only after hearing all of the facts in the case. The New Haven courts had an entirely different view of the judicial task.
Criminal cases began with a presumption of guilt. In practice, this presumption was well nigh conclusive. Toward the end of the colony’s history, the Court of Magistrates acquitted a defendant of the crime of which he had been accused. This was such a novel event that the court was at a loss what to do. It felt compelled to find him guilty of something, and it ended up finding him “guilty of suspicion” (see chapter 31, “The Stamford Murder Mystery”). This problem did not, however, frequently arise. Criminal defendants were routinely convicted. The court’s task was to question the defendant and confront him with the evidence against him until a confession was forthcoming.
This judicial practice had both practical and ideological roots. In practical terms, the colony’s approach was closely connected with the pretrial examination procedure just described. Before a case came to one of the upper courts, a local magistrate would have examined the parties and witnesses shortly after the events in question and written a report of the examination. The members of the upper courts would read the magistrate’s report at the beginning of the trial. At least in their own minds, they knew the facts of the case before they had heard the first witness.
Ideology played a role as well. The colony was governed by biblical law. The judges, who consulted with the local clergy, were not wholly secular magistrates. Their task was to execute the law of God, and part of that task was to punish the wicked. Modern notions of judicial neutrality and the presumption of innocence would have been as alien to them as their judicial attitude is to us.
In civil cases—that is, actions for damages between private persons—the situation was somewhat different. Even though, in theory, biblical law was supposed to apply to these cases as well, in these cases applicable biblical law was difficult to identify. While, as we see in “The Piglet’s Paternity” in chapter 2, a court could determine the biblical punishment for bestiality by consulting the correct verse in Leviticus, this approach was not available in, for example, a dispute between a merchant and a shoemaker as to who was at fault for a supply of faulty shoes (see chapter 9, “The Faulty Shoes”). As a result, the New Haven courts could be admirably creative in devising solutions to civil disputes, such as assembling a panel of experts in the Case of the Faulty Shoes or engaging in Socratic reasoning with a party in “The Disputed Will” case in chapter 18. The New Haven courts, unfettered by judicial precedent, could be surprisingly progressive in these cases—indeed centuries ahead of their time. The General Court’s abandonment of the doctrine of caveat emptor (let the buyer beware) in the Case of the Exploding Gun (chapter 3) and the Court of Magistrates’ solicitude for a mistreated apprentice in the Case of the Brickmaker’s Apprentice (chapter 26) hold up centuries later as examples of wise and humane judging.
However wrong or even preposterous some of the courts’ decisions may seem to modern readers, the trials recounted here are considerably more than a collection of the follies and failures of the past. The New Haven judges were persons of intelligence and learning, working in a differently constructed judicial system and holding a worldview quite different from our own. They, like we, had their professional failures and their professional successes. Modern readers can learn from both.
The People
The New Haven trials are of obvious interest to legal historians, but their importance does not end there. They contain a vivid panorama of the life of the colony. While we read the words of the political and religious leaders of the colony, we also hear a chorus of voices from other strata of society. We hear from pillars of the colony and the church as well as from political and religious dissidents; from merchants and traders; and from rich and poor alike. We hear from persons living in houses staffed with servants and from the servants as well. We hear from farmhands who herd swine and shovel dung. We hear from persons who are gravely injured and persons engaged in grudge matches. We hear from persons who make enemies and persons who fall in love. Importantly, we hear the voices of women and children. Persons of all descriptions appeared before the New Haven courts and had intimate portraits of their lives recorded for posterity.
Reading carefully, we learn that the New Haven Colony, regardless of its official theology, was far from a peaceful assembly of religious folk living quiet lives of biblical virtue. However strict the colony’s political and religious rule, turmoil seethed beneath the surface. Church members dissented from the colony’s political and religious rule. Women rebelled from the church and its teachings. The colony’s young people (no surprise to us!) strayed from its official teachings and had premarital sex. More disturbingly, the colony’s economy was built on the labor of women, servants, and children. In scenes that could be drawn from the novels of Dickens, young children were forced into indentured servitude. There are many dark tales in the records, but cases involving the brutal oppression of children are the darkest of all.
This Book
All of these stories (with the exception of redacted sexual matters) appear in the printed records of the nineteenth century, but their original format, even when printed, makes them challenging to read. Contractions, antiquated spellings, and obsolete words abound. Familiarity with the Bible is presumed. Trials are interspersed with the records of legislative and executive business of the colony. Specific trials are sometimes interrupted by other business of the tribunal and must be pieced together from the larger record.
Once the trials are located in the records and the vocabulary and spelling are mastered, the narrative is not always clear. While the records can wonderfully capture the drama of a moment, they can also maddeningly omit key words and phrases in a speech and fail to identify (or occasionally misidentify) the speaker. Sometimes it is difficult to determine who is the person speaking or who is the person being discussed. Every effort has been made to resolve these difficulties, but some problems have proved intractable. Particularly vexing passages are discussed in endnotes accompanying the cases.
The New Haven trials have been previously known and accessible only to a handful of academic specialists. The goal of this book is to make these historic treasures accessible to the general public. To that end, each of the thirty-three cases recounted here is reported in two parts. The first part is a retelling of the case in modernized and intelligible English, with explanatory endnotes where needed. The second part is a commentary on the case.
The aim of the retold cases (indeed the enterprise of the entire book) is to do for the New Haven trials what the great English historian F. W. Maitland hoped to do for the medieval Year Books: “to hasten the day when they will once more be readable, intelligible and—we do not fear to say it—enjoyable.”55 The dual aspirations are to modernize the language of the original records and, at the same time, to retain the original’s distinctive voice. These are conflicting goals, imperfectly realized. The difficulty is something like that of translating Chaucer into modern English. No translation will ever do complete justice to the original, but the more readable the modern version is, the more likely it is to depart from the original. The translator strives to retain as much of the original language as possible but with the knowledge that if the original language is simply repeated verbatim, the goal of modernization will be lost.
The titles, headings, introductory material, notes, and commentaries are mine. The notes explain difficult words, phrases, and references. The commentaries discuss the respective trials from a modern legal perspective.
The thirty-three trials recounted here have been culled from a larger number of trials reported in the records. Numerous short trials, briefly stating, for example, that specific persons were convicted of specified crimes or that certain persons were granted divorces or inheritances, are omitted because they shed little light on larger issues. It has also been necessary to omit a number of more lengthy trials because of the exigencies of publication. It is hoped