Description: Stocks were known in England for about a thousand years, first illustrated in Anglo-Saxon manuscripts, and a few were still in use as late as the 1850s. From the 14th century every town and village was ordered to maintain a set of stocks and an Act passed under Henry VII decreed that vagabonds and idle persons were to be secured in stocks, 'there to remayne by the space of thre days and thre nightes and there to have none other sustenance but bread and water' before being driven out of town.