[Colonial America – Legal History – Women – Bastardy Laws] Leonard, Daniel

1776 Copy of a 1773 Verdict Against Lydia Curtis, an Attleboro Woman Found Guilty of “Fornication with a person [...] unknown” and Having “a Bastard Child born of her body”.

Taunton, Province of Massachusetts Bay: November 28, 1776. Sheet measuring 7 ½ x 12 inches, docketed on the verso. Folded with wear and small tears along folds. Two small repairs with archival tape. Excellent. Item #List3724

A legal document dating from near the end of the American colonial era, documenting a 1773 verdict against Lydia Curtis, an Attleboro resident, for fornication and bastardy; that is, intercourse and birth of a child out of wedlock, with both parents unmarried (the charge for a married person would be adultery rather than fornication). This document is a 1776 copy of the 1773 verdict; the prosecuting attorney appears to have been the Loyalist Daniel Leonard (exiled from Massachusetts shortly after the onset of the Revolutionary War) and the document was witnessed by Dr. David Cobb, likely the same who would shortly become a member of the Massachusetts Provincial Congress and a military officer under Henry Jackson and George Washington.

The legal consequences for fornication and bastardy could include fines, corporal punishment, and public shaming. Though at first both men and women were held legally responsible in these cases, at least to the extent that paternity could be determined, by the late Colonial period in Massachusetts essentially only women faced prosecution.[1] This seems to be a case in which the father of the child in question was not identified; he is referred to as “a person to the prior aforesaid unknown”, indicating that Curtis was the only party held legally accountable and, moreover, that Curtis herself did not know the identity of the child’s father.

Full text as follows:

“Bristol At his Majesty’s Court of General Session of the Peace begun & held at Taunton within & for the County of Bristol on the second Tuesday of March in the thirteenth year of the Reign of our Sovereign Lord George the third by the grace of God of Great Britain France & Ireland King Defender of the Faith &c & in the year of our Lord one thousand seven hundred & seventy three

“The Jurors for the said Lord the King for the body of the County of Bristol upon their oaths present that Lydia Curtis resident of Attleborough in the county of Bristol Single woman, an Infant did at said Attleborough in the county of Bristol on the last day of december in the year of our Lord one thousand seven hundred and seventy one commit fornication with a person to the prior aforesaid unknown, and afterwards to wit on the last day of September last had a Bastard Child born of her body at said Attleborough in the county of Bristol, contrary to an act or Law of this province in this [?] made and provided, against the peace of our said Lord the King his Crown and Dignity an evil example to others

“Danl. Leonard Att. / pro Dom. Rege / a true Bill Simeon Williams Foreman / Witnesses Dr. David Cobb / Zilpha Robinson”.

It is unclear why the verdict was copied in 1776—perhaps as a way to transfer records from the Colonial legal system to that of the newly-declared government. Of interest to historians of the law in the Massachusetts Bay Colony and during the Revolutionary War, especially as it pertains to women and the family structure.

[1] Kelly A. Ryan, Regulating Passion: Sexuality and Patriarchal Rule in Massachusetts, 1700–1830 (Oxford University Press, 2014).

Price: $450.00