TUMBREL. An instrument of punish ment made use of by the Saxons, chiefly for the correction of scolding women by ducking them in water, consisting of a stool or chair fixed to the end of a long pole.
2. In Domesday it in called cathedra etercorie, and is described as cathedra in quo rixoec mulieree sedentee aquie demergebantur, and seems to be no other than what has more receotly been called a ducking or oucking stool, Braeton writes it rim borella, of which perhaps tumbrel is a curruption. It was sometimes also called a trcbucket, from the stool or buoket in whioh the prisoner was placed when put down into the water being fixed to the end of a tree or piece of timber. Lord Coke, how ever, says it properly signifies a dung-cart, and that every lord of a leet or market ought to have a pillory and tumbrel, and that the leet oould be, forfeited for the want of either.
3. This antique punishment was also inflicted upon bakers, brewers, and other transgressors of the sumptuary laws, who were placed upon such a stool and immerged in etercore,—that is, in filthy water. By a statute of Henry III., in the year
1250, entitled the statute of the pillory and tum brel, a baker or brewer offending against the assize of bread or of malt shall suffer bodily punish ment; that is a baker in the pillory and a brewer to the tumbrel, pietor patiatur collietrigium bracia trix trebucetum.
The last attempt on record, by legal process, seems to have been on the 27th of April, 17,15, of which we find the following account in the London Evening Poet of that day. " Last week a woman that keeps the Queen's Head alehouse, at Kingston in Surrey, was ordered by the court to be ducked for scolding, and was accordiogly plazed in a chair and duoked in the river Thames, under Kingston bridge, in the presence of two thousand or three thousand people. The statute authorizing such punish mente was finally repealed by a statute of 1 Victoria,, in 1837.