Page:Lancashire Legends, Traditions, Pageants, Sports, Etc., with an Appendix Containing a Rare Tract.djvu/214

 KIRKHAM DUCKING-STOOL. ancient borough of Kirkham, in Amounderness, formerly possessed a bridle, or brank, for scolds, as well as a ducking-stool. A pool near the old workhouse long bore the name of the Cuckstool Pit, but it is now filled up.

MANCHESTER GALLOWS AND TUMBREL. inquisition at Preston in 1359, found that Manchester had been held by its lords time out of mind, not as a borough, but as a market-town, with the privileges to market-towns belonging, including the right to punish all breakers of the assise of bread and ale, as well as butchers, tanners, regulators, &c., with right also of gallows and tumbrel. Where the gallows stood in Manchester is not known. Those for the Hundred of Salford were fixed at a little distance from the town of Salford, in a field still called the Gallows Field, on the banks of the Irwell, leading from Boat-house Lane to the lock, and opposite the great Hulme Meadow. The pillory, or neck-stocks, stood in the market-place till 1812, when it was removed with the common stocks, which stood beneath it. The tumbrel (says Baines) was the same instrument of correction as the cuck-stool, which is described by our Saxon ancestors as "a chair in which scolding women were plunged into water." In Domesday it is called Cathedra Stercoris, and was anciently used for the punishment of brewers and bakers who transgressed the laws. "Some (says Blount) think it is a corruption from ducking-stool, others from choking-stool, because women plunged in water by this means were commonly suffocated." In