Tales from the Court

British America had produced an abundant store of history, thanks to the colonists’ literacy, their imported legal systems, and a penchant for doing things by the book. The early courts produced near-mountains of written records, which later generations did not have the foresight (or technology) to properly preserve. By the mid-nineteenth century the oldest records were so dilapidated that a growing number of conservators began sounding the alarm. Eventually, state legislatures, local authorities, and various privately-funded institutions responded by appropriating money for record rehabilitation and preservation, as well as for editorial oversight and transcription of the original records to make printed versions available to the public. 

The print volumes were placed in libraries for use by the public, which as a practical matter still limited who could see them. The law libraries of most large universities held copies from every state that reproduced their ancient court records. In the twenty-first century, the Internet Archive and online genealogy sites began releasing scanned books and microforms to the public, which meant that anyone with an Internet connection, anywhere in the world, could access 17th-18th century court records and read for themselves what the colonists said and did. 

Old Norfolk County Records and beyond. From 1643 to 1680, Norfolk County was comprised of the towns of Haverhill, Salisbury (Massachusetts), Portsmouth, Exeter, Dover, and Hampton (New Hampshire). Circuit or “quarterly” courts were held four times a year; Hampton hosted the court in October. These courts were replaced in 1680 and their records removed to Salem, Massachusetts. From 1911 to 1921, the Essex Institute of Salem transcribed, edited, and printed what remained of the Old Norfolk County court records. From 1680 on, New Hampshire had its own court system separate from Massachusetts. Those records were transcribed and printed in the first half of the 20th century. A century later the printed records were electronically scanned and placed in the Internet Archive. From those records come these Tales from the Court.

Goody Cole meets the devil

In 1661 the constable presented Unise Cole of Hampton at court for saying to her teenage neighbor Hulda Hussey, “Where is your mother Mingay that whore? She is abed with your father that whoremaster.” Incarcerated in Boston for the offense, she later petitioned the court for release from prison. Meanwhile, her aged husband had died, and when the town heard of her petition, it asked the court to continue to detain her. The court decided to release her, on the condition that she depart the province within one month, never to return. Unise went home to Hampton to find that the town had taken her house and land to clear her husband’s debts. She was sent back to prison for failing to abide by the court’s order. Unhappy, frightened, and not just a little angry, on the night before the constable would take her back to prison she was seen storming up and down in her house, rattling cupboards and conversing with a “great hollow voice,” purported to be that of the Devil. This incident prompted a Boston grand jury—ten years later—to conclude that on that long-ago night she had been “instigated by the devil” and they put her on trial for witchcraft.

This court makes me sick

The October 1667 session of the Norfolk county court, held at Hampton, was relatively quiet. No one was ordered whipped, pilloried, put in the stocks, or made to confess their sins at the meetinghouse door…but all was not lost. Haverhill tavernkeeper Daniel Ela came drunk to court and vomited in sight of the magistrates. Ela excused himself by saying that he had been fasting all day and was not “accustomed to drinking strong waters.” The court fined him for drunkenness. His reaction to the verdict was predictable, and he was fined for cursing at the magistrates.

Disorderly squabblers and face biters

At the October 1668 session of the court the magistrates heard the case of Boulter v. Colcord. Nathaniel Boulter of Hampton had accused Edward Colcord, also of Hampton, of stealing timber from his property to build a house frame. Colcord, a man famous for his courtroom antics, behaved “disorderly and turbulently,” and charged the judges with not going according to law in their verdict. When he threatened to drive his cart through Boulter’s house, the exasperated judges ordered him committed to prison. Undeterred by this sentence, Colcord accused Boulter of felling and carrying away timber and grass near the mill brook, and “gave provoking speeches” to one of the judges, Mr. Andrew Wiggin of Squamscott (Stratham, New Hampshire), striking him several times for good measure. For the latter offense Colcord was ordered to sit in the stocks for two hours.

Wiggin, who was brother-in-law to Hampton’s minister Seaborn Cotton, behaved no better. During another case before the magistrates, he had “under pretence of love” bitten a man on the face. The court threatened to fine him 40 shillings unless he apologized before the court, which he did.

Court-ordered sex

In June 1680 the New Hampshire Provincial Council ordered Edward Colcord’s wife Ann to “attend her duty towards her said husband in the Use of ye marriage bed according to ye rule of gods word.” If she refused to do so, she would be “Whipt to ye Number of 10 Stripes.”

Ann decided that going against God and the magistrates was preferable to sleeping with her abusive, alcoholic husband, prompting him to apply his own threatened punishments to his uncooperative wife. He was later imprisoned for abusing her “at divers times,” and ordered to remain in jail until he could put up the astronomical sum of 40 pounds as bond for his good behavior. The following day, however, after listening to his pleas, the Council reversed its decision and allowed him a month’s reprieve, even though they recognized that Ann and her children stood “in fear of their lives should he be at liberty.” Ann continued to suffer his abuse until his death in early 1682.

The adventures of Jacob Garland

Jacob was the son of John and Elizabeth (Philbrick Chase) Garland of Hampton. When he was 15 years old his father died, and two years later, in 1674, his mother was pledged to marry tavernkeeper Henry Roby. A few months before the wedding, 21-year-old John Mason, whose job it was to keep the town safe from “nightwalkers” and other ne’er-do-wells, assaulted Jacob at Roby’s tavern. Believing that Jacob was in the tavern at an illegal hour, Mason dragged the boy outside and then dashed his head against the flagstones. Elizabeth complained of the abuse to local magistrate Samuel Dalton, who ordered Mason to pay Jacob ten shillings plus court costs.

On a Sabbath day in March 1677, Jacob, now 20 years old, stayed late at Roby’s tavern and drank too much, perhaps commiserating with his stepfather over the recent death of his mother. Leaving the tavern around 10 p.m., he crossed the town green to the meetinghouse and began tolling the bell, “to the disturbance of the Towne and giving just cause of offense to the inhabitants.” He got away undetected, but a few days later was brought in for questioning. He at first lied, but upon subsequent scrutiny admitted he was the miscreant who had rung the bell. For his “diverse disorders, heightened by sundry denials,” he was fined 20 shillings plus court costs and had to acknowledge his “sin and foolishness” by reading a shame script before the public and asking forgiveness. He later began frequenting the friendlier districts of Newbury, Massachusetts for his entertainment, and in 1682 married Rebecca Sears of that town, four months before their first child was born (a not uncommon occurrence in that period).

Meanwhile, in Exeter…

Cattle were wandering unobstructed in and out of the meetinghouse! The bridge had gone to hell! Judge Simon Bradstreet’s righteous roar of disapproval leaps from the pages of the court record as he orders the lax Exeter selectmen “to take effectual care that the house be cleansed and made decent for Christians to meet in, that the doors be hung and kept shut!” He also fined the town for the broken bridge and ordered it to be fixed immediately.

Rebellious tax evader

From 1673 to 1680 Henry Dow of Hampton served as the marshal of Norfolk County, then later as the town clerk, a position he held until his death in 1707. He had served as selectman, court justice, attorney, councilor, and captain of the militia. By all measures, he was an upstanding pillar of the established order. Yet, he dared to believe that he had no obligation to pay what he considered unlawfully ordered taxes, and so became a notorious tax evader, with a royal warrant issued for his arrest.

“To Nathaniel Batchelder, constable for Hampton: Whereas Henry Dow of Hampton planter hath refused to pay his rate, you are required forthwith to apprehend the body of the said Henry Dow and convey him to the prison of Great Island if he does not immediately discover some part of his estate to satisfy the said rate.”

We don’t know if Henry spent time in prison, but we do know that he paid his 18 shilling tax—four months after the warrant had been issued.

Attack on the meetinghouse

On May 29, 1673, a 20-year-old Quaker named Abraham Chase fired a pistol into a window of the Hampton meetinghouse where commissioners Samuel Dalton, Christopher Hussey, and Ensign John Sanborn were meeting, “burning a hole in the collers and breaking down some of the glass, whereby some of those who stood near were in danger.” In writing the official report, Dalton described Abraham’s action as a “bold attempt,” suggesting that the shooting was no accident. Three days later, Abraham purloined a “load of red oak hogshead staves from off Hampton commons, near the old saw mill.”

What prompted young Chase to act so foolishly is a mystery, but we do know that a month earlier the court had ordered his brother Joseph and Joseph’s wife Rachel Partridge to pay a six pound fine or be “severely whipped” for the sin of fornication. Perhaps Abraham had sought revenge for the court’s decision, and sale of the stolen barrel staves would help pay his brother’s fine.

Joseph and Rachel became Quakers and lived the rest of their days at the Landing, the spot on the river where the first Hampton settlers had come ashore. Joseph grew rich as a merchant and a mariner, and he left the bulk of his estate to his daughter Rachel Chase Freese, who ran a tavern at her inherited estate and later married a prominent politician and moved to Stratham.

In 1674, Abraham, his brother Thomas, and Christopher Hussey were “convicted for breach of the law called Quaker’s meeting and were admonished.” Two years later Abraham was “slain in y^e warres,” one of eight Hampton men sent to help defend the town of Marlborough, Massachusetts against Indian attacks.

Martha Taylor Leavitt, distiller

In the early days, making beer and other alcoholic beverages was mainly a woman’s task, so the mention of it rarely appears in documents from the period. Even so, a window sometimes opens onto the shadowy world of these domestic alchemists. In 1703, for example, Hezron Leavitt of Hampton recorded with the court “articles of agreement” between himself and his son Thomas. These articles stipulated that in exchange for Hezron’s estate, Thomas would provide an “honorable and comfortable” living for his parents, “over and above what my father doth geet by his practiz [tanning] and my mother by Stilling which they are to have for their own use.” To the framers of the document, Martha’s distilling was as economically important as Hezron’s tanning trade. 

Notices from Early Newspapers

Besides the court system, legal but personal matters were often aired in public by way of the local newspaper.

—The obstinate refusal of Dorothy Dunster Page

Solomon Page, a Harvard graduate, schoolmaster, and Hampton clergyman, posted this ad in a Boston newspaper in 1738:  “This is to forbid all persons either in Town or Country, to entertain Dorothy Page, wife of Solomon Page of Hampton aforesaid, or to trust her for Goods, Money, or anything else whatsoever, upon their peril, seeing she has absconded and left him with four small children, and obstinately refuses to live with him or take any care of her Children. Attested by me, Solomon Page.”

At the time of her disappearance, Dorothy Page’s youngest child was only four months old. Her reasons for leaving are a mystery, but Mrs. Page eventually returned home. She died in 1741 at the age of thirty-nine.  

—Imprudent Prudence Marston

In 1752, Hampton farmer John Marston posted this ad in a Boston newspaper: “My wife Prudence behaves imprudently and spends my money without my knowledge, and runs me into debt: This is therefore to warn all persons not to trust said Prudence on my account, for I will not pay any debts by her so contracted.”

Marston, who was Prudence’s second husband, died in 1763. She then married William Branscombe, the pilot of the mast ship St. George which ran aground—some say on purpose—on Hampton Beach in 1764. The scramble to claim the ship’s marooned cargo caused a “riot” Hampton.  In 1772 Branscombe advertised that “Whereas Prudence, the Wife of me the Subscriber, hath absented herself without any Occasion from my Bed and Board for a Fortnight, and with the Help of others, as abandon’d as herself, hath Robbed my House and carried away all the most valuable furniture in my Absence; And fearing she may run me in Debt, with an Intention to ruin me, I do hereby forbid all and every Person from Trusting, Harbouring, Entertaining or Concealing her, for I hereby declare I will pay no Debts of her Contracting from this Time. I am sorry to say that this is not the first Time my Wife has behaved imprudently; as her former Husband, John Marston was under the same disagreeable Necessity with myself of publickly Advertising her.” 

Prudence, known around town as “Old Pru,” died childless in 1796.

—The phew! in the meetinghouse

Nathaniel Sheafe Griffith, whose father Gershom was a local tavernkeeper, was a maker of watches, clocks, and surgeon’s instruments at the “Sign of the Clock” in Hampton. In 1768 an anonymous person, known only by the initials “Z.Z.,” published a letter in the New Hampshire Gazette, implicating the young clockmaker in a bizarre incident which involved “bedaubing the Linings and Cushions of a certain Gentleman’s Pew in [the] Hampton [meetinghouse]” with excrement. To read the rest of this strange story, click https://lassitergang.com/2019/06/13/the-phew-in-the-meeting-house/

Hampton History Matters is devoted to the history of Hampton and Hampton Beach, New Hampshire. Hampton History Matters Volumes I & II are available at amazon.com.