Interpreting a sentence

[George Thompson]

It certainly isn't my impression that the criminal law of 17th C England was "lax", or that the New Englanders devised a criminal law that was more draconian than back home.
Nonetheless, I would interpret the quoted sentence as stating that the criminal law of NE was intended to be more severe than that of the old country.

As far as the Purritans being considered extremists, they were indeed so considered, by me, Ben Jonson and many other figures of note, but not for their code of criminal law.  What the writer of the quoted sentence meant to say there I won't guess at.

Is the writer thinking of the scarlet-letter business?  That wasn't found in England, I suppose, but I doubt that my great-to-the-7th grandads supposed that England was soft on fornication & adultery.    (1/4 of my ancestry is old-time New Englander)  The law's take on theft can't have been different, much.  How about gambling, drunkenness & other victimless crimes?  Leaving aside what the aristocracy was able to get away with, of course.

One of my very-great-grandmas had an out-of-wedlock baby, and seems not to have suffered unduly for it.  (This last is a family scandal that we have kept hidden for 325 years -- I hope that you all will not let it go beyond the circle here.)

GAT

George A. Thompson
Author of A Documentary History of "The African Theatre", Northwestern Univ. Pr., 1998, but nothing much lately.

----- Original Message -----
From: "Joel S. Berson" <Berson at att.net>
Date: Tuesday, February 8, 2011 11:34 am
Subject: Interpreting a sentence
To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU

> I am reading the following sentence (in email, so I excuse the typo):
>
> >Criminal law in New England was created on the whole by people who
> >had found life in Europe too lax, but were considered extremists,
> >and persecuted, by their contemmporaries [sic] Europeans.
>
> Is it fair to assume that "criminal law in New England was created on
> the whole by people who had found life in Europe too lax"  is the
> opinion of the writer of this sentence, rather than the opinion of
> "their contemporaneous Europeans"?
>
> Is it fair to assume that the "criminal law was founded ..." part
> implies the belief (whether held by the writer or held by the
> contemporaneous Europeans) that the New Englanders created a criminal
> law that was severe in order to overcome the laxness they saw in Europe?
>
> Joel
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------
> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org

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