PAST CRIMESpunishments were used, as were punishments designed to humiliate the
wrongdoer. The stocks joined the pillory as a feature of many towns and
villages.
The mass of people in towns took what pleasures they could, with bear
baiting, cockfights, and much drinking. One result of the dissolution of the
monasteries was to make brewing of beer, rather than ale, more common in
ordinary homes and taverns. There was a sharp rise in drunkenness as a result
- beer is stronger than ale─and for the first time, public drunkenness became
a crime.
Convicts to the colonies
From the 1620s onwards, another new form of punishment was introduced–
transportation–and merchants formed syndicates to exploit this profitable
trade. Estimates vary, but between 50,000 and 120,000 convicts were
transported to North America until the American War of Independence.
Merchants contracted to take the convicts by ship to Canada and New England,
or to the West Indies. English convicts, but also the Irish and Scottish poor or
defeated soldiers were transported. Cromwell sent thousands of Scottish
soldiers to the Americas during the Civil War. On arrival, the transportees were
sold into bondage, usually for a term of up to seven years, as indentured
servants. The Scottish sent their own vagabonds too – a transport was
commissioned by Edinburgh merchants to take a cargo of‘idle and debosht
persons’to Barbados. In 1666 it is recorded that the Edinburgh authorities were
attempting to send another cargo of such people to labourhungry Virginia with
its tobacco plantations. Conditions could be hard–one source claims that of
the first 300 deportees, only four were still alive after four years. Many ran
away or committed suicide. Some rebelled and were executed.
One who did not survive was the victim of a murder that happened near
Annapolis in Maryland. Digging in a seventeenth century cellar,
archaeologists came across the body of a boy. Analysis of his bones showed
him to have been in his midteens, and of European origin. His teeth and spine
showed evidence of disease and hard labour. He may well have been an
indentured servant, or even a convict transportee. He had been buried in a
small pit and covered with fragments of broken bottles and pots, and ash from
a fireplace. Lying on his bones was a broken milk pan, which seems to have
been used to dig out the grave (Figure 22). A coin of 1664 and a piece of glass
marked with the date 1663 suggest that the boy died some time before 1675.
At that time, colonial laws were passed forbidding private burial of
indentured servants, precisely to stop owners from hiding their abuse of these