Adultery was considered a particularly wayward act for a woman. Chastity and honesty were among the most valued qualities of proper women and this transgression was a violation of both. The offense also offers an idea of the “two concepts of order” that were at play in early modern English society. In elite society, women guilty of adultery could be punished by death. In popular culture, however, adulteresses as well as their cuckolded male counterparts, were often subject to public shaming in the form of a skimmington.

Skimmingtons were common manifestations of moral outrage at married couples who violated social norms. The public procedures often involved effigies of the couple being paraded through town on a cart, while townspeople banged on pots and pans. The word skimmington is believed to originate from skimming ladles, wielded by furious wives in early illustrations.

Rendering of a skimmington. [8]

Another means of publicly decrying social deviants was the ballad. Ballads, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, were common “popular songs often celebrating or scurrilously attacking persons or institutions,” thus lending themselves well to the objective of public shaming. In the case of ballads pertaining to women and crime, ballads “sought to reinforce gender roles and strengthen the social order by providing an example of deviant women as a deterrent to others”[33]. One such ballad, The Protestant Cuckold: A New Ballad, describes a husband’s discovery of his wife’s sexual indiscretion and his subsequent beating of her lover.

Parallel to adultery was the indiscretion associated with bastardy. Having a child out of wedlock was a punishable offense, with delinquents reprimanded with whippings and stints in houses of correction. Though it took both man and woman to create children, bearing one out of wedlock, the woman exclusively bore the guilt and shame for the transgression. An unmarried, pregnant woman was given three choices of action; she could give birth to the child and subsequently kill it, thereby committing a capital offense, abandon the child at a church or marketplace, or keep it. By choosing the second option, the child became the financial responsibility of the community. Though theoretically both parents were financially obligated to care for the child in the case of her keeping it, the difficulty of providing paternity made it unlikely that the woman would receive any monetary assistance in rearing the child, which meant that “if she was not employed (as was most likely after the public admission of an illegitimate birth), and the bastard child was chargeable to the parish, the mother would be put in a house of correction”[33].

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