A year or two before this he records: "Another case fell out about Mr. Maverick of Nottles Island, who had been formerly fined £100 for giving entertainment to Mr. Owen and one Hale's wife who had escaped out of prison, where they had been put for notorious suspicion of adultery." The editor adds, "Sarah Hales, the wife of William Hales, was censured for her miscarriage to be carried to the gallows with a rope about her neck, and to sit an hour upon the ladder; the rope's end flung over the gallows, and after to be banished."[280]
Some women in Massachusetts actually paid the penalty of death. Then, too, as late as Sewall's day we find mention of severe laws dealing with inter-marriage of relatives: "June 14, 1695: The Bill against Incest was passed with the Deputies, four and twenty Nos, and seven and twenty Yeas. The Ministers gave in their Arguments yesterday, else it had hardly gon, because several have married their wives sisters, and the Deputies thought it hard to part them. 'Twas concluded on the other hand, that not to part them, were to make the Law abortive, by begetting in people a conceipt that such Marriages were not against the Law of God."[281]
The use of the death penalty for adultery seems, however, to have ceased before the days of Sewall's Diary: for, though he often mentions the crime, he makes no mention of such a punishment. The custom of execution for far less heinous offences was prevalent in the seventeenth century, as any reader of Defoe and other writers of his day is well aware, and certainly the American colonists cannot be blamed for exercising the severest laws against offenders of so serious a nature against society. The execution of a woman was no unusual act anywhere in the world during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and the Americans did not hesitate to give the extreme penalty to female criminals. Sewall rather cold-bloodedly records a number of such executions and reveals absolutely no spirit of protest.
"Thorsday, June 8, 1693. Elisabeth Emerson of Haverhill and a Negro Woman were executed after Lecture, for murdering their Infant children."[282]
"Monday, 7r, 11th.... The Mother of a Bastard Child condemn'd for murthering it...."[283]
"Sept. 25th, 1691. Elisabeth Clements of Haverhill is tried for murdering her two female bastard children...."[284]
"Friday, July 10th, 1685.... Mr. Stoughton also told me of George Car's wife being with child by another Man, tells the Father, Major Pike sends her down to Prison. Is the Governour's Grandchild by his daughter Cotton...."[285]
From the court records in Howard's History of Matrimonial Institutions we learn: "'In 1648 the Corte acquit Elisa Pennion of the capitall offence charged upon her by 2 sevrall inditements for adultery,' but sentence her to be 'whiped' in Boston, and again at 'Linn wthin one month.'" "On a special verdict by the jury the assistants sentenced Elizabeth Hudson and Bethia Bulloine (Bullen) 'married women and sisters,' to 'be by the Marshall Generall ... on ye next lecture day presently after the lecture carried to the Gallowes & there by ye Executioner set on the ladder & with a Roape about her neck to stand on the Gallowes an half houre & then brought ... to the market place & be seriously whipt wth tenn stripes or pay the Sume of tenn pounds' standing committed till the sentence be performed.'"[286]
When punishment by death came to be considered too severe and when the crime seemed to deserve more than whipping, the guilty one was frequently given a mark of disgrace by means of branding, so that for all time any one might see and think upon the penalty for such a sin. All modern readers are familiar with the Salem form—the scarlet letter—made so famous by Hawthorne, a mark sometimes sewed upon the bosom or the sleeve of the dress, sometimes burnt into the flesh of the breast. Howard, who has made such fruitful search in the history of marriage, presents several specimens of this strange kind of punishment:
"In 1639 in Plymouth a woman was sentenced to 'be whipt at a cart tayle' through the streets, and to 'weare a badge upon her left sleeue during her aboad' within the government. If found at any time abroad without the badge, she was to be 'burned in the face with a hott iron.' Two years later a man and a woman for the same offence (adultery) were severely whipped 'at the publik post' and condemned while in the colony to wear the letters AD 'upon the outside of their vppermost garment, in the most emenent place thereof.'"[287]