page_title: Common scold
hierarchical_section_title: Common scold
caption_attribution_description: Illustration from an 18th century chapbook reproduced in Chap-books of the eighteenth century by John Ashton (1834).
context_page_description: In the common law of crime in England and Wales, a common scold was a type of public nuisance—a troublesome and angry person who broke the public peace by habitually chastising, arguing and quarrelling with their neighbours. Most punished for scolding were women, though men could be found to be scolds.
  The offence, which carried across in the English colonisation of the Americas, was punished by fines and increasingly less often by ways intended to humiliate in public: dunking; being put in the scold's bridle; or the stocks. Selling bad bread or bad ale was also punished in these ways in some parts of England in medieval centuries.
  None of the physical punishments are known to be administered since an instance of 1817 which involved a wheeling through the streets. Washington D.C. authorities imposed a fine against a writer against clerics, declared a common scold, in 1829. The offence and punishment were abolished in England and Wales in 1967 and in New Jersey declared as such formally in 1972.
context_section_description: In the common law of crime in England and Wales, a common scold was a type of public nuisance—a troublesome and angry person who broke the public peace by habitually chastising, arguing and quarrelling with their neighbours. Most punished for scolding were women, though men could be found to be scolds.
  The offence, which carried across in the English colonisation of the Americas, was punished by fines and increasingly less often by ways intended to humiliate in public: dunking: (being arm-fastened into a chair and dunked into a river or pond, or paraded through the street on wheels); being put in the scold's bridle (branks); or the stocks. Selling bad bread or bad ale was also punished in these ways in some parts of England in medieval centuries.
  None of the physical punishments are known to be administered (such as by magistrates) since an instance of 1817 which involved a wheeling through the streets. Washington D.C. authorities imposed a fine against a writer against clerics, declared a common scold, in 1829. The offence and punishment were abolished in England and Wales in 1967 and in New Jersey declared as such formally in 1972.
caption: Punishing a common scold in the ducking stool
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