Sittings of courts were often held in the public room of taverns, not only in small towns where assembly rooms were few, but in large cities. From the settlement of Philadelphia till 1759, justices of peace heard and decided causes in the public inns of Philadelphia, and the Common Council had frequent sittings there. In Boston the courts were held in suburban taverns when the smallpox scourged the town. In Postlethwaite’s Tavern (shown on [page 214]) the first courts of Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, were held in 1729, and propositions were made to make it the county seat; but the present site of the city of Lancaster was finally chosen, though Landlord Postlethwaite made strenuous endeavors to retain his tavern as a centre.
Postlethwaite’s Tavern, 1729.
Our ancestors found in criminals and all the accompaniments of crime their chief source of diversion. They did not believe in lonely captivity but in public obloquy for criminals. The only exciting and stirring emotions which entered their lives came through the recounting of crimes and offences, and the sight of the punishment of these crimes and offences; rising of course to the highest point of excitement in witnessing the public executions of criminals. The bilboes were the first engine of punishment in Boston, and were used until 1639, and perhaps much later. The drinkers of a cup of sack at the Boston ordinary had much diversion in seeing James Woodward, who had had too much sack at the Cambridge ordinary, “laid by the heels” on the ground with a great bar of iron fastened and locked to his legs with sliding shackles and a bolt. Still more satisfaction had all honest Puritans when Thomas Morton, of Merrymount, that amusing old debauchee and roisterer, was “clapt into the bilbowes,” where “the harmless salvages” gathered around and stared at him like “poor silly lambes.”
The stocks soon superseded the bilboes and were near neighbors and amusement purveyors to the tavern. Towns were forced by law to set up “good sufficient stocks.” Warwick, Rhode Island, ordered that “John Lowe should erect the public stocks and whipping-post near David Arnold’s Tavern, and procure iron and timber for the same.” The stocks were simple to make; a heavy timber or plank had on the upper edge two half-circle holes which met two similar notches or holes in a movable upper timber. When this was in place these notches formed round holes to enclose the legs of the prisoner, who could then be locked in.
The whipping-post, a good sound British institution, was promptly set up in every town, and the sound of the cat often entered the tavern windows. I can imagine all the young folk thronging to witness the whipping of some ardent young swain who had dared to make love to some fair damsel without the consent of her parents. There was no room for the escape of any man who thus “inveagled” a girl; the New Haven colony specified that any tempting without the parents’ sanction could not be done by “speech, writing, message, company-keeping, unnecessary familiarity, disorderly night meetings, sinful dalliance, gifts, or (as a wholesale blow to lovers’ inventions) in any other way.”
But sly Puritan maids found that even the “any other way” of Puritan law-makers could be circumvented. Jacob Murline, in Hartford, on May-day in 1660, without asking any permission of Goodman Tuttle, had some very boisterous love-making with Sarah Tuttle, his daughter. It began by Jacob’s seizing Sarah’s gloves and demanding the mediæval forfeit—a kiss. “Whereupon,” writes the scandalized Puritan chronicler, “they sat down together, his arm being about her, and her arm upon his shoulder or about his neck, and hee kissed her and shee kissed him, or they kissed one another, continuing in this posture about half an hour.” The angry father, on hearing of this, haled Jacob into court and sued him for damages in “inveagling” his daughter’s affections. There were plenty of witnesses of the kissing, and Jacob seemed doomed to heavy fines and the cat-o’-nine-tails, when crafty Sarah informed the Court that Jacob did not inveigle her, that she wished him to kiss her—in fact, that she enticed him. The baffled Court therefore had to fine Sarah, and of course Sarah’s father had to pay the fine; but the magistrate called her justly a “Bould Virgin,” and lectured her severely. To all this she gave the demure answer “that she hoped God would help her to Carry it Better for time to come,” which would seem to be somewhat superfluous, since she had, without any help, seemed to do about as well for herself as any girl could wish to under the circumstances.
Sign-board of
Pembroke Tavern.
For some years the Quakers never were absent from the whipping-post. They were trying enough, preaching everywhere, and on all occasions, yet never willing to keep silent when the Puritan preacher held forth; not willing, even, to keep away from the Puritan meeting. They interrupted these meetings in most offensive ways, and were promptly whipped. One poor Quakeress, Lydia Wardwell, “a young tender chaste person,” but almost demented with religious excitement, was taken forcibly from the Ipswich meeting-house and “tyed to the fence-post of the Tavern,” and then sorely lashed.