The days of ducking women in the Skerne and Swale

As the river turns sharply, it forms an unfathomably deep pool at the foot of the cliff which is called the Clink Pool – presumably because of the noise a stone makes when dropped into it, or perhaps it was the sound an overly talkative woman made when, tied to a stool, she was ducked there.

Robin Brooks in Barningham takes us to Clink Bank because, several years ago, he found in an original picture in the Oxfam shop in Richmond entitled “A Winter Scene in Cling-bank Wood”.

George Cuit's aquatint showing Clink Pool in Richmond in 1895

It is dated 1795 and signed G Cuit.

This is George Cuit (1743-1818), who is the father of George Cuitt (1799-1854), the renowned engraver who has featured here in recent weeks because the University of Chester has published an immense catalogue of all of his works, and because his headstone in Masham churchyard has become overgrown.

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George Cuitt seems to have added the second t to his surname to differentiate himself from his father, who was also an artist.

George Cuit by his son, George Cuitt, shortly after he had died in 1818. Why George Jnr had added the extra t to George Snr's surname is a mystery. Picture: Bree 2.95, courtesy of Cheshire Archives and Local Studies. Taken from George Cuitt: England's Piranesi (University of Chester, £35) 

In fact, George Cuit was a builder’s son from Moulton, near Middleton Tyas, and went to Richmond Grammar School, where he came to the attention of Sir Lawrence Dundas of Aske who, in 1769, paid for him and a friend to go to Rome to study art. Cuit returned in 1775 and built up a reputation as a fine artist, specialising in painting the homes and horses of the wealthy in the Yorkshire Dales – he painted the scenery for Richmond theatre when it opened in 1788.

When Cuit returned from Rome, he brought with him a “fine collection” of works by master-engraver Giovanni Piranesi. These prints inspired his son to become “England’s Piranesi” while Cuit himself became known for his aquatints, where acid eats into the metal plate to create the pools of colour.

It is his 225-year-old aquatint of Clink Bank that Robin found for a couple of pounds in Oxfam.

“It is in typical 18th Century "romantic" style, and shows curtains of massive icicles, and wintry trees, overhanging the River Swale,” says Robin. “I often wonder if the print ever left the town of his birth.”

Cuit probably made the engraving to appeal to the early tourists who were entranced by Richmond’s scenic beauty.

“The 'hanging' wood up above the deep Clink Pool was particularly highly regarded feature of the Richmond landscape in Georgian times,” says historian Jane Hatcher, “and the great and the good of the town made a great deal of protecting it from being spoiled by the projected railway line in the 1840s.”

After much discussion, the railway terminated to the south of the river rather than cross it near Clink Bank.

But earlier generations of Richmondians had come to Clink Pool not to drink in its romantic beauty but to dunk in it their misbehaving wives.

Robert Harman’s 1724 plan of Richmond (above) shows a chair balanced at the end of a plank in the “Clinck Poole”. The key says that it is “the ducking stoole”.

A close-up of Richmond's ducking stool in the Clink Pool

The practice of ducking women in water dates back to Saxon times. When witch-hunting was at its height in medieval times, the suspected witch had her right thumb tied to her left big toe and was thrown half-naked into a river. If she floated, she was guilty because it proved she was in league with the devil and so was rejecting the baptismal water; if she sank, she was innocent – but she was dead.

By the 17th Century, women were being ducked for being “scolds” – argumentative, troublesome and overly talkative. The ducking was supposed to cool the heat in their tongue, and embarrass them into silence.

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In Darlington, there was a “duckstoole” from the beginning of the 17th Century – in 1615 it needed five shillings worth of repairs to its “iron pynne and stowpe of wood”. It was in a pool dug in the River Skerne in Northgate, near where the ABC cinema building is today.

Several women were shown the error of their ways by being plunged into the water, including in 1619, Dorothy Metcalfe, who was “a common scold to the common nuisance of the neighbours and against the peace of our Lord the King”. However, when Dorothy transgressed again in 1622, she was fined as Darlington seems to have ended this form of punishment.

Richmond, though, pushed on. In 1654, it was ordered that Mary, wife of George Outhwaite of Firby near Bedale, should “be set in the ducking stool and publiquely ducked for being an incorrigible and notorious scould and abusing her neighbours”.

In 1695, the Richmond chamberlains, who were in charge of the borough finances, paid a local joiner ten shillings to repair the ducking stool, although it soon fell into disrepair once more and was quietly ditched.

We believe the last ducking in our area was on October 8, 1776, when Moll Cass, of Leeming, was “with great dordum dragged to the dam and there ducked” in the Bedale Beck.

Moll had a long history of fortune-telling and being in league with the devil. She was also accused of causing chimneys to catch fire, of infecting people with smallpox and of sucking the life-giving milk out of Ann Jepson’s breasts.

Despite the Bedale Beck not often having more than a trickle in it, “the amazement is that it (the ducking) was not her end for she amost drownded”. Moll survived and continued to practice her sorcery until she died a natural death in 1795.

The last recorded ducking in Britain was in 1809 in Leominster in Herefordshire, where Jenny Pipes, a “notorious scold”, was paraded through the town half naked before being submerged. Sarah Leeke was sentenced in 1817 in the same town to the same fate, but when they reached the river with her, the water was too low, so she was just humiliated by being paraded through the streets.

The ducking stool is now on display in Leominster priory. The law allowing women to be ducked remained on the statute book until 1967.

The ducking stool on display in Leominster Priory, believed to be the only one in the country

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