New England -- Religious life and customs; New England -- Social life and customs -- To 1775; Sunday
dollars for each wolf's head was offered by law in that township in 1853.
In 1718 the last public reward was paid in Salem for a wolf's head, but
so late as the year 1779 the howls of wolves were heard every night in
Newbury, though trophies of shrivelled wolves' heads no longer graced the
walls of the meeting-house.
All kinds of notices and orders and regulations and "bills" were posted on
the meeting-house, often on the door, where they would greet the eye of
all who entered: prohibitions from selling guns and powder to the Indians,
notices of town meetings, intentions of marriage, copies of the laws
against Sabbath-breaking, messages from the Quakers, warnings of "vandoos"
and sales, lists of the town officers, and sometimes scandalous and
insulting libels, and libels in verse, which is worse, for our forefathers
dearly loved to rhyme on all occasions. On the meeting-house green stood
those Puritanical instruments of punishment, the stocks, whipping-post,
pillory, and cage; and on lecture days the stocks and pillory were
often occupied by wicked or careless colonists, or those everlasting
pillory-replenishers, the Quakers. It is one of the unintentionally comic
features of absurd colonial laws and punishments in which the early legal
records so delightfully abound, that the first man who was sentenced to and
occupied the stocks in Boston was the carpenter who made them. He was thus
fitly punished for his extortionate charge to the town for the lumber
he used in their manufacture. This was rather better than "making the
punishment fit the crime," since the Boston magistrates managed to force
the criminal to furnish his own punishment. In Shrewsbury, also, the
unhappy man who first tested the wearisome capacity and endured the public
mortication of the town's stocks was the man who made them. He "builded
better than he knew." Pillories were used as a means of punishment until
a comparatively recent date,--in Salem until the year 1801, and in Boston
till 1803.
Great horse-blocks, rows of stepping-stones, or hewn logs further graced
the meeting-house green; and occasionally one fine horse-block, such as the
Concord women proudly erected, and paid for by a contribution of a pound of
butter from each house-wife.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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