Take a look in detail at this extraordinary plasterwork, from a house called Llys Owain in Dolgellau. I don't know much about it, but the cartoonish characters probably date from the sixteenth century. When you look carefully you can see one person (a witch?) strung up by the neck from the branches of a tree. Down below, somebody else (probably another witch) is being given the full treatment in a ducking stool. Are the other characters on the right cheering things on, or are they involved in operating the ducking stool? Difficult to tell. But one appears to be holding a cross, and the one in the middle appears to be playing a wind instrument.
Thankfully, people were not often hanged by the neck in Regency Wales -- but it did happen when people were condemned to death by a court of law, and very rarely as a result of mob rule. It is uncertain when the ducking stool was last used in Wales as a form of punishment.
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