In 1681
two women were sentenced to sit during service on a high stool in the
middle alley of the Salem meeting-house, having on their heads a paper
bearing the name of their crime; and a woman in Agamenticus at about the
same date was ordered "to stand in a white sheet publicly two several
Sabbath-Days with the mark of her offence on her forehead." These are the
latest records of this punishment that I have chanced to see.
Thus, from old church and town records, we plainly discover that each laic,
deacon, elder, criminal, singer, and even the ungodly boy had his alloted
place as absolutely assigned to him in the old meeting-house as was the
pulpit to the parson. Much has been said in semi-ridicule of this old
custom of "seating" and "dignifying," yet it did not in reality differ much
from our modern way of selling the best pews to whoever will pay the most.
Perhaps the old way was the better, since, in the early churches, age,
education, dignity, and reputation were considered as well as wealth.
VI.
The Tithingman and the Sleepers.
The most grotesque, the most extraordinary, the most highly colored figure
in the dull New England church-life was the tithingman. This fairly
burlesque creature impresses me always with a sense of unreality, of
incongruity, of strange happening, like a jesting clown in a procession of
monks, like a strain of low comedy in the sober religious drama of early
New England Puritan life; so out of place, so unreal is this fussy,
pompous, restless tithingman, with his fantastic wand of office fringed
with dangling foxtails,--creaking, bustling, strutting, peering around the
quiet meeting-house, prodding and rapping the restless boys, waking the
drowsy sleepers; for they slept in country churches in the seventeenth
century, notwithstanding dread of fierce correction, just as they nod
and doze and softly puff, unawakened and unrebuked, in village churches
throughout New England in the nineteenth century.
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