Paul Bass Photo
Blue: Spencer didn’t do it.
Unfortunately for George Spencer, a man accused of fathering a piglet in our fair burg, a ruling from Judge John C. Blue comes 373 years too late.
Spencer was executed for bestiality in New Haven Colony in 1642. First, the sow he allegedly lay with was executed before his eyes. Then Spencer was hanged.
After all, Leviticus 20:15 says: “If a man lie with a beast, he shall surely be put to death; and ye shall slay the beast.”
Fast forward to 2015: A Superior Court judge in New Haven, Jon C. Blue (pictured), has revisited Spencer’s case — along with a bunch of other New Haven legal cases ordinary and extraordinary, tawdry and sensational from the days of the Puritans.
Blue found Spencer innocent of his alleged capital crime. He also unearths revelations and insights about our Colonial history’s legal system.
How the literal sentences of the Bible were the fundamental case law of the New Haven Colony was one of the illuminating points Blue makes in a new book called The Case of the Piglet’s Paternity: Trials from the New Haven Colony, 1639 – 1663.
Judge Blue discussed that case, along with others including “The Clamorous Quaker” and “The Exploding Gun” in a recent interview with me on WNHH radio’s “This Day In New Haven History.”
The book, published by Wesleyan University Press, picks out 33 cases from the early proceedings of the colony’s General Court. Several sexual cases have never been before published before, even in court annals.
In the 1850s, when the early cases were first transcribed and edited for printing, masculine homoerotic whipping and “The Case of the Lecherous Swineherd” were deemed in their raw language too risque for Victorian sensibilities.
Enter Judge Blue. Blue studied and loved history in college in the late 1960s. But he determined that there would be a dearth of jobs for medievalists at the time. (He was not wrong.) So he chose the law.
Now he has returned to a first love in this collection, a first book. Blue retold some of the tales in his book, using the detailed accounts kept by court secretaries.
He called those notes “maybe the best committee meeting [notes] you ever heard. They give you a ‘You Are There’ quality.’”
The 1st “Verifiable False Confession”
During the interview, Judge Blue brought us back to a justice system without juries, lawyers, or even jails. Fines, whipping, and execution were the default punishments. In the process, he depicted what daily life was like for randy kids, poor exploited servant girls, a man who buys a musket that then blows up in his face.
And for poor Spencer — who just happened to have one good working eye, very similar, it seemed, to the piglet’s.
Or, as Blue read from his text, “His deformed eye being beheld and compared together with the eye of the monster [that is, the piglet], seemed to be as like the eye in the glass to the eye in the face.”
The evidence was two-fold, Judge Blue explained: Spencer’s brow-beaten confession and the vetted testimony or circumstantial evidence of others.
Although the verdict sounds horrific to us, Blue brought an empathy to his reading of his predecessors’ work: “Here we can look back at it with the wisdom of four centuries later, and say these peoplee were ignorant, but for hundreds of years people believed it was possible to have inter-species reproduction.”
“I call it [the case of the piglet’s paternity] the first verifiable false confession in American history, because we know he wasn’t the father of the piglet; it was impossible. But a number of people heard him confess, and they testified.”
“The Exploding Gun”
If the judges did badly in this case, they did remarkably well and were ahead of their time in another first, a case Blue calls “The Exploding Gun.”
Blue took us back to the winter of 1645, when one Francis Linley sold Stephen Medcalfe a gun that turned out not only to be badly built. But, as the testimony would report, Linley knew the gun might be dangerous. Result: Medcalfe fired it and lost an eye.
“It was the new world’s first product liability action … and the person was actually awarded damages in a way that wouldn’t be done in America for hundreds of years. Once you got away from cases governed by the Book of Leviticus, they could actually be pretty good,” Blue said
To hear about this all — and those sexual cases, raw in detail and a window on how vulnerable young people, especially girls were to the predations of their masters — click on the above sound file to hear this special edition of “This Day In New Haven History.”
What was Judge Blue’s take-away from his immersion in 17th Century law? And how does it affect him as he sits on the Superior Court bench today?
The author, who at one point described himself as 17th century-esque in that he doesn’t possess a cell phone, concluded: “People being people act in recognizable ways. Witnesses confronted with contrary evidence change their stories. People squirm on the witness stand. It [this project] doesn’t help me understand contemporary law, but it helps me understand people.”