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Apr 3, 2024

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1 Paper 3 Keeping Order in a Puritan Community Yiren Hu Green River College HIST 136 Professor Thomason 2024.1.16

2 Keeping Order in a Puritan Community 1.What values did the court seek to uphold? The Suffolk County Court Records from 1671-1673 document the Puritan court's efforts to uphold its fundamental principles in the New England community. These beliefs include a focus on moral purity, as seen by responses to situations of cheating and immoral action. The court also would emphasize the significance of law and order, punishing those who conducted disorderly activities. However at the time that religion still remained important. Such as mentioned in the text that Alice Thomas had severe penalties of illegal trespassing into a warehouse, burglary, theft, and assisting criminal activity(Keeping Order in Puritan Community-2-1). Due to such severe crimes, the court found her guilty and sentenced her to harsh penalties, including money charges, public humiliation, whipping, and a prison sentence. We can see that from this case, the court reacted strongly with harsh consequences to such criminal conduct, especially to religious activity that must be upheld because that the puritan community is a theocracy. 2.What did the cases indicate about the role of religion in this community? From Robert Marshall’s case who has been accused of being atheism, who was punished to be imprisoned unless he posted a two-hundred-pound bail to appear in the next Court of Assistance to face the charges brought against him(Keeping Order in Puritan Community-2-1). This reveals the focus of the court on the importance of religion in the Puritan culture during this time, which we can see from the threat of imprisonment posted demonstrates the community's willingness to combat perceived challenges to religious harmony through the law. In such a theocracy, the case of Robert Marshall is a dramatic illustration of how religious views intersected with legal

3 consequences in Puritan culture at the time and from all the perspectives that religion must be the most important thing to look into in the time period. 3.What do the cases reveal about the ability of the Puritans to create a smooth-running theocracy? The cases in the Puritan society, as documented in the Suffolk County Court Records of 1671-1673, provide a picture of their efforts to build a smooth-running theocracy. Maintaining moral discipline is difficult, as seen by cases such as Alice Thomas(Keeping Order in Puritan Community-2-1). Furthermore, the court demonstrated legal power by resulting in harsh fines for a variety of acts, combining legal consequences with religious values. Those acts have shown the ability of the theocracy depended on negotiating the intricate details and keeping control over both religious and legal parts of the community with serious consequences such as flogging, giving funds and imprisonment to keep the society in order and to run the theocracy with religion more smoothly. 4. What do the cases tell us about gender and race in the colony? The cases in the Suffolk County Court Records provide a lot of cases that's related to gender and race issues in the Puritan colony. In terms of race, situations involving indigenous and enslaved people demonstrate inequality of power, which in Jonathan Atherton’s Indian case, who was was only published to cover the charges for the Indian's care, at the same time disabled him from wearing a sword and required him to pay fees of court, it’s not really that severe to have imprisonment or public whipping, it’s obvious showing indians has much less power(Keeping

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