A Pilgrim’s Drunken Progress

[MerryBlooms]

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On January 6, 1678 members of the jury of the Plymouth Colony Court were summoned to view a dead body lying by the side of the road and to investigate the cause of the man’s demise. The body was identified as Thomas Lucas, and the court ruled in March that the cause of death was the result of “hee being very ancient & decriped in his limbes, and it being very cold, and having drunk some drinke, gott a volent fall into a ditch, in a very dangerous place, could not recover himslefe, but bruised his body, and lying all night in the cold, soe hee came by his end.”

By drunkenly falling into a ditch and expiring, Thomas Lucas made himself historically significant by being the first Plymouth colonist whose death was linked to alcohol consumption. The Plymouth Colony Court Records are filled with hundreds of cases related to alcohol sales and consumption, and before his death, Lucas had distinguished himself as a frequent character in these records: he was charged with the most alcohol-related crimes in the history of Plymouth Colony.

Thomas Lucas was a thorn in the Court’s side for nearly twenty years. His first appearance in court records was in October of 1658, and over the next four years he was fined for being drunk four times (usually at ten shillings a pop) and for retailing liquor without a license. In March of 1661 he was found guilty of being drunk again, and sentenced to pay twenty pounds in “surties for his good behavior.” Lucas’s pals John Wood and Gorge Bonum each ponied up ten pounds for the bond, but Lucas couldn’t stay straight for long. In May he was found with Thomas Savory’s wife Ann at his home “on the Lord’s day” at an unreasonable hour (while Church was in session). The Courts sentenced Ann to the stocks after she was found drunk “under a hedge, in uncivell and beastly manor.” Lucas was found guilty as well and had broken his bonds of good behavior, but the Courts weren’t sure how to punish him. They put off his case for further consideration.

Two years passed before Lucas entered the books again. In June of 1663 he was sentenced to be publicly whipped, but the order was stayed until the next time he was found to be drunk, which occurred less than a year later. In June of 1664 he was summoned again to the court to answer accusations that he had abused his wife, as well as “railing and reviling others,” and disturbing the peace, and sentenced to sit in the stocks. The next year he was fined ten shillings for being drunk—barely a slap on the wrist after years of increasingly severe punishments.

http://www.laphamsquarterly.org/roundtable/pilgrims-drunken-progress

[MisterP]

1. well, that's what happens when you expect a new colony to succeed entirely on the basis of one

commodity: someone has to drag the corpses out of the ditches and explain that thousands of shoes won't cut it

heck, even Puritan fashion was just Spanish haute couture transferred a few isles northward

[LuvNewcastle]

2. If I had lived back then, I think

I would've been one of those people who moved away from 'civilization' into the mountains. Plymouth Colony just doesn't sound like much fun to me. Too many fucking rules. I'd rather join an Indian tribe.