Waving the Box in the Air

It's cooled down this morning, but it's been hot in my apartment, and men have been putting siding on a very near house, making it hard to work here. I've been working well other places, though. Yesterday, I went in the morning to the beautiful graveyard, and did some delicious, sentence by sentence revision (that's my favorite, the fine polishing stuff, when deep glints suddenly come up) under the shade of my favorite tree, everything I needed in the basket of my trike. Then, I looped by the store for some chicken, two apples and a pear, then went to the library. When I first asked at the reference desk about court records from January 1736 (I wanted to try to double check details about a flogging), the librarian said they didn't have the records, but I went upstairs to the local history room, where the amazing Mrs. Feeley, retired head reference librarian and very well-informed and ardent admirer of Jonathan Edwards, still works on Fridays and Saturday afternoons. She was waiting for someone from Seattle who had an appointment to do geneology research, but she left me to be her "temporary docent" outside the door of the archive, and went to look in the basement. She wasn't sure that she could find the microfilm, since there have been two head reference librarians and a renovation since she retired and they move things around without telling her, but she came back waving the little cardboard box of microfilm over her head in triumph: microfilm of the records of the Court of General Sessions of the Peace and the Inferiour Court of Common Pleas holden at Northampton, 1735 - 1741.

The flogging wasn't there on the third Tuesday of January, being the 20th day, 1735/6 (there was a confusing date shift in these years) -- they must have tried it, I think, in criminal court -- but tons of interesting things were, including the license granted as an innholder, taverner and common victualler granted the guy in whose tavern I'd just revised a key scene, with the law directing him to keep "good rule and order," and a lot of debt, land deals (including one really intriguing one) and fornication cases (usually settled by paying 50 shillings).

So much fun.