Introduction.           xxvii

    of witnesses and in the findings of the coroner's jury before the case was “sent
    downe to the next Provincãll”. The verdict of the coroner's jury, signed by
    Thomas Goddard, chirurgeon, describing the brain injury, shows considerable
    anatomical knowledge of the brain membranes (Arch. Md. LIV; 390, 391). In
    the Provincial Court, April 6th, 1666, Carpenter was presented and indicted;
    he pleaded not guilty, and asked a trial “by his country”, but did not exercise
    his right to challenge any of those called by the sheriff as jurymen. The
    testimony showed that he had beaten the boy over the head with a stick on
    two separate occasions. At the first beating, he inflicted a scalp wound two
    fingers' breadth wide and one finger's breadth deep which later became foul
    and suppurating. Three weeks later he again struck the boy a blow on the head,
    this time over the right ear, which resulted in his death a few hours later
    from a fracture of the skull. Following this second and fatal beating, the dying
    victim was left out for several hours on a cold February night, until his death
    occurred, in a "thatcht cabbin where [he] lay uppon the Ground wth out any
    Clothes to Cover [him] being a very Cold and bleake place”. The jury, by
    Thomas Hynson, the foreman, who was a neighbor of Carpenter, returned the
    verdict “Wee finde Manslaughter”. Asked by the court what he had to say
    for himself, why according to law “you should not have Judgmt to suffer
    death” . . . . “The Prisoner then Claim'd benefitt of Clergy Which to him then
    was allow'd The Ordinary then shewing him the booke The Clarke askt him
    Legit ut Clericus vel non Answere, legit Whereupon Ordered the Prisoner be
    burnt in the hand acording to law, which was in open Court forthwth done
    and performed, by the Under Sheriffe of Marys County”. At the February
    court following, as was customary in criminal cases, it was ordered that Car-
    penter pay the sheriff, Thomas Vaughan, imprisonment costs at the rate of
    thirty pounds of tobacco a day, and all other charges, these fees to be deter-
    mined by the Talbot County court (pp. 59-65, 153). That court later fixed
    the total costs assessed against Carpenter at 2998 pounds of tobacco (Arch.
    Md. LIV, 410).
      Murder committed by an inn-keeper while drunk, and who was unable to
    claim benefit of clergy, ended in a somewhat bizarre hanging in front of his
    own inn. Walter Pake, a landowner and inn-keeper at St. Lawrence in Bret-
    ton's Bay, St. Mary's County, killed the notorious William Price at the inn with
    his sword. Pake, brought before the December, 1668, court, and indicted for
    murder, pleaded not guilty and asked trial “by God and his Country”, and a
    jury with Mr. Christopher Rousby as foreman was chosen. Incidentally, two
    men summoned as grand or petit jurors were fined—one a Quaker who refused
    to take the oath, and the other because he did not answer the sheriff's summons.
    The accused, told that he might challenge any of those called as jurymen before
    they were sworn, did not exercise this right. The charges in the indictment,
    which were supported by witnesses, showed that the inn-keeper, with a sword
    valued at five shillings, did “Peirce through to his right Side under the shouldier
    and by the same thrust a Certaine mortall wound of the length of seven inches
    and the bredth of one inch to the said william Price did give of which
    mortall wound the said william Price immediately did dye”, and that he then