The penalty for adultery in early Massachusetts was whipping at the cart’s tail, branding, banishment, or even death.  It is a common impression that the larger number of colonists were God-fearing people who led upright, blameless lives, and this impression is correct; few nations have ever had so high a percentage of men of lofty ideals.  It is natural, therefore, that such people should be most severe in dealing with those who dared to lower the high morality of the new commonwealths dedicated to righteousness.  But even the Puritans and Cavaliers were merely human, and crime would enter in spite of all efforts to the contrary.  Bold adventurers, disreputable spirits, men and women with little respect for the laws of man or of God, crept into their midst; many of the immigrants to the Middle and Southern Colonies were refugees from the streets and prisons of London; some of the indented servants had but crude notions of morality; sometimes, indeed, the Old Adam, suppressed for generations, broke out in even the most respectable of godly families.

Both Sewall and Winthrop have left records of grave offences and transgressions against social decency.  About 1632 a law was passed in Massachusetts punishing adultery with death, and Winthrop notes that at the “court of assistants such an act was adopted though it could not at first be enforced."[278] In 1643 he records: 

“At this court of assistants one James Britton ... and Mary Latham, a proper young woman about 18 years of age ... were condemned to die for adultery, upon a law formerly made and published in print...."[279]

A year or two before this he records:  “Another case fell out about Mr. Maverick of Nottles Island, who had been formerly fined L100 for giving entertainment to Mr. Owen and one Hale’s wife who had escaped out of prison, where they had been put for notorious suspicion of adultery.”  The editor adds, “Sarah Hales, the wife of William Hales, was censured for her miscarriage to be carried to the gallows with a rope about her neck, and to sit an hour upon the ladder; the rope’s end flung over the gallows, and after to be banished."[280]

Some women in Massachusetts actually paid the penalty of death.  Then, too, as late as Sewall’s day we find mention of severe laws dealing with inter-marriage of relatives:  “June 14, 1695:  The Bill against Incest was passed with the Deputies, four and twenty Nos, and seven and twenty Yeas.  The Ministers gave in their Arguments yesterday, else it had hardly gon, because several have married their wives sisters, and the Deputies thought it hard to part them.  ’Twas concluded on the other hand, that not to part them, were to make the Law abortive, by begetting in people a conceipt that such Marriages were not against the Law of God."[281]