Common scold
A British historian suggests attempts to control and punish 'bad speech' increased after the Black Death, when demographic shift led to greater resistance and threats to the status quo.
In the Commentaries on the Laws of England, Blackstone outlines the offence: Lastly, a common scold, communis rixatrix, (for our law-latin confines it to the feminine gender) is a public nuisance to her neighbourhood.
Other writers disagree with this: the Domesday Book notes the use of a form of cucking stool at Chester as a cathedra stercoris, a "dung chair", whose punishment apparently involved exposing the sitter's buttocks to onlookers.
French traveller and writer Francois Maximilian Misson recorded the means used in England in the early 18th century:[10] The way of punishing scolding women is pleasant enough.
[12][13] In 17th-century New England and Long Island, scolds or those convicted of similar offences—men and women—could be sentenced to stand with their tongue in a cleft stick, a more primitive but easier-to-construct version of the bridle—alternatively, to the ducking stool.
[14][10] A plaque on the Fye Bridge in Norwich, England, claims to mark the site of a "cucking" stool, and that from 1562 to 1597 strumpets (flirtatious or promiscuous young women) and common scolds suffered dunking there.
"[15] The Anecdotes also suggest penological ineffectiveness as grounds for the stool's disuse; the text relates the 1681 case of a Mrs. Finch, who had received three convictions and duckings as a common scold.
[16] and a 1780 poem by Benjamin West, who wrote that: There stands, my friend, in yonder pool, An engine call'd a ducking-stool; By legal pow'r commanded down, The joy and terror of the town.
Lord Chief Justice John Holt of the Queen's Bench apparently pronounced this error, for he announced that it was "better ducking in a Trinity, than a Michaelmas term", i.e. better carried out in summer than in winter.
[18] The last recorded uses of ducking stool were In 1812, federal enforcement of common law offences was held to be unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in United States v. Hudson and Goodwin.
Nevertheless, in 1829, a Washington, D.C., court found the American anti-clerical writer Anne Royall guilty of being a common scold, the outcome of a campaign launched by local clergymen.
The common law offence endured in New Jersey until struck down in 1972 in State v. Palendrano by Circuit Judge McGann, who found it had been subsumed in the provisions of the Disorderly Conduct Act of 1898, was bad for vagueness and offended the 14th Amendment to the US Constitution for sex discrimination.
