In the Boson of the 1900s adultery was the major among all of the different crimes for which punishment was levied in Puritan times. Other crimes were sluggishness on the part of a servant, lack of dutiful behavior in a child, being a Quaker (or, indeed, holding any religious beliefs considered false by the Puritans), being a witch, wearing ornate dress (if you were not high society or wealthy), being an idle Indian, joking, laughing, and putting on dramas or singing in public, to name a few. So many pleasurable and joyful activities were criminal acts that, blackest shade of Puritanism so darkened the national visage with it, that all the subsequent years have not sufficed to clear it up. Society had yet to learn again the forgotten art of gaiety. This criminalization of essentially harmless human actions seemed to go against nature in a very destructive way. (Miller & Johnson, 2001)
Some of the actions that the Puritans in the seventeenth century made into criminal acts punishable by law, usually with public whippings, but sometimes worse, were:
- disobedience on the part of children or servants
- speaking ill of the court or judge
- speaking ill of a magistrate or minister
- playing with cards or dice
- denying the divinity of any part of the Bible
- professing to be a Quaker or befriending one
- telling lies
- drinking in a tavern on the Sabbath
- wandering around
- being idle
- marrying your brother's widow
- wearing the clothes of the opposite sex (Bremer, 1995)
By far the greatest number of crimes for which Puritans were brought to justice was sexual in nature. Scholars have discovered from looking at old records that almost half the crimes of which Puritans were convicted were sexual crimes between consenting partners................
