Lancashire Legends, Traditions, Pageants, Sports, &c./Part 4/Manchester Gallows and Tumbrel

3253706Lancashire Legends, Traditions, Pageants, Sports, &c. — Manchester Gallows and Tumbrel1873

MANCHESTER GALLOWS AND TUMBREL.

An inquisition at Preston in 1359, found that Manchester had been held by its lords time out of mind, not as a borough, but as a market-town, with the privileges to market-towns belonging, including the right to punish all breakers of the assise of bread and ale, as well as butchers, tanners, regulators, &c., with right also of gallows and tumbrel. Where the gallows stood in Manchester is not known. Those for the Hundred of Salford were fixed at a little distance from the town of Salford, in a field still called the Gallows Field, on the banks of the Irwell, leading from Boat-house Lane to the lock, and opposite the great Hulme Meadow. The pillory, or neck-stocks, stood in the market-place till 1812, when it was removed with the common stocks, which stood beneath it. The tumbrel (says Baines) was the same instrument of correction as the cuck-stool, which is described by our Saxon ancestors as "a chair in which scolding women were plunged into water." In Domesday it is called Cathedra Stercoris, and was anciently used for the punishment of brewers and bakers who transgressed the laws. "Some (says Blount) think it is a corruption from ducking-stool, others from choking-stool, because women plunged in water by this means were commonly suffocated." In Saxon times the fosse, over which the correctional stool was suspended, was used for the ordeal of plunging. In the ancient collection of laws entitled "Regia Majestas Scotiarum," it is stated that criminal pleas belonged to those barons who held their courts with "Sac et soc furca et fossa [gallows and pit], toll et theam, infangtheof et utfangtheof." On the words "furca et fossa," Sir Henry Spelman remarks, that they express the right of hanging male and drowning female criminals; and adduces an instance in which the latter punishment was used in the reign of Richard II. "The Manchester stool (says Rev. John Whitaker) remained within these few years (1775) an open-bottomed chair of wood, placed on the end of a long pole (balanced upon a pivot), and suspended over the large collection of water called Pool-house, or Pool Fold, which continued open until about the middle of the seventeenth century. It was afterwards suspended over the water of Daub Holes (afterwards the Infirmary Pond), and was used to punish scolds and common prostitutes."