the present genteel residences were erected there, the pond was filled up. The ducking-pits for the Pendle district were formed by the side of the northern branch of the river Calder, here locally termed "Pendle Water." The ford across the river at that point is well known as the "Duck-Pit Hippings."
