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 that it will be possible to publish additional trials in the future.
When you read these cases, you will have the satisfaction—and, it is hoped, the pleasure—of discovering a treasure trove of informative and provocative source materials previously known only to a handful of academic specialists. But four cases involving sexual matters occupy an even more rarified category. “The Milford Bestiality Case” (chapter 15), “The Youth Sex Cases” (chapter 17), “The Attempted Bestiality Case” (chapter 22), and “The Lecherous Swineherd” (chapter 32) have never been printed, and the handwritten manuscript that records them has been locked in government vaults for centuries. With the exception of the seventeenth-century secretaries who wrote them and the nineteenth-century librarian who refused to print them, the number of people who have seen these cases must be few indeed. When you read, for example, “The Lecherous Swineherd” (chapter 32), with its Hardyesque tale of a swineherd’s seduction of a young servant girl, you will have the excitement of knowing that you are among the first to have read this story in centuries.
The New Haven trials are a great and endlessly interesting heritage. As Maitland said of the Year Books, “They come to us from life.”56 It is hoped that this book will enable these endlessly interesting cases to come to life again.
1
THE INDIAN’S NAME
One day after the New Haven court system was organized, the colony made its first arrest and initiated its first case.1 This case cannot be fully appreciated without some understanding of the extremely hostile relationship between the European colonists and the Native Americans residing in the area at that time. Between 1634 and 1638, these two groups waged a war known in U.S. history as the Pequot War.
In 1637 an Englishman named Abraham Finch had been killed in Wethersfield, then part of the (separate) Connecticut Colony. A Quinnipiac (the English name for the Renapi, an Algonquin tribe in Connecticut) man named Nepaupuck was accused of his murder. Finch was a casualty of a deadly raid on Wethersfield during the Pequot War. The war had formally ended on September 21, 1638, with the Treaty of Hartford, but tensions remained high among the English and Native populations.2 The Pequots had lost the war; by the end, about seven hundred Pequots had been killed or taken into captivity. Hundreds of prisoners were sold into slavery in the West Indies. The conflict had embroiled the many tribes in the area including the Niantic, Mohigg, Naragansett, Montauk, and Pequot.
On October 26, 1639, a man calling himself Nepaupuck appeared in New Haven “of his own accord” and, “with a deer’s head upon his back,” presented himself to New Haven’s newly appointed magistrate, Theophilus Eaton. Whether he was, in fact, Nepaupuck was to be the central question in the case. For now, we’ll call him the prisoner. The reference to the “deer’s head upon his back” is one of the only references to attire in any of the records, so it seems significant—though we don’t know whether this detail was to indicate the stature of the man or his difference from the Europeans, or both.
Robert Seely, the colony’s newly appointed marshal, made his maiden arrest by apprehending the prisoner on a warrant and tying him up. Seely had been a neighbor of Finch’s in Wethersfield and was second in command in the Pequot War. The arrest was anything but routine. Aided by a second Native American, the prisoner attempted to escape. The attempt was unsuccessful. He “was again taken and delivered into the magistrate’s power, and … kept in the stocks until he might be brought to a due trial.” The period of pretrial detention turned out to be a couple of days—short by modern standards but a long time to spend in the stocks, hinged wooden boards that locked his feet in place. In the meantime, Seely’s deputy whipped the accomplice who had aided the prisoner.
Two days later, the colony witnessed its first judicial proceeding when the prisoner appeared before the New Haven magistrate and his deputies. The idea seems to have been that the judges would investigate the case and decide whether to refer it to the colony’s General Court for trial. In procedural terms, this was roughly analogous to a modern preliminary hearing, in which a court determines whether there is probable
