HE creators of the popular image of the New England Puritan, and many historians and critics of the Massachusetts Bay Colony as well, have made much of the severity of Puritan law. On the other hand, perhaps as much has been written, though with less popular effect, of the relative mildness of Puritan law. Defenders of New England have pointed to the Bay Colony's twelve capital offenses and proudly contrasted them with old England's thirty-one during the reign of James I. Both critics and defenders, however, have tended to focus their attention on the sentences imposed by the courts and to take little note of the punishments which were in fact inflicted. The records of the General Court of Massachusetts Bay show that, in the first decade of the colony, the sentences actually carried out were frequently at variance with the sentences the Court originally imposed, and were less severe than the literary tradition would lead us to believe.' Furthermore, a pattern emerges in this variance between initial sentence and ultimate punishment which makes it clear that court actions frequently meant one thing for the man of property and another for the man without. The basis of law in the Bay Colony was the then existing ecclesiastic, statute, and common law of England. The Bible was rarely a primary source of legislation, and was generally employed only to lend authority to laws modeled on English statute and common law. An exception to this was the Ten Commandments, violations of which were theoretically capital offenses. There were hangings for murder, and John Winthrop notes in his journal a hanging for adultery; but the magistrates sentenced commandment breakers to punishments which fell, in nearly all cases, far short of death. Usually a breach of the third commandment, for instance,