Curious Punishments of Bygone Days

								

flowers, and his health was drunk, and scraps of his vigorous doggerel
from his Hymn to the Pillory passed from lip to lip.



    "Men that are men in thee can feel no pain

    And all thy insignificants disdain

      Contempt that false new word for shame

      Is, without crime, an empty name.



    The first intent of laws
Was to correct the effect and check the cause

    And all the ends of punishment
Were only future mischiefs to prevent.



    But justice is inverted when

      Those engines of the law

    Instead of pinching vicious men

      Keep honest ones in awe."
Williams, the bookseller, set in the pillory in the year 1765 for
republishing the North Briton was also treated with marks of
consideration and kindness. He held a sprig of laurel in his hand as he
stood, and a purse of two hundred guineas for his benefit was collected
in the crowd.
As times changed, so did opinions. The Bishop of Rochester denounced
Martin Luther and all his works, and Luther's books were burned in the
public squares. Puritan publications by the hundreds fed the flames;
Quaker and Baptist books took their turns. Then the Parliamentary
soldiers burned the Book of Common Prayer. In France, in the year 1790,
the monasteries were ransacked and their books burned. In Paris eight
hundred thousand were burned; in all France over four million: of these
twenty-six thousand were in manuscript.
Crossing the Atlantic to a land void of printing presses could not
silence Puritan authors. They still had pen and ink, and manuscripts
could be sent back across the ocean to a land full of presses and type.
A rather amusing episode of early Massachusetts history anent authors
happened in 1634, as may be found in Volume I, page 137, of the
Colonial Records.
"Whereas Mr. Israel Stoughton hath written a certain book, which hath
occasioned much trouble and offence to the Court; the said Mr. Stoughton
did desire of the court, that the said book might be burnt, as being
weak and offensive."
Such extraordinary and unparalleled modesty on the part of an author did
not save Mr. Stoughton's bacon, for he was disabled from holding any
office in the commonwealth for the space of three years. Winthrop said
he used "weak arguments," all of which did not prevent his being a brave
soldier in the Pequot Wars, and serving as a colonel in the
Parliamentary army in England.
A fuller account of the trials of a Puritan author in a new land is told
through notes taken from the court records. First may be given a
declaration of the Court:
"The Generall Court, now sittinge at Boston, in New England, this
sixteenth of October, 1650. There was brought to or hands a booke
writen, as was therein subscribed, to William Pinchon, Gent, in New
England, entituled The Meritorious Price of or Redemption,
Justifycation, &c. clearinge it from some common Errors &c. which booke,
brought ouer hither by a shippe a few dayes since and contayninge many