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Friday, August 15, 2014

Wyuen Pine

Wyuen Pine  is a 13th or 14 century term, most likely Scottish, meaning "women's punishment".  This term was used primarily in association with the use of a "dunking" stool or chair, as a form of public humiliation.


Chairs or stools were built upon a plank from which a person was tied and then publicly dunked into a body of water as a form of law enforcement. 

"The ducking-stool was a strongly made wooden armchair (the surviving specimens are of oak) in which the victim was seated, an iron band being placed around her so that she should not fall out during her immersion.


Usually the chair was fastened to a long wooden beam fixed as a seesaw on the edge of a pond or river. Sometimes, however, the ducking-stool was not a fixture but was mounted on a pair of wooden wheels so that it could be wheeled through the streets, and at the river-edge was hung by a chain from the end of a beam. In sentencing a woman the magistrates ordered the number of duckings she should have....Sometimes the punishment proved fatal and the victim died of shock."  - wiki


From the TV Series, "Salem"
Not only women were punished in this manner, men were also submerged.  

"Dunking is a form of punishment that was mainly reserved for supposed witches. The victim was tied to a chair which was elevated or lowered by the torturer. If he noticed that the victim was going to pass out, he elevated the chair. When he needed information and the victim was unwilling to cooperate, he lowered it. 



This method was widely used during the Spanish Inquisition and in England and France. The victim was usually intermittently submerged for many hours until he or she revealed information or death occurred.

While witches were commonly tortured using this method, thieves and murderers could be subject to it in order to extract a confession. This was more common when other more sophisticated torture devices were not present."  - medievality.com



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