SCOLD - The Law Mind Legal Dictionary

SCOLDAuthored

The Law Mind • 886 words

Definition

At common law, a scold — more precisely, a common scold — was a person, invariably characterized as a woman, who habitually disturbed the public peace through brawling, wrangling, and vituperative speech directed at neighbors. The offense was treated as a public nuisance rather than a private wrong.

As a legal status, the term describes not a single act of angry speech but a pattern of conduct sufficiently persistent and disruptive to constitute a neighborhood nuisance. The distinction between ordinary quarreling and being adjudged a common scold lay in frequency, public character, and the communal harm caused.

Common Language

Modern common usage (Wiktionary): A person who habitually scolds, in particular a troublesome and angry woman.

Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): To find fault or rail with rude clamor; to brawl; to utter harsh, rude, boisterous rebuke; to chide sharply or coarsely.

The common meaning captures something close to the legal concept, but the gap is significant: in ordinary usage, scolding is a behavior anyone engages in. In legal usage, scold designated a formal status — a recognized category of offender subject to prosecution and specific punishment. The law also gendered the term explicitly in a way ordinary usage does not require.

Common Confusion

Scold and common scold are sometimes treated as interchangeable in historical sources, but the operative legal term of art is common scold. The qualifier "common" does the legal work: it signals habitual, repeated conduct rising to the level of a public nuisance, as distinct from a single incident of abusive language, which might be addressed under other categories of breach of the peace.

Recognized Forms

/SUBTYPES

Common Scold: The specific common law offense. One who by the practice of frequent scolding disturbs the neighborhood. Treated as a public nuisance indictable at common law. The prescribed punishment in English practice was the trebucket, castigatory, or cucking-stool (a ducking stool), a punishment unique to this offense and reflecting both its gendered nature and its archaic origins.

Why It Matters in Research

SCOLD is a historically bounded term with almost no living legal application. Researchers encounter it almost exclusively in three contexts: (1) early American criminal indictments and court records through the nineteenth century; (2) historical treatises and commentaries on common law nuisance and criminal law; and (3) constitutional and feminist legal scholarship examining the gendered character of early American criminal law.

The key research trap is anachronism. Because the offense was openly and explicitly gendered — all historical definitions frame it in terms of a troublesome woman — modern researchers working in criminal law history, women's legal history, or the history of public order offenses will find the term used without apology or qualification in sources through the mid-nineteenth century. Bouvier simply redirects to COMMON SCOLD, signaling that the standalone term had no independent legal purchase.

The offense's status in American law is a useful research thread in itself. Several American courts in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries grappled with whether common scold survived as an indictable offense in jurisdictions that received English common law. The offense was litigated into the twentieth century in some states, making it a surprisingly durable archaism. Researchers tracing the reception and survival of English common law offenses in American jurisdictions should flag this term as a test case.

The cucking-stool punishment referenced in Anderson's entry is significant for legal historians: it illustrates the degree to which early common law incorporated publicly humiliating, corporal, and explicitly gendered punishments that had no American statutory successor, raising questions about what it meant to "receive" the common law of crimes.

Historical Dictionary Support

All four source dictionaries converge on the core definition: habitual, disruptive, quarrelsome speech by a woman, constituting a public nuisance. Black's first and second editions reproduce nearly identical language drawn from Stephen's Commentaries (4 Steph. Comm. 276), making Stephen the common ancestor of the American legal dictionary treatment.

Anderson's entry is the most substantive, adding the punishment element (trebucket, castigatory, cucking-stool) and noting that the offense remained nominally punishable — by fine — in his era, though enforcement had become exceptional. Black's 2nd edition cross-references Bishop's Criminal Law (§ 147) and notes American case law, indicating the offense had actual courtroom presence in the nineteenth-century United States, not merely theoretical survival.

What the historical dictionaries uniformly omit: any discussion of the offense's constitutional or civil liberties dimensions. No source addresses the tension between punishing speech-as-nuisance and emerging free speech principles. For a researcher working backward from modern doctrine, that silence is itself informative.

Jurisdictional Note

The offense of common scold was received as part of English common law in many American states but was never universally recognized, and its enforceability varied considerably. Some American courts held that the offense did not survive reception of the common law; others permitted indictments well into the twentieth century. No American jurisdiction actively prosecutes the offense today.

Encyclopedia Cross-Reference

See Law Mind Encyclopedia: Public Nuisance (Common Law Origins); Criminal Law — Reception of English Common Law in American Jurisdictions; Gendered Offenses in Early American Criminal Law.

SCOLDmain

Black's Law Dictionary • 1891

A troublesome and angry wo- man, who, by brawling and wrangling among her neighbors, breaks the public peace, in- creases discord, and becomes a public nui- sance to the neighborhood. 4 Steph. Comm. 276.

SCOLDmain

Black's Law Dictionary (2nd Ed.) • 1910

A troublesome and angry woman, who, by brawling and wrangling among her neighbors, breaks the public peace, increases discord, and becomes # public nuisance to the neighborhood. 4 Steph. Comm. 276. —Common scold. One who, by the practice of frequent scolding, disturbs the neighborhood. Bish. Crim. Law, § 147. A quarrelsome. brawling, vituperative rson. . SS. Vz. Fed. Cas. 907; Com. v. Mohn, 52 Pa. 243, 91 Am. Dec. 153; Baker v. State, 63 N. J. Law, 45, 20 Atl 858.

SCOLDmain

Anderson's Dictionary of Law • 1890

A troublesome and angry woman, who, by brawling and wrangling among her neighbors, breaks the public peace, increases discord, and becomes a nuisance to the neighborhood.1 At common law, a common scold is a public nuisance. The sentence was that she be placed in a trebucket, castigatory, or cucking-stool, that is, in AngloSaxon, the scolding stool.2 The offense is now punishable, if at all, by fine, or by fine and imprisonment. In 1824 a woman was convicted of this offense in the city of Philadelphia, and the sentence was, as at common law, that she "be placed in a ducking or cucking-stool, and be plunged three times in the water." This sentence was reversed by the supreme court, which decided that the old common-law punishment had not been adopted in Pennsylvania. The court also said that the punishment was introduced at a time when women were subjected to degradation as slaves; that authorities differ as to what the original Scienter. With knowledge, knowingly; punishment was, and how, therefore, it was to be exethe fact of knowledge. In the Latin forms of pleadings, the emphatic word used to charge knowledge in a defendant. Has also designated the clause in a declaration or indictment which alleges such knowledge. The intention of the accused must be alleged in every part of the description of the crime where it is necessary to constitute an offense. It is necessary to allege and prove a scienter where there is injury by a domestic animal of mischievous propensity.4 The possession of other counterfeit paper by the accused at the time of passing a counterfeit note is evidence of the scienter. The scienter may be proved inductively by collateral facts, and from previous offenses. Scilicet. From scire licet, as one may know or learn : to wit; that is to say, namely. Abbreviated sct., sc., ss. On reviving judgments, see generally 94 Am. Dec. 222-46 (1888), cases; on making representative a defendant to suit abated by death, Porlevant v. Pendleton, 23 Miss. 36-37 (1851), cases; recognizances, United States v. Stevens, 16 F. R. 105 (1883), cases, State v. Dowd, 43 N. H. 455 (1862); order for alimony, Chestnut v. Chestnut, 77 111. 349 (1875), cases; liens, Winder v. Coldwell, 14 How. 443 (1852). 2 As to patent for an invention, see Stearns v. Barrett, 1 Mas. 164 (1816); United States v. Rell Telephone Co., 128 U. S. 360, 369, 371 (1888). cuted upon offenders, if executed at all.3 In 1866 the same court, in reviewing the record in another case, said that the law has been considered settled since the decision in the James Case; that the penal code of 1860 did not abolish the offense; and that, as to the unreasonableness of punishing women alone for a too free use of the tongue "it is enough to say that the common law, which is the expressed wisdom of ages, adjudges that it is not unreasonable. Argument drawn from the indelicacy or unreasonableness of such a prosecution should be addressed, therefore, to the legislature." See PUNISHMENT, Cruel.

SCOLDv.

Websters Unabridged Dictionary (1913) • 1913

To find fault or rail with rude clamor; to brawl; to utter harsh, rude, boisterous rebuke; to chide sharply or coarsely; -- often with at; as, to scold at a servant. Pardon me, lords, 't is the first time ever I was forced to scold. Shak.

SCOLDv.

Websters Unabridged Dictionary (1913) • 1913

To chide with rudeness and clamor; to rate; also, to rebuke or reprove with severity.

SCOLDn.

Websters Unabridged Dictionary (1913) • 1913

One who scolds, or makes a practice of scolding; esp., a rude, clamorous woman; a shrew. She is an irksome, brawling scold. Shak. A scolding; a brawl.

scoldnoun

Wiktionary (English) • 2026

Wiktionary contributors • CC BY-SA 4.0 • via Kaikki
Extracted and formatted for display by Law Mind. Source link opens the current Wiktionary page and its contributor history; it is not a frozen copy of this extract.

A person who habitually scolds, in particular a troublesome and angry woman.

scoldverb

Wiktionary (English) • 2026

To rebuke angrily. | Of birds, to make harsh vocalisations in aggression. | Of birds, to make vocalisations that resemble human scolding. | Misconstruction of scald.

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