London, Sept 20 (ANI): Ancient Warwickshire documents unearthed stipulate strange laws in the county during the late Middle Ages, which included penalty for selling shoes before 1pm, playing tennis and not going to church on a Sunday.
Women who play away from home might want to consider the punishment meted out for similar indiscretions hundreds of years ago in Warwickshire.
While adultery in this day and age might end up in the divorce courts, women guilty of such a crime during the late Middle Ages were forced to endure a very unusual form of retribution - reciting a humiliating ditty while sitting backwards on a ram, holding its tail.
This is just one of many punishments that were routinely handed out in Warwickshire for activities banned in the county for more than six centuries. Many of the offences themselves would now be considered equally ridiculous.
The documents stipulating the strange laws have been uploaded on the internet, so that they can be viewed online for the first time on the National Archives' Manorial Documents Register.
Historians spent six months collating the records and putting them onto an online database, the Daily Mail reported.
They include laws against selling shoes before 1pm, as well as playing tennis and bowls - "crimes" which were punishable by a 40 pence fine.
"People were fined for playing bowls [in Temple Balsall] in the 1620s," Neil Bettridge, manorial documents project officer for Warwickshire County Council, said.
"It was more a question of social order. People weren't keen on [other] people getting together in large groups and necessarily enjoying themselves.
"I think it was a question of social control that they didn't want people to be wasting their time on what they thought were frivolous things," he said.
In 1424 tennis was banned from the streets of Atherstone, Warkwickshire, while ale house haunters who did not attend church were fined under charges issued by 17th Century courts. (ANI)
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