A man who was committed to a crime of a Boston seaman, one Captain Kemble. He made the mistake of publicly kissing his wife after returning home on a Sunday after three years at sea, an action that earned him several hours of public humiliation at the stocks. The laws, made crimes of lying and idleness, general lewdness and bad behavior. Sex was of large concern. Outlawed crimes were masturbation, fornication, adultery, sodomy, buggery, and every other possible sexual practice that wasn’t close enough to straight sex as approved by the Bible. The term sodomy was applied to homosexual behavior; and buggery was to bestiality. Punishment for such serious sexual crimes could be severe, and often were. Thomas Granger of Plymouth, a boy of seventeen was indicted in 1642 for buggery with a mare, a cow, two goats, five sheep, two calves and a turkey. Granger was therefore hung; the animals, for their part in the “affair”, were executed according to the law, Leviticus 20.15, and "cast into a great and large pit that was digged for the purpose for them, and no use was made of any part of them.” Moral conduct was the one crime that the Puritan’s did not take lightly, in fact they were the most strict about this one. The Puritans had more records on moral transgressions than they did on assault and even robbery. …show more content…
Sexual offences were accused and tried three times more than the rest of the classes of crime, murder, assault and robbery didn’t even come close to as frequent as sex crimes. Running a close second would be non-attendance at public worship and breach of the Sabbath, drunkenness, theft, and breach of the peace. Running in third place would be none other than a disorderly house. These houses were places where people would gather, at someone’s home, to drink and play games. The last two mentioned were not punished harshly like the moral sex crimes