the word "sovereign" and
Leicester rendered his own name in eight different ways. It was by no
means a mark of illiteracy to spell not only unlike your neighbor, but
unlike yourself on the line previous.

But it is more than quaint diction and fantastic spelling which
fascinates us as we turn over, not only the leaves of Bradford's famous
history, but the pile of fading records of various kinds of this once
prosperous shipbuilding town. The records of Kingston are valuable, not
only because they tell the tale of this particular spot, but because
they are delightfully typical of all the South Shore towns. The
yellowing diaries mention crude offenses, crude chastisements; give
scraps of genealogies as broken as the families themselves are now
broken and scattered; lament over one daughter of the Puritans who took
the veil in a Roman Catholic convent; sternly relate, in Rabelaisian
frankness, dark sins, punished with mediaeval justice. In fact, these
righteous early colonists seemed to find a genuine satisfaction in
devising punishments, and in putting them into practice. We read that
the stocks (also called "bilbaos" because they were formerly
manufactured in Bilbao, in Spain) were first occupied by the man who had
made them, as the court decided that his charge for the work was
excessive! There were wooden cages in which criminals were confined and
exposed to public view; whipping-posts; cleft sticks for profane
tongues. Drunkenness was punished by disfranchisement; the blasphemer
and the heretics were branded with a hot iron.

Let us look at some of these old records, not all of them as ferocious
as this, but interesting for the minutiae which they preserve and which
makes it possible for us to reconstruct something of that atmosphere of
the past. It was ninety-six years after the settlement at Plymouth that
Kingston made its first request for a separation. It was not granted for
almost a decade, but from then on the ecclesiastical records furnish us
with a great deal of intimate and chatty material. For instance, we
learn in 1719 that Isaac Holmes was to have "20 shillings for sweeping,
opening and shutting of the doors and casements of the meeting house for
1 year," which throws some light upon sextons' salaries!

The minute directions as to the placing of the pews in the meeting-house
(1720) contain a pungent element of personality. Major John Bradford is
"next to the pulpit stairs"; Elisha Bradford on the left "as