Cucking-Stool
Bouvier's Law Dictionary and Concise Encyclopedia · John Bouvier; revised by Francis Rawle · 1914
Bouvier's Law Dictionary and Concise Encyclopedia
An engine or machine for the punishment of scolds and unquiet women. Called also a trebucket, tumbrel, and castigatory. Bakers and brewers were formerly also liable to the same punishment. Being fastened in the machine, they were immersed over head and ears in some pool; Blount; Co. 3d Inst. 219; 4 Bla. Com. 168. CUI ANTE DIV0RTIUM (L. Lat. The full phrase was, Cui ipsa ante divortium contradicere non potuit, whom she before the divorce could not gainsay). A writ which anciently lay in favor of a woman who had been divorced from her husband, to recover lands and tenements which she had in feesimple, fee-tail, or for life, from him to whom her husband had aliened them during marriage, when she could not gainsay it; Fitzh. N. B. 240; 3 Bla. Com. 183, n.; Stearns, Real Act. 143; Booth, Real Act. 188.
Abolished in 1833.
CUI IN VITA (L. Lat. The full phrase gainsay). A writ of entry which lay for a widow against a person to whom her husband had in his lifetime aliened her lands.
Fitzh. N. B. 193.
It was a method of establishing the fact of death, being a trial with witnesses, but without a jury. The object of the writ was to avoid a judgment obtained against the husband by confession or default. It is obsolete in England by force of 32 Hen.