tumbril

plural tumbrils · alternative tumbrel · alternative tumbrill

1. historicalA kind of medieval torture device, later associated with a ducking stool.
2. A cart well suited to dumping its load easily, being single-axled and also often having a hinged tailboard.

   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.

   1997, Don DeLillo, Underworld

   2 more examples

   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 […]

   1800, The Times, 17 Mar 1800, p.3 col. B

   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.

   1994, Cormac McCarthy, The Crossing

   Synonyms: dumpcart

3. historicalA cart used to carry condemned prisoners to their death, especially to the guillotine during the French Revolution.

   Out go Thomas Gainsborough and George Romney with all their 18th century frills and fripperies, like aristocrats deported on the tumbril.

   1999 July 21, Jonathan Jones, “Grey and grimy alternative to frippery that bespeaks loyalty to welfare state Britain”, in The Guardian

   2 more examples

   It is now ascertained that the tumbrel and the torches which figured in the massacre-scene of the 23d of February were prepared beforehand […]

   1848, The Times, 26 Jun 1848, p.4 col. B

   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.

   2002, Colin Jones, The Great Nation, Penguin, published 2003, page 370

4. UKobsoleteA basket or cage of osiers, willows, or the like, to hold hay and other food for sheep.