The Scarlet Letter .......

    

 In 1695 the Puritans in Salem, Massachusetts, passed the law against adultery that suggested to Nathaniel Hawthorne the story of The Scarlet Letter. The Law provided that people convicted of adultery would have to wear the letter "A" on a conspicuous part of their clothes for the remainder of their lives. The law also made adulterers liable to a severe whipping of forty lashes and required them to sit in humiliation on the gallows with chains about tyheir necks for at least one hour. Harsh as these penalties were, however, they were much milder than the punishments common in New England just a few years before. In the middle of the seventeenth century the penalty for adultery in Massachusetts was death.
     In just one year during the third quarter of the seventeenth century, when the population of Boston was only 4,000, there were forty-eight instances of bastardy and fifty of fornication.

So Now You Know.....