No man shall court a maid in person or by letter without first obtaining consent of her parents; five pounds penalty for the first offense; ten pounds for the second; and for the third, imprisonment during the pleasure of the court.
A man that strikes his wife shall be fined ten pounds. A woman that strikes her husband shall be punished at the court's discretion.
Puritan New England was not alone among the colonies in adopting harsh laws. Virginia went to extremes, as appears in the following extract from "Laws of Virginia, at a Grand Assembly held at James City, 23d March, 1662":
In every county the court shall cause to be set up a pillory, a pair of stocks, and a whipping-post near the courthouse, and a ducking stool; and the court not causing the said pillory, whipping-post, stocks, and ducking-stool to be erected, shall be fined five thousand pounds of tobacco to the use of the public.
Among commercial restrictions we find an enactment prohibiting the planting of tobacco after July 10, which was done for "the improvement of our only commodity, tobacco, which can no ways be effected but by lessening the quantity and amending the quality."
Another object that the government had in view was to compel the people to become silk-growers against their will. "Be it therefore enacted," says the Legislature, "that every proprietor of land within the colony of Virginia shall, for every hundred acres of land holden in fee, plant upon the said land ten mulberry-trees at twelve feet distance from each other, and secure them by weeding and a sufficient fence from cattle and horses."
Tobacco fines, as usual, were enacted in case the planting and weeding were not duly performed according to the statute; and further:
There shall be allowed in the public levy to any one for every pound of wound silk he shall make, fifty pounds of tobacco, to be raised in the public levy, and paid in the county or counties where they dwell that make it.
This act was passed in 1662, and probably continued in force for a long time; but Virginia did not therefore become a silk-growing country, nor has it yet, though many parts are well adapted to raise this commodity. People, we presume, have hitherto found other things more profitable.
The following enactment is a mixture of the barbarous and the ludicrous: