A carpenter was employed to make a pair of stocks; and, it being adjudged that he charged too much for his work, he was sentenced to be put in them for one hour. A servant, charged with slandering the Church, was whipped, then deprived of his ears and banished. This punishment was deemed severe, and excited some remarks upon the subject.
A Capt. Stone was fined one hundred pounds and prohibited from coming into Boston without the governor’s leave on pain of death, for calling Justice Ludlow a “just-ass.” Another party, for being drunk, was sentenced to carry forty turfs to the fort; while another, being in the company of drunkards, was set in the stocks.
But finally the Court of Assistants began to make laws, or lay down rules of some sort. As for example: Every one shall pay a penny sterling for every time of taking tobacco in any place. In Plymouth Colony the law was less stringent: there a man was fined five shillings for taking tobacco while on a jury, before a verdict had been rendered. Absence from church subjected the delinquent to a fine of ten shillings or imprisonment. Any one entering into a private conference at a public meeting shall forfeit twelve pence for public uses. 1642, Mr. Robert Saltonstall is fined five shillings for presenting his petition on so small and bad a piece of paper; and this, it seems, was after it had been determined “that a body of laws should be framed which would be approved of by the General Court and some of the ministers as a fundamental code.” Notwithstanding this, in all cases, like the above, where there was no law, one was made, or inferred, to meet the case; so that, after the establishment of a “fundamental code,” there was about as much ex post facto law as before. Among the laws or orders of the “fundamental code” was one, “that no person, Householder or others, shall spend his time unprofitably under paine of such punishment as the court shall think meet to inflict;” and “the constables were ordered to take knowledge of offenders of this kind,” and, among others, especially tobacco-takers. Another was, “that no person either man or woman shall make or buy any slashed clothes, other than one slash in each sleeve and another in the back; also all cuttworks, imbroidered or needle workt caps, bands, vayles, are forbidden hereafter to be made or worn under said penalty—also all gold or silver girdles, hatbands, belts, ruffs, beaver hats, are prohibited to be bought or worn hereafter, under the aforesaid penalty,” &c. The penalty is such punishment as the Court may think meet to inflict.
In addition to these, the code went still further in regulating the dress of women: “4th of 7th month [September, as the year began with March, until 1752], 1639, Boston. No garments shall be made with short sleeves, whereby the nakedness of the arm may be discovered in the wearing thereof;” and, where garments were already made with short sleeves, the arms to be covered with linen or otherwise. No person was allowed to make a garment for women with sleeves more than half an ell wide, and “so proportionate for bigger or smaller persons.”
In the matter of currency, it was ordered, in 1634, “that musket balls of a full boar shall pass currently for farthings apiece, provided that no man be compelled to take above 12 pence at a time in them.”
It would seem that some of these decisions, or the general character of the government, had caused some remark, as it was “ordered that Henry Lyn shall be whipt and banished the Plantation before the 6th day of October next, for writing into England falsely and maliciously against the government and execution of Justice here.” “Execution of justice” is good, we should say.
Ward, in his “Trip to New England,” a very coarse and abusive paper, published in London, in 1706, in a book called “London Spy,” says, in Boston “if you kiss a woman in publick, tho’ offered as a Courteous Salutation, if any information is given to the Select Members, both shall be whipt or fined.” He relates, that “a captain of a certain ship, who had been a long voyage, happen’d to meet his wife, and kist her in the street, for which he was fined Ten Shillings, and forc’d to pay the Money. Another inhabitant of the town was fin’d Ten Shillings for kissing his own wife in his Garden, and obstinately refusing to pay the Money, endur’d Twenty Lashes at the Gun, who, in Revenge for his Punishment, swore he would never kiss her again either in Publick or Private.”
John Dunton, in his famous work, “Dunton’s Life and Errors,” speaks of the government, when he was in Boston, in 1686. He says, “Let it be enough to say, The laws in force here, against immorality and prophaneness, are very severe. Witchcraft is punish’d with death, as ’tis well known; and theft with restoring fourfold, if the Criminal be sufficient.—An English woman, admitting some unlawful freedoms from an Indian, was forc’d twelve months to wear upon her Right arm an Indian cut in red cloath.”
The “Body of Liberties,” as it was strangely called, contained an hundred laws, which had been drawn up pursuant to an order of the General Court, by Nathaniel Ward, pastor of the church at Ipswich, who had been formerly a practitioner of law in England; and this book was printed by Daye, the first printer, at Cambridge in 1641. (Thomas, p. 47.)
There was also published in 1649 a “Book of General Laws and Liberties, concerning the Inhabitants of Massachusetts.” By these, gaming by shuffle-board and bowling at houses of entertainment, where there was “much waste of wine and beer,” were prohibited under pain for every keeper of such house twenty shillings, and every person playing at said games, five shillings. For “damnable heresies,” as they were called, banishment was the appropriate punishment.