ABSTRACT
Thomas Verry and his wife, Elizabeth Proctor, excused the gratification of their “corrupt natures” by stating that they had the consent of both sets of parents to marriage. This sounds good, but Elizabeth Proctor was just eighteen, and their child was born 8 weeks after their 1681 marriage. The claim that a contract had preceded intercourse was an attempt to salvage some respectability that cannot have fooled many of their neighbors in Salem.2 Although a full-term pregnancy requires 270 days, or almost 39 weeks, Puritans established 32 weeks as the cut-off point for premarital fornication prosecutions. They did so not because they accepted that couples would have intercourse between contract and marriage, but because they wanted to allow for prematurity. To convict a married couple of having committed an act of “uncleanness” so vile that it endangered their entire community, threatened successive generations of their progeny, and required ritual humiliation in church and corporal or financial punishment at a quarterly court session was a serious undertaking.3 Prior to 1655, only eight persons were prosecuted, such was the strength of Puritan religious/sexual ideology.
