Ducking-stools and cucking-stools are chairs formerly used for punishment of women in England and Scotland (see reference, 1985). Writers often mistakenly consider both stools to be the same but they are not. The cucking-stool was a form of wyuen pine ("women's punishment") as referred to in Langland's Piers Plowman(1378). They were both instruments of social humiliation and censure, primarily for the offense of scolding or and less often for sexual offenses like bearing an illegitimate child, or prostitution. The stools were technical devices which formed part of the wider method ...