The same morning perambulating of ale-houses was carried on at Skipton, the churchwardens being headed by the old beadle, an imposing personage, who wore a cocked hat and an official coat trimmed with gold, and carried in majestic style a trident staff, a terror to evil-doers, at least to those of tender years.[54] At Beverley the stocks still preserved in the minster were used as late as 1853; Jim Brigham, guilty of Sunday tippling, and discovered by the churchwardens in their rounds, was the last victim.  Some sympathizer placed in his mouth a lighted pipe of tobacco, but the constable in charge hastily snatched it away.  James Gambles, for gambling on Sunday, was confined in the Stanningley stocks, Yorkshire, for six hours in 1860.  The stocks and village well remain still at Standish, near the cross, and also the stone cheeks of those at Eccleston Green bearing the date 1656.  At Shore Cross, near Birkdale, the stocks remain, also the iron ones at Thornton, Lancashire, described in Mrs. Blundell’s novel In a North Country Village; also at Formby they exist, though somewhat dilapidated.

  [54] History of Skipton, W.H.  Dawson, quoted in Bygone
  Punishments, p. 199.

Whether by accident or design, the stocks frequently stand close to the principal inn in a village.  As they were often used for the correction of the intemperate their presence was doubtless intended as a warning to the frequenters of the hostelry not to indulge too freely.  Indeed, the sight of the stocks, pillory, and whipping-post must have been a useful deterrent to vice.  An old writer states that he knew of the case of a young man who was about to annex a silver spoon, but on looking round and seeing the whipping-post he relinquished his design.  The writer asserts that though it lay immediately in the high road to the gallows, it had stopped many an adventurous young man in his progress thither.

The ancient Lancashire town of Poulton-in-the-Fylde has a fairly complete set of primitive punishment implements.  Close to the cross stand the stocks with massive ironwork, the criminals, as usual, having been accustomed to sit on the lowest step of the cross, and on the other side of the cross is the rogue’s whipping-post, a stone pillar about eight feet high, on the sides of which are hooks to which the culprit was fastened.  Between this and the cross stands another useful feature of a Lancashire market-place, the fish stones, an oblong raised slab for the display and sale of fish.

In several places we find that movable stocks were in use, which could be brought out whenever occasion required.  A set of these exists at Garstang, Lancashire.  The quotation already given from King Lear, “Fetch forth the stocks,” seems to imply that in Shakespeare’s time they were movable.  Beverley stocks were movable, and in Notes and Queries we find an account of a mob at Shrewsbury dragging around the town in the stocks an incorrigible rogue one Samuel Tisdale in the year 1851.