Early American Crime

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Sometime around midnight on June 10, 1664, Arthur Nottool, a tailor by trade and a servant living in Abington Cliffs, broke into the house of John Hunt of Eltonhead Manor in Calvert County, Maryland. Poking around in the dark, Nottool spotted an open trunk and removed a shirt from it. He also spied a gun, and after quickly grabbing it, he fled the house with the two items in hand.

A 17th-century House in Eltonhead Manor - From the Library of Congress

Soon after that night, Nottool was captured on suspicion of burglary and delivered to Thomas Sprigg, the High Sheriff of Calvert County. Sprigg placed irons on Nottool’s legs, locked him in a room, and put a watch over him. The fact that Nottool was held on Sprigg’s own property was not unusual. Prisons were not that common during early colonial times, so prisoners were often held in the homes of officials charged with keeping the peace until they could appear in court or be punished.

In the meantime, Hunt appeared before the Provincial Court on June 21 to lodge an official complaint that Nottool had been breaking into and robbing several houses in the area. Taking Hunt’s charges seriously, the Court ordered Nottool to be held by the sheriff until the next court session on July 5, 1664. The Court also realized the importance of Hunt’s testimony for the case. It set recognizance for Hunt to the value of three thousand pounds of tobacco plus the cask holding it, which Hunt would be required to pay the Court if he failed to appear and give testimony against Nottool on that day.

A Bold Move

Before Nottool could be brought to trial, he made a bold move to gain his freedom. On the Tuesday before his trial, Nottool found a horse lock in the room where he was being held and managed to pull out one of the screws. He waited until nighttime and with his newly found tool, he was able to pry off his shackles. After breaking out of the room, Nottool then broke into Sprigg’s milk house and stole three cheeses, two loaves of bread, and a canvas bag, all of which he took with him into the woods.

Nottool’s freedom, however, was short-lived. He was eventually found after a close search of the woods and placed back in custody. Not only did he fail to escape, he now faced the additional charge of escaping prison.

(Nottool wasn’t the only prisoner Sprigg failed to hold during his career as sheriff. One year later in 1665, Sprigg was accused of willfully allowing Richard Newell, who was convicted of killing some hogs that did not belong to him, to escape from his custody. This time, Sprigg was fined two thousand pounds of tobacco by the Court and threatened with even more fines if Newell could not be captured and brought to the next court session.)

On July 5, Nottool came to trial to face charges of burglary and escaping from prison. During testimony, Nottool readily cooperated with the court by openly confessing not only to the burglary of Hunt’s house, but to others as well. Nottool admitted to breaking open a chest with a hatchet and stealing a burning glass, a device that concentrates the rays of the sun in order to ignite a surface. He also confessed to breaking into the dairy of a Mr. Smyth and stealing some flour, which he hid in a hollow tree in the woods, taking a pot of butter and a pot of cream after climbing through the window of another home, and stealing other goods besides the shirt and gun from Hunt. When asked if anyone assisted him in any of his burglaries or in his escape, Nottool replied no.

After Nottool testified, John Hunt was then called before the Provincial Court. When asked if he could swear that Nottool had broken into his house, Hunt replied that he could not.

Despite the weak testimony of Hunt, Nottool’s confessions were enough for the jury to convict him of both charges of burglary and escaping from prison. Nottool was now in serious trouble. Burglary and robbery were capital offenses in Maryland, although conviction could bring any number of punishments, including death, loss of a member, or burning in the hand. Since Nottool compounded his original crime with escaping from prison, there was no telling how he would be sentenced.

Sentencing

During sentencing, Nottool and two other convicted offenders were called to the bar of the court. Nottool watched as the judge first turned to Pope Alvey, who was convicted of beating one of his servants, Alice Sandford, to death. When the judge asked Alvey what he had to say for himself, he replied that he “Craves Benifitt of Clergy,” which was granted to him. A book was brought forth, most likely a Bible, and with it Alvey proved that he could read.

Benefit of Clergy was an oddity of English law dating back to the Middle Ages and was widely used in the American colonies until just after the Revolution. Its origin grew out of the split in legal jurisdiction between the ecclesiastic and secular courts. Members of the clergy were one of the few people in English society who could read at the time, so if a convicted criminal could prove in the secular courts that he or she were literate, jurisdiction over the case would then fall to the Church.

As the practice of Benefit of Clergy evolved, only certain offenses became “clergyable”–usually minor felonies–and more serious ones, such as murder, were excluded. Only first-time offenders were eligible to claim Benefit of Clergy, and once they used this legal loophole, they were branded to ensure that they would not be able to exploit it again. Benefit of Clergy became an important component of English common law, because it mitigated the harsh penalties that would normally apply to first-time offenders and gave judges and juries some discretion in sentencing.
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Since Pope Alvey was granted Benefit of Clergy, the charges against him must have been reduced to manslaughter by the jury, otherwise he would have been executed for murder. Nottool’s spirits must have risen somewhat after watching Alvey successfully avoid execution for an offense that was much more egregious than any that he committed. Alvey’s sentencing offered Nottool hope that he still might be able to escape the harsh punishment he desperately tried to avoid while he was locked away in prison, albeit through legal means.

The judge now turned to Nottool and asked him what he had to say for himself. Following the protocol employed by Alvey, Nottool replied that “hee Craves benifitt of Cleargy.” Just like before, a book was handed to Nottool, and he indeed proved that he could read.

Since both Nottool and Alvey were granted Benefit of Clergy, the court ordered the two of them to be burnt in the brawn of their right hands with a red hot iron. The Under Sheriff immediately stepped forward to perform the punishment, and they were both released.

Nottool’s case was one of the earliest in which Benefit of Clergy was used successfully in Maryland, and afterward it became a normal part of Maryland’s criminal law.

Read more about burglary in Early American Crime.

Sources

• Proceedings of the Provincial Court, 1663-1666. Vol. 49. Archives of Maryland Online. Maryland State Archives.
• Sawyer, Jeffrey K. “‘Benefit of Clergy’ in Maryland and Virginia. The American Journal of Legal History 34:1 (Jan., 1990), 49-60.
• Semmes, Raphael. Crime and Punishment in Early Maryland. Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1938.

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Note: This post is the conclusion of the story of the “Harvard-Educated Burglars.”

In his History of New England, John Winthrop notes on June 5, 1644,

Two of our ministers’ sons, being students in the college, robbed two dwelling houses in the night of some 15 pounds. Being found out, they were ordered by the governours of the college to be there whipped, which was performed by the president himself–yet they were about 20 years of age; and after they were brought into the court and ordered to two fold satisfaction, or to serve so long for it. We had yet no particular punishment for burglary.

The burglaries committed by Harvard students James Ward and Joseph Welde created a sensation throughout New England. They also presented a quandary. When Rev. Nathaniel Ward, the father of James Ward, composed his “Body of Liberties,” which served as a basis for Massachusetts law, he did not classify burglary as a capital offense. In fact, Massachusetts law in 1644 did not specify any punishment for burglary beyond the stipulation that it should be “severely punished.”

The question of how the General Court would punish the two offenders, in other words, remained an open question. In addition, since the two young men were students at Harvard, they were also subject to punishment by the college.

Punishment at Harvard

Given their age, Ward and Welde were technically classified as adults, so according to Harvard’s disciplinary statute they were merely subject to public admonition. The public embarrassment that the actions of the two perpetrators brought upon Harvard, however, was too much for the officials of the college to bear. They instead sentenced the two young men to the severe penalty of being publicly whipped in the college as an act of correction. Along with this penalty, the two were expelled from the school.

The public whipping of Ward and Welde wasn’t the first time corporal punishment was used by the college on its students. In 1637, Nathaniel Eaton filled the position of Head Master over the first classes of Harvard College. Less than a year later, Eaton was caught beating his assistant with a cudgel, which Winthrop described as “a walnut tree plant, big enough to have killed a horse.” During the inquiry into the event, information came out that Eaton had also been abusing the students at the college in a similar manner. Eaton was consequently put on trial.

Eaton acknowledged during testimony that it wasn’t unusual for him to apply 20 to 30 stripes at a time to the students and that “he would not give over correcting till he had subdued his party to his will.” Eaton might have been found innocent if he could have showed that his students were obstinate, unruly, and ill-behaved, but he made no attempt to prove that this was the case. Instead, he maintained his innocence by claiming that as master he had the absolute right to punish the students as he saw fit. The court found Eaton guilty and sentenced him to quit his job and pay a large fine. After his dismissal, Eaton eventually returned to England and died after many years in a debtor’s prison.

The punishment of Ward and Welde was carried out by Henry Dunster, Eaton’s successor as head of the college and officially the school’s first president. Two years before administering the penalties to the two young men, Dunster was involved in another case of corporal punishment. In 1642, he whipped two students after their conviction for ribaldry. Apparently, these other two men were also kicked out of the college, since their names do not appear on the school’s graduation lists.

After their punishment at Harvard, Ward and Welde appeared before the General Court of Massachusetts, which made them compensate the victims of their burglary by paying them twice the value of what they stole. Three years later, the General Court finally set specific penalties for burglary: first-time offenders had a “B” branded on their foreheads, second-time offenders were severely whipped, and third-time offenders received the death penalty.

Return to England

The fact that Joseph Welde’s father sat on the Board of Overseers at Harvard apparently did not help his son receive a reduced sentence or help him regain admittance to the school. After being expelled, Joseph Welde eventually followed his father back to England. Even though Welde’s father never returned to America after leaving in 1641, he continued to send large amounts of money back in support of Harvard College.

In December 1646, Rev. Nathaniel Ward also returned to England. With his departure, he left the College 600 acres of land near Andover, MA. Even though the actions of Ward and Welde greatly embarrassed Harvard at the time, in the end the school profited quite nicely from the events.

While Joseph Welde never made anything of himself after being kicked out of Harvard, his companion in crime, James Ward, did. Ward must have appeared before the college governors seeking forgiveness and showing true remorse for his actions, because he was readmitted and received his A.B. from Harvard in 1645. In 1646, Ward returned to England with his father apparently a changed man. He became a Fellow of Magdalen College at the University of Oxford and earned a degree in medicine.

Read more about burglary in Early American Crime.

Sources:

• Adams, Charles Francis, ed. Antinomianism in the Colony of Massachusetts Bay, 1636-1638. Boston: The Prince Society, 1894.
• Dean, John Ward. A Memoir of the Rev. Nathaniel Ward, A.M. Albany, NY: J. Munsell, 1868.
• Moore, Kathryn McDaniel. “The Dilemma of Corporal Punishment at Harvard College.” History of Education Quarterly 14.3 (Autumn, 1974), 335-346.
• Powers, Edwin. Crime and Punishment in Early Massachusetts, 1620-1692. Boston: Beacon Press, 1966.
• Sibley, John Langdon. Biographical Sketches of Graduates of Harvard University, In Cambridge, Massachusetts. Vol. I, 1642-1658. Cambridge: Charles William Sever, 1873.
• Stout, Harry S. “University Men in New England, 1620-1660: A Demographic Analysis.” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 4.3 (Winter, 1974), 375-400.
• Winthrop, John. The History of New England from 1630 to 1649. Ed. James Savage. Vol. II. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1853.

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James Ward and Joseph Welde were positioned for success. Both were sons of prominent Puritan church men who were respected members of Massachusetts society, and both were enrolled at Harvard College, which would help them follow in their fathers’ footsteps and become leaders in their community.

One night in March 1644, Ward and Welde burglarized the house of Joshua Hewes. Then they repeated the act one month later in April when they broke into the house of Welde’s uncle, Joseph Welde, who was in London at the time. In the end, both students were caught with eleven pounds in money and about 30 shillings worth of gunpowder taken from the two houses.

The burglaries carried out by Ward and Welde embarrassed the college and shocked the Cambridge and Boston communities, especially given the prominence of the people involved.

Family Backgrounds

James Ward’s father, the Rev. Nathaniel Ward, was educated at Emmanuel College in England. He originally became a barrister, but at age 40 he abandoned the law to go into the ministry. In 1633, Ward was excommunicated from the Church of England, and as a result he traveled to Massachusetts in 1634 at the age of 56, most likely with his son James in tow. Upon his arrival in June, Ward became the minister of Ipswich, MA.

During his tenure as minister, Ward used his knowledge of the law to author the “Body of Liberties,” a kind of early Bill of Rights that outlined people’s civil liberties. While not a legally binding document, it served as the basis for many of the laws passed in Massachusetts and other colonies. Out of the 98 articles written by Ward, number 94, which handled capital crimes, was the only one that outlined specific penalties for offenses. Notably, even though the “Body of Liberties” was written before the burglaries in which his son participated took place, Ward did not list burglary as a capital offense, presumably because the crime was not treated as such under ancient Israeli law.

Just like Nathaniel Ward, the Rev. Thomas Welde, father of Joseph Welde, was excommunicated from the Church of England for nonconformity in 1631. He arrived in Boston in June 1632 and became the first pastor of the Roxbury church.

Trial of Ann Hutchinson

Welde was a prominent elder as well as an overseer of Harvard College; he also at times has been described as “a man of intense and narrow mind” and “naturally intolerant.” Welde and John Eliot served as the two clerical witnesses against Anne Hutchinson during her infamous trial for heresy in 1637, when she was sentenced to banishment from the colony. While awaiting her separate religious trial for blasphemy, Hutchinson was placed under the charge of Welde’s brother, Joseph, who was also a prominent resident of Roxbury and one of the victims of the young men’s burglaries. Hutchinson was held in Joseph Welde’s house throughout the winter and spring, and she was regularly tormented by the minister of the Roxbury church throughout the duration of her stay.

In 1641, Rev. Thomas Welde was sent along with Hugh Peter back to England to secure financial aid for the colony. Even though he was successful in his mission, he never returned to America, so he was not present in the colony at the time his son committed the burglaries.

Diminishing Opportunities

How could two Harvard students, who were sons of two prominent leaders of their community, end up committing such an atrocious crime, twice? Were they rebelling against their parents and family? In the case of Joseph Welde, it is quite possible, considering that he broke into his own uncle’s house. Unfortunately, we will never know their true motives.

One factor that may have contributed to their actions, however, was the steep decline in available employment opportunities for Harvard graduates at the time. Starting in 1640, New England experienced its first economic depression when immigration to the colonies practically ceased with the onset of the English Civil War and, at the same time, the birth rate in the colonies suddenly dropped. The colonial job market depended on a growing population to provide new opportunities, so when the population declined, so did the number of jobs.

Second-generation Harvard students, of which Ward and Welde were a part, faced social and economic challenges that the first generation of students never did. Graduates of Harvard, the vast majority of whom were preparing to become ministers (85% of those enrolled at the college), depended on new towns and new congregations for employment. As the growth of towns dwindled, so did the number of open professional positions available to college graduates. The lack of opportunities in New England meant that many of Harvard’s graduates were forced to leave America.

Since Ward and Welde were students at Harvard with most of their needs taken care of, they certainly did not commit the burglaries out of economic necessity. However, with a stagnant economy and bleak job prospects, Harvard students felt fewer ties to the New England community. The two sons faced a colonial world that looked much different to them than to their fathers when they first arrived in America a decade earlier.

By 1640, university men were already feeling the effects of demographic constriction. As a result, between 1640 and 1660 New England lost nearly half of its intellectual leaders as they searched for opportunities in other places. Most of them returned to England where more positions were suddenly available for Puritans thanks to the English Civil War. In the end, a growing sense of indifference towards the New England community among students and graduates of Harvard, who knew that there was a good chance that they would be leaving the colony, could have made a crime like burglary carried by Ward and Welde no longer unthinkable, but also possible.

Note: The story of James Ward and Joseph Welde concludes with the “Punishment of the Harvard-Educated Burglars.”

Read more about burglary in Early American Crime.

Sources:

• Adams, Charles Francis, ed. Antinomianism in the Colony of Massachusetts Bay, 1636-1638. Boston: The Prince Society, 1894.
• Dean, John Ward. A Memoir of the Rev. Nathaniel Ward, A.M. Albany, NY: J. Munsell, 1868.
• Moore, Kathryn McDaniel. “The Dilemma of Corporal Punishment at Harvard College.” History of Education Quarterly 14.3 (Autumn, 1974), 335-346.
• Powers, Edwin. Crime and Punishment in Early Massachusetts, 1620-1692. Boston: Beacon Press, 1966.
• Sibley, John Langdon. Biographical Sketches of Graduates of Harvard University, In Cambridge, Massachusetts. Vol. I, 1642-1658. Cambridge: Charles William Sever, 1873.
• Stout, Harry S. “University Men in New England, 1620-1660: A Demographic Analysis.” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 4.3 (Winter, 1974), 375-400.
• Winthrop, John. The History of New England from 1630 to 1649. Ed. James Savage. Vol. II. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1853.