out in even the most respectable
of godly families.

Both Sewall and Winthrop have left records of grave offences and
transgressions against social decency. About 1632 a law was passed in
Massachusetts punishing adultery with death, and Winthrop notes that at
the "court of assistants such an act was adopted though it could not at
first be enforced."[278] In 1643 he records:

"At this court of assistants one James Britton ... and Mary Latham, a
proper young woman about 18 years of age ... were condemned to die for
adultery, upon a law formerly made and published in print...."[279]

A year or two before this he records: "Another case fell out about Mr.
Maverick of Nottles Island, who had been formerly fined L100 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