What an intriguing title – The Case of the Piglet’s Paternity. That’s what Connecticut Superior Court Judge John Blue calls his collection of 33 trials from The New Haven Colony: 1639-1663, lost to history until now.
Charges of bestiality were big in colonial days, along with accusations of witchcraft, arson, adultery, and theft. The book is an eye opener on judicial history and social life 350 years ago, when the General Court in New Haven, unlike courts in other colonies and England, operated without a jury, without lawyers, without due process. Guiding principles were drawn from the Bible. The goal was to execute the law of God and punish the wicked, and the presiding authority was the Puritan governor of the colony, a vicar of the English church, who sometimes was an interested party.
Criminal cases then began with a presumption of guilt, and the defendant was rarely acquitted. The trials were “free-flowing and improvisational,” with questions being shot to any number of witnesses at any time, until the defendant, overwhelmed with damning testimony, would confess. Then there was the punishment. The man charged with fathering a deformed piglet was hanged, and the sow killed before his eyes. The case was a “doozy,” Blue says, but not unlike others- proving there sure was a lot of straying and dissent from God’s law and the way in which justice applied it in this small colony, where an accuser and the accused in one case could reappear in another.
Blue notes, by the way, how many of the cases foreshadow Dickens, especially those that show the indifference of the court – and the times – to the plight of children, many abandoned, malnourished, sold into servitude, impregnated, sodomized, as was the case of John Knight, a servant charged with sexually abusing an indentured 14-year-old boy.
Blue writes, he says, for “the educated generalist,” deciphering old documents, transcribing them into modern English, summarizing their content, and commenting on their significance, then and later. Reading these cases, it’s impossible not to think of Arthur Miller’s The Crucible, set in 1692, its witch trials alluding to the hysteria years later by the House Un-American Activities Committee.
As primitive as Colonial justice seems to us, Blue shows that the New Haven courts were far-seeing in some ways, in calling expert witnesses, in understanding that some cases had wide public interest, and in accepting written pretrial examination of parties even if unfair because the accused often could not examine the accuser.
Colonial justice could be surprisingly efficient and fair. The Case of the Piglet’s Paternity, engaging and informative.