Dunking


Dunking is a form of corporal punishment used in the medieval and Early Modern period; particularly in the middle of the 17th century.

As a trial

was associated with the witch hunts of the 16th and 17th centuries: an accused who sank was considered innocent, while floating indicated witchcraft. Some argued that witches floated because they had renounced baptism when entering the Devil's service. King James VI of Scotland claimed in his Daemonologie that water was so pure an element that it repelled the guilty.
The idea itself went back to classical times. Pliny the Elder in his Natural History of c.70 A.D., says: "Hee reporteth besides of these kind of men , that they will never sink or drown in the water, be they charged never somuch with weightie & heavie apparel."

As punishments for scolds

Francois Maximilian Misson, a French traveller and writer, recorded the method used in England in the early 18th century:
The way of punishing scolding women is pleasant enough. They fasten an armchair to the end of two beams twelve or fifteen feet long, and parallel to each other, so that these two pieces of wood with their two ends embrace the chair, which hangs between them by a sort of axle, by which means it plays freely, and always remains in the natural horizontal position in which a chair should be, that a person may sit conveniently in it, whether you raise it or let it down. They set up a post on the bank of a pond or river, and over this post they lay, almost in equilibrio, the two pieces of wood, at one end of which the chair hangs just over the water. They place the woman in this chair and so plunge her into the water as often as the sentence directs, in order to cool her immoderate heat.

The ducking stool, rather than being fixed in position by the river or pond, could be mounted on wheels to allow the accused to be paraded through the streets before punishment was carried out. Another method of dunking was to use the tumbrel, which consisted of a chair on two wheels with two long shafts fixed to the axles. This would be pushed into a pond and the shafts would be released, tipping the chair up backwards and dunking the occupant.

Modern use

In 2004, a soldier from the Singapore Guards died from a dunking incident during a Combat Survival Training course.