xxvi                 Introduction.

        mony, the verdict of the jury, and the judgment of the court, followed by the
        sentence if the accused was found guilty, or “cleared by proclamation” if not
        guilty.
          It is to be noted that the number of grand jurors was not fixed, varying
        in this record from fourteen to twenty-two. The petit jury was almost invari-
        ably composed of twelve men, but in one case the jury is said to have numbered
        thirteen (p. 197). In one instance two men, accused of entirely different
        crimes, one of murder and another of rape, were tried consecutively before
        the same jury, which having heard the testimony in both cases, retired and
        returned with separate verdicts in each case. In the case of Joane Colledge,
        found guilty of infanticide and sentenced to be hanged, upon the petition of a
        number of persons then in court, the justices suspended her execution until
        the will of the Lord Proprietary was known. This case will be referred to in
        more detail later (p. xxxix).
          In all, fourteen cases of murder, or suspected murder, came before the court
        during this five year period. In the majority of these cases, death was either
        found to have been due “to misadventure”, or the accused was cleared on the
        evidence. There were four persons, however, who were found guilty and sen-
        tenced to death. Two of these, Carpenter and Morrice, escaped death by
        claiming benefit of clergy, one Joane Colledge, whose case has just been
        mentioned may later have been pardoned, and one, Pake, was hanged.
          There were two instances, the cases of Thomas Corker (Cocher) and John
        Richardson, in which death was found by the jury to have been “by misad-
        venture”, followed by a pardon by the Governor, which was required to
        free them. Corker accidentally shot a man, and Richardson was unwittingly
        the cause of his wife's death. Both were tried by juries with all legal formal-
        ities. The verdict of “Manslaughter by misadventure” was rendered in the
        case of Corker, whose trial is very fully reported, and the accused was there-
        upon cleared by proclamation. In Richardson's case, however, his trial being
        sketchily reported, we are left in the dark as to just what happened at the trial
        after the jury brought in their verdict “that the said John Richardson is guilty
        of misadventure” (pp. 353-358, 599-600). That neither of these verdicts was
        in itself sufficient to clear Corker or Richardson of taint, or even to secure their
        release from imprisonment, is shown by the fact that the Governor, in the name
        of the Lord Proprietary, in each case later issued a pardon out of Chancery
        (Arch. Md. LI; 324-4, 348). In two of the remaining murder trials those pre-
        sented were found by a jury on the evidence “not guilty”, and in the remain-
        ing presentments for murder no indictments were found.
          The four trials for murder in which the sentence of death was imposed have
        sufficient human interest to be described in some detail. The case of Francis
        Carpenter, a planter of Broad Creek, Talbot County, who murdered his ser-
        vant boy Samuel Youngman, was particularly revolting, and is an example
        of the cruelty so often shown by masters to indentured servants at that time.
        One only regrets that the murderer was able to save his neck by claiming bene-
        fit of clergy. The case had first come up in the Talbot County court on March
        31st, 1665/6, the accused being called Mr. Francis Carpenter in the depositions