The stool was exactly like a chair without legs, fastened on one end of a long pole, in the centre of which was a framework with solid wooden wheels.  The culprit was fastened in the chair with her face towards the men, who were at the other end of the pole, and who had to push and guide the machine through the narrow streets of the town until they reached the “deep hole,” where the unfortunate woman had to be ducked overhead in the river.  Her feet were securely tied to the top of the pole to prevent them from being hurt when passing through the town, and to hinder her from using them to keep her head above the water.  The poet describes the “engine called a ducking-stool” as the “joy and terror of the town,” but the “joy” could only have been that of the men, women, and children who could be spared to see the show, and knew the woman’s scolding propensities.  If she continued scolding after the first “duck,” down she went again, and again, until, as we imagined, half filled with water, she was unable to scold further, and so the water triumphed in the end: 

  No brawling wives, no furious wenches
  No fire so hot, but water quenches.

The tower of St. Mary’s Church was built on four lofty arches, one of which formed the entrance to the church while the other three formed entrances to the street, the footpath passing through two of them.

[Illustration:  LORD LEICESTER’S HOSPITAL AND GATE.]

We passed alongside the ancient and picturesque half-timbered building known as Lord Leicester’s Hospital, which was one of the few buildings in the town that escaped the fire in 1694.  It had been built by Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, the favourite of Queen Elizabeth and of Kenilworth fame, to accommodate twelve poor men or brethren besides the master, who, according to Dugdale the famous antiquary, “were to be clothed in blew cloth, with a ragged staff embroydered on the left sleeve,” and not to go into the town without them.  The hospital dated from 1571, but what was formerly the banqueting-hall belonged to an earlier period, and owed its preservation largely to the fact that the timber of which the roof had been constructed was Spanish chestnut, a timber which grew luxuriantly in the forests of England, and resembled English oak.  It was largely used by the monks in the building of their refectories, as no worm or moth would go near it and no spider’s web was ever woven there, the wood being poisonous to insects.  It is lighter in colour than oak, and, seeing the beams so clean-looking, with the appearance of having been erected in modern times, it is difficult for the visitor to realise that they have been in their present position perhaps for five or six centuries.  Over one of the arched doorways in the old hospital appeared the insignia of the bear and the ragged staff, which was also the sign of public houses, notably that at Cumnor, the village of Amy Robsart.  This we discovered to be the arms of the Earls of Warwick,