In the common law of crime in England and Wales, a
common scold was a type of public nuisance—a troublesome and angry person who broke the public peace by habitually chastising, arguing and quarrelling with their neighbours. Most punished for scolding were women, though men could be found to be scolds.
The offence, which carried across in the English colonisation of the Americas, was punished by fines and increasingly less often by ways intended to humiliate in public: dunking (being arm-fastened into a chair and dunked into a river or pond, or paraded through the street on wheels); being put in the
scold's bridle (branks); or the stocks. Selling bad bread or bad ale was also punished in these ways in some parts of England in medieval centuries.
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