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tumbril
(historical) A kind of medieval torture device, later associated with a ducking stool.
A cart well suited to dumping its load easily, being single-axled and also often having a hinged tailboard.
📑 Synonyms:
dumpcart
💬 Quotations
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.
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.
(historical) A cart used to carry condemned prisoners to their death, especially to the guillotine during the French Revolution.
💬 Quotations
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.
(UK, obsolete) A basket or cage of osiers, willows, or the like, to hold hay and other food for sheep.
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