96 The Story of The Bronx 



Chester is the case of one offender, convicted of " hogg stealing," 

 who was sentenced to pay eleven pounds for the stolen ani- 

 mals, or to receive forty lashes upon the back. There is 

 another record of one member of a jury "hanging" the jury 

 and being fined by the court therefor. The case of Judge 

 Morris shows that there were honorable, upright men upon 

 the bench, and this, too, at a time when the English judiciary 

 had not lost its subserviency to the crown, nor completely 

 departed from the harsh and brutal manners instituted by the 

 infamous Jeffreys. 



Education among the rural Dutch was a much neglected 

 quantity. There were schools in New Amsterdam and in 

 Beverwyck (later, Albany) ; but in the country districts the 

 mother was the teacher, and the Bible and the Catechism the 

 only text-books; so that the Dutchman, while not illiterate, 

 was certainly uneducated. The children of the better classes 

 had more advantages and were sometimes sent to the great 

 University of Leyden, especially if the young man intended to 

 become a dominie. The daughters were trained to be house- 

 wives and mothers; to cook and to clean with that thorough- 

 ness which has become proverbial of the Dutch, to sew and to 

 knit, to spin and to weave, and to take care of the poultry and 

 the household generally. 



It was not until the days of the English that anything in the 

 way of schools was established, and these were far from our 

 modern idea of a rural school. In the more eastern portions 

 of the county, adjacent to Connecticut and settled by the 

 people of that colony, the school-house was earlier established, 

 the Yankee necessity of a school having been recognized by the 

 General Court, or Legislature, of Massachusetts as early as 

 1645-47, and carried by Winthrop, Davenport, and others into 

 the colony of Connecticut from the mother colony. The 



