Laws2

== In the colony, which most people were Puritans, they were allowed to make their own laws and use the center of e == == == ==ach village as a meeting house. The laws were made by white men. They were really strict about the law that parents must teach their children to read. Large villages must have schools in the villages called Dames Schools. So many laws were made to make sure the children in the colony knew how to read the bible. ==

==Freedom of Religion was not the law in the Massachusetts Bay Colony. The Puritans came to America so they could practice their religion as they pleased. However, they did not allow other settlers the same religious freedom. Settlers who did not follow the Puritan ways were not allowed to own land in the colony, and were often sent away. ==

==The first person to be executed in the colony was Margaret Jones, a female physician accused of being a "witch". A delusional Dorothy Talbye was hanged in 1638 for murdering her daughter, as at the time the common law of Massa chusetts made no distinction between insanity (or mental illness) and criminal behavior. The Puritans of the Massachusetts Bay Colony were the most active of the New England persecutors of Quakers. In 1660, one of the most notable victims of the religious intolerance was English Quaker Mary Dyer who was hanged in Boston for repeatedly defying a law banning Quakers from the colony. As one of the four executed Quakers known as the Boston martyrs, the hanging of Dyer marked the beginning of the end of the Puritan theocracy and New England independence from English rule. In 1661 King Charles II explicitly forbade Massachusetts from executing anyone for professing Quakerism. ==

@http://www.u-s-history.com/pages/h1164.html @http://www.watertown.k12.ma.us/cunniff/americanhistorycentral/05europeansinnamerica/The_Massachuse.html @http://www.ladyoftheearth.com/witch/accused-witch.txt

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