There were a number of important catalysts. In the later seventeenth century, after a long period in which population expansion and short­age of resources had underpinned the tightening of attitudes towards immorality, demographic pressure levelled off and living standards started to rise: against this backdrop, fears about bastardy gradually receded.[8] The general ideal of personal […]

Because the theory and practice of sexual and of religious discipline had traditionally been so closely intertwined, the growth of religious liberty in the later seventeenth century raised obvious questions about moral liberty. To most observers, however, this was a deeply unwanted devel­opment. Indeed, the orthodox view amongst advocates of toleration was that freedom of […]

Others say, it is true freedom to have community with allwomen, and to have liberty to satisfy their lusts and greedyappetites: but this is the freedom of wanton unreasonablebeasts, and tends to destruction. Gerrard Winstanley, The Law of Freedom (1652), 17. God has given these natural affections and lusts to be gratifiedwith reason, to make […]

By 1750 most forms of consensual sex outside marriage had drifted beyond the reach of the law. This was a development that could not have been foreseen in 1700, let alone a hundred years earlier, for it overturned some of the longest-established moral and legal principles in English history. Until the later nineteenth century there […]

After 1688 even the summary conviction of sexual offenders was increasingly called into question. Throughout the middle ages, the six­teenth century, and the seventeenth, as we have seen, it had been common practice to punish harlots summarily for their evil life. The societies for reformation continued this practice, systematically using so-called general warrants, which empowered […]

An equally striking effect of the campaign for reformation was that even the prosecution of common whores and brothel-keepers became controversial. In 1700 no one thought that such criminals were beyond punishment, and the reform societies were able to proceed vigorously against them. Yet though in the short term their tactics were remark­ably successful, they […]

The rise and fall of the societies helped to bring about a fundamental change in the relationship between law and society. Up to this point the policing of sexual offences, as of other crimes, had been based on the principle of communal self-regulation. The offices of watchman, constable, and churchwarden were supposed to be held […]

The campaign against prostitution was much more successful, in all sorts of ways. Some godly magistrates waged war on sin more or less single-handedly, in the spirit of earlier Puritan magistrates. The mayor of Deal in 1703, Thomas Powell, plastered his town with royal proc­lamations against vice and went around personally admonishing and punishing swearers, […]

The Glorious Revolution of 1688, in which the Catholic James II was overthrown by the invasion of his son-in-law, the Dutch Protestant prince William of Orange, was widely perceived by English Protes­tants as a divine intervention. It was God’s way of giving England one last chance to reject sin, irreligion, and ill government. In response, […]

These piecemeal, local and colonial attempts to create a brave new world, dedicated to God and purified of sin, were in the 1640s and 1650s suddenly played out on a national scale. Within English society, * This is why in Scotland those guilty of incest, sodomy, and bestiality, the most abom­inable crimes of all, were […]