tumbril

English
A tumbril (sense 1) or cucking stool.
A tumbril (sense 3), carrying prisoners to a guillotine.

Alternative forms

Etymology

From Old French tumberel (modern French tombereau, in Anglo-Latin tumberellus), from tomber, tumber (“to fall”).

Pronunciation
  • IPA(key): /ˈtʌmbɹɪl/

Noun

tumbril (plural tumbrils)

  1. (historical) A kind of medieval torture device, later associated with a cucking stool.
  2. A cart well suited to dumping its load easily, being single-axled and also often having a hinged tailboard; a dumpcart.
    • 1800, The Times, 17 Mar 1800, p.3 col. B:
      They then confined the Dean, while they rifled the house of every valuable article, as well as plate and money; all that was portable they loaded on Mr. Carleton’s own tumbril, to which they harnessed his horse […]
    • 1994, Cormac McCarthy, The Crossing:
      They’d rigged a makeshift tent of sheeting over the little tumbril of a cart and they’d put up a sign at the front that gave her history and the number of people she was known to have eaten.
    • 1997, Don DeLillo, Underworld:
      This is a sixteenth-century work done by a Flemish master, Pieter Bruegel, and it is called The Triumph of Death […] He studies the tumbrel filled with skulls.
  3. (historical) A cart used to carry condemned prisoners to their death, especially to the guillotine during the French Revolution.
    • 1848, The Times, 26 Jun 1848, p.4 col. B:
      It is now ascertained that the tumbrel and the torches which figured in the massacre-scene of the 23d of February were prepared beforehand […]
    • 1999 July 21, Jonathan Jones, “Grey and grimy alternative to frippery that bespeaks loyalty to welfare state Britain”, in The Guardian‎:
      Out go Thomas Gainsborough and George Romney with all their 18th century frills and fripperies, like aristocrats deported on the tumbril.
    • 2002, Colin Jones, The Great Nation, Penguin, published 2003, page 370:
      If there would be former freemasons on the Committee of Public Safety during the Terror, they would be numbered too in the ranks of the émigré armies and counter-revolutionary Chouan rebels, and in tumbrils bound for the guillotine.
  4. (UK, obsolete) A basket or cage of osiers, willows, or the like, to hold hay and other food for sheep.

Translations

Further reading
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