The site of a lawbreaker sitting in the stocks or fastened in the pillory is a site familiar to anyone who is familiar with New England history. The stocks are one of the first things that you see when you enter Pioneer Village, and one of its most popular attractions. People are fascinated by this visible symbol of a stern, even brutal penal code. This fascination is appropriate, as the Puritans were very big on corporal punishment. As a small, isolated group living in the midst of wilderness and surrounded by enemies both real and imagined, the spectacle of public shame, humiliation and punishment, is a powerful social glue.
Puritan law was not only based on English Common Law, but on Old-Testament Biblical Law as well. You might be just as likely to find yourself in the stocks for violating the Sabbath as for stealing your neighbors' corn.
If you are interested in a detailed look at Puritan crime and punishment, I would recommend the book Wicked Puritans of Essex County by Tom Juergens. Juergens is a writer and journalist with roots in local daily and weekly newspapers such as the now defunct Beverly Times and the Cape Cod Register. He has collected a series of stories, gathered from court records, that detail Puritan crime and punishments. The accounts are listed by type of crime. There are many surprises. There are the usual crimes of rape, arson, and murder, but also the crime of being a Quaker (a dissenting Christian sect) fornication, adultery, and disrespecting your parents. Punishments abound; whippings, brandings (on the hand and face), the wearing of symbolic letters designating your crime, nostril-splitting, heavy fines, banishment, and forfeiture of property. (Apparently spurious civil suits are not an exclusive invention of the twentieth century). The book shows that all people are subject to weakness, jealousy, greed and violence, regardless of what century they live in, or what moral code they subscribe to.
It humanizes the Puritans, who are sometimes caricatured as cold, morally-superior people. It turns out they were all too human after all.
