Note 517 — Chapter XII · OBLIGATORY CIVIL MARRIAGE IN THE NEW ENGLAND COLONIES

Thus on Sept. 7, 1641, for adulterous practices a man was "censured to bee sent to the gallos wth a roape about his neck, & to sit upon the lather an houre, the roapes end throwen over the gallos, so to returne to prison."—Mass. Col. Rec., I, 335; cf. Davis, op. cit., 15. In 1645 Henry Dawson came near suffering the extreme penalty: Winthrop, op. cit., II, 305. Three years later the "Corte acquit Elisa : Pennion of the capitall offence charged upon her by 2 sevrall inditements for adultery," but sentence her to be "whiped" in Boston and again "at Linn wthin one month" (1648): Mass. Col. Rec., II, 243. Still more striking are the cases of Elizabeth Hudson and Bethia Bulloine (Bullen), "married women and sisters," carried from the county court at Boston before the assistants in 1667. On a special verdict by the jury the latter tribunal sentenced each "to be by the Marshall Generall ... on ye next lecture day presently after the lecture carried to the Gallowes & there by ye Executioner set on the ladder & with a Roape about her neck to stand on the Gallowes an half houre & then brought ... to the market place & be seriously whipt wth tenn stripes or pay the Sume of tenn pounds," standing committed till the sentence be performed: MSS. Early Court Files of Suffolk (Sept. 11, 1667), No. 821. Whether this sentence was for adultery as charged or for "lascivious carriage" we are not informed. In Noble's Records of the Court of Assistants, I, 56, 57, 70, 71, 73, 74, 114, 115, 240, 252, are ten cases of punishment by rope and gallows and whipping instead of death, the jury plainly avoiding the penalty for adultery under the law.