In New England, notably on Massachusetts Bay, where the leaders of the breakaway Puritans sought to build a new world on the Book of Leviticus, a more determined attempt was made to legislate passion out of life. Of all ages this would seem, on the face of it, to have been the most difficult one for courting couples, since the most trivial intimacies which occur when boy meets girl-holding hands, walking together in a lovers' lane-were liable to be construed as 'sinful dalliance'. Yet the young generation of settlers seems to have circumvented the law no less successfully than a later generation circumvented Prohibition.
The Puritan Fathers were persuaded that the disposing of children in marriage was a responsibility vested in them by the Almighty. They held, moreover, that the sooner a man was married the better, and for that reason they persecuted bachelors. In Connecticut every kind of obstacle was put in the way of a bachelor keeping his own house, the assumption apparently being that he would turn it into a brothel. Unless a bachelor had authority to live alone, he was fined £1 a week. Nor could a young spark choose, of his own accord, a congenial family with which to stay. A law of 1636 said 'it is ordered that no master of a family shall give habitation or entertainment to any young man to sojourn in his family but by the allowance of the inhabitants of the said town'. In New Haven, in 1642, the law directed that 'no young men shall live by themselves in cellars but betake themselves to such families as the masters thereof. . . may watch over them. . . .' A Massachusetts law sought to prevent single persons riding from town to town. According to the legislators, such per-sons customarily gave the pretext of going to hear lectures, when the reality was that they were tavern-crawling.
Since a father was carrying out God's will in disposing of his daughter in marriage, it followed that any unauthorized young man who sought to engage the girl's affections was frustrating the intentions of God and man. Hence the offence of 'inveigling' found its way on to the statute book. 'It is common practice in divers places', said the Massachusetts law of 1647, 'for young men irregularly and disorderly to watch all advantage for their evil purposes, to insinuate into the affections of young maidens by going to them in places and seasons unknown to their parents for such ends, whereby much evil hath grown among us, to the dishonour of God and damage of parties.' To discourage conduct of this kind, the law decreed a penalty of £5 for a first offence, £10 for a second and prison for a third.
A similar law was passed in Connecticut. Some of the methods by which 'endeavours to inveigle' were to be expected were enumerated; they included 'speech, writing, message, company keeping, unnecessary familiarity, disorderly night meeting, sinful dalliance, gifts or any other way.,..' In modern eyes, it would appear to have been a promising field for a rising and irreverent lawyer. 'What is dalliance?' he might have asked. 'And what makes it sinful? What is unnecessary familiarity?' But the pious settlements on Massachusetts Bay had no time or taste for such dialectics.
The law was not a dead letter. There are numerous cases on record of men being fined for unauthorized wooing. A determined offender was Arthur Rowland Junior, who paid his court to Elizabeth, daughter of the Governor of Plymouth Colony, Thomas Prence. The Governor hauled him before the court in 1660 and he was fined £5. Seven years later he was fined again for 'disorderly and unrighteously endeavouring to obtain the affections of Mistress Elizabeth Prence', but shortly afterwards the parental objection must have been overcome, for the two were married. The law conceded that if parents unreasonably refused permission to marry they could be obliged to show cause, and if the cause was insufficient they could be over-ruled.
Not all Puritan maids were grave-eyed and demure. In 1642 the elders of Connecticut admitted they had found such sad evidence of uncleanness and 'lascivious carriages' in their midst as to defy the art of legislation. In the autumn of that year there were irregular goings-on in New Haven, culminating in the apprehension of Will Harding and several of the young women he had led astray. The record says:
Will Harding being convicted of a great deal of base carriage and filthy dalliance with divers young girls together with his enticing and corrupting of divers servants in this plantation, haunting with them in night meetings and junketing etc. was sentenced to be severely whipped and fined £5 to Mr Malbon and £5 to Will Andrews (whose families and daughters he hath so much, dishonoured and wronged in attempting to defile them) and presently to depart the plantation and not to return under the penalty of severe punishment.
Ruth Acie and Martha Malbon were among those whipped for dalliance with Will Harding. Martha's offence was threefold :
accompanying Will Harding by night to a venison feast, stealing from her parents and 'yielding to filthy dalliance with the said Will Harding'.
In 1660 the New Haven court was called on to consider the scandalous case of Sarah Tuttle, whose behaviour would have been considered pert even by campus standards in the 1920's. Sarah had called on a neighbour. Dame Murline, to borrow thread, and finding the house filled with a merry, lewd and congenial company, stayed on. Jacob Murline entered and, snatching her gloves, offered to restore them on payment of a kiss. 'Whereupon they sat down together, his arm being about her and her arm upon his shoulder or about his neck; and he kissed her, and she kissed him, or they kissed one another, continuing in this posture for about half an hour.' Hearing a garbled version of this Revolt of Youth, Sarah's father sued Jacob Murline for inveigling his daughter's affections. In court, however, Sarah impudently made it dear that she had not been inveigled. Jacob was discharged with a caution, but Sarah's sin could not be overlooked. They told her she was a bold virgin and imposed a fine, but after two years only half of it had been paid, and the balance was cancelled.
When the evidence was merely that 'he kissed her and she kissed him' the courts were content to inflict a fine or a caution. But some sharper penalty, clearly, was demanded for the sin of fornication, even when closely followed by marriage. In the court records of New Haven, alternating with convictions for dodging military duty and sleeping on guard, are listed whippings for 'filthy dalliance' and 'folly'. It seems hard, on the face of it, to be whipped for mere 'folly', but that was a synonym for fornication-a sin which (as the court told Peter Mallery) 'shuts out the Kingdom of Heaven, without repentance. It is that which the Holy Ghost brands with the name of folly, it is that wherein men show their brutishness, therefore as a whip is for the horse and ass, so a rod is for the fool's back.' Mallery and his partner in folly escaped with a fine, 'she being weakly and for aught is known with child, and he subject to distraction. . ..' In June 1642 there is this entry in the New Haven records:
Samuel Hoskings and Elizabeth Cleverley, for their filthy dalliance together, which was confessed by them both, they were both severely whipped.
Some days later, after 'John Lovell, the miller, for sinful dalliance with a little wench of Goodman Hall's was whipped', Hoskings and his partner were again before the court:
Samuel Hoskings and Elizabeth Cleverley, being desirous to join together in the state of marriage, and not being able to make proof of their parents' consent, but seeing they both, affirm they have the consent of their parents, and with all having entered into contract, sinfully and wickedly denied each other in filthy dalliance and unclean passages, by which they have made themselves unfit for any other, and for which they have both received public correction, upon these considerations granted them liberty to marry.
It was a grudging enough benison: the couple were suffered to marry only because they were unfit to marry anybody else. No doubt the court found it disagreeable to concede, as a favour, what should have been imposed as a penalty, for an order to marry was part of the prescribed punishment for fornication. In Hartford, Connecticut, in 1639, not only was Aaron Starke pilloried, whipped and branded on the cheek for seducing Mary Holt, and ordered to pay ten shillings to her father, but he was ordered to marry her when both should be 'fit for that condition'. The Connecticut Code of Laws of 1650 included compulsory marriage in its consolidated list of punishments:
It is ordered . . . that if any man shall commit fornication with any single woman they shall be punished either by enjoining to marriage, or fine, or corporal punishment, or all or any of these, as the Court of Magistrates shall appoint, most agreeable to the word of God.
Perhaps the luckier couples were those who were detected IN Flagrante delicto; punishment in the form of a stiff fine or a whipping followed swiftly. But those who sinned undetected and then married could expect to spend the springtime of marriage awaiting retribution. As soon as the baby was born the elders-skilled arithmeticians to a man-began to count back on their fingers, and if the days were too few the couple were charged with filthy dalliance. Little allowance seems to have been made for seven- and eight-months babes. In the records of Cape Cod appears the entry:
A. F., for having a child born six weeks before the ordinary time of women in marriage, fined for uncleanness and his wife set in the stocks.
For a similar offence, C, E. was sentenced to be whipped publicly, and his wife was ordered to stand by while the sentence was carried out. 'Done, and he fined £5 for his trouble,' says the vengeful chronicler.
Much grotesque injustice, no doubt, was meted out in these prosecutions. A wife, it may be supposed, went in live fear lest she be involved in any accident which might accelerate the birth of her first child. It is a solemn thought that if a similar law were enforced in Britain today (on the basis of the Registrar-General's statistics) one wife in six would be whipped or put in the stocks.
The Quaker state of Pennsylvania kept a sharp watch on the amours of its citizens, being anxious to frustrate any dalliance with 'persons of the world'. To walk out with one who was not a Friend was an indiscretion hard to live down; it had to be atoned for by a confession and apology in assembly. A Quaker suitor visiting a new community was happy to produce, on demand, a clearance certificate testifying to his freedom from any amatory entanglements, and guaranteeing him to be of sober and God-fearing behaviour. Sometimes a certificate would be withheld out of spite by a former flame who considered herself to have been slighted. The document was no mere piece of eyewash. At one stage, New Jersey's Quakers, suspecting that certain new arrivals had left 'no good savour in their native land', and were the type who 'profess truth yet walk disorderly', wrote to their community in London saying ‘we desire to be satisfied of their clearness or unclearness from other parties and what else you think fit for our knowledge'.
A Quaker suitor and his bride-to-be were required to publish their banns, viva voce, in open assembly. Each rose in turn and avowed the intention of taking the other for partner ‘if the Lord permit'-a powerful ordeal, it may be thought, for a shy young Quaker maid. 'Weighty' men and women were then detailed to inquire into the recent pasts of the parties, to ensure that they had severed all other romantic connections, and parents were required to state in public that the match had their approval.
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