And law had cruel and idiot faces as well as faces just and wise.

Hitherto the colony possessed no written statutes.
The Company now resolved to impose upon the wayward an iron restraint.
It fell to Dale to enforce the regulations known as "Lawes and Orders, dyvine, politique, and martiall for the Colonye of Virginia"-- not English civil law simply, but laws "chiefly extracted out of the Lawes for governing the army in the Low Countreys." The first part of this code was compiled by William Strachey; the latter part is thought to have been the work of Sir Edward Cecil, Sir Thomas Gates, and Dale himself, approved and accepted by the Virginia Company.

Ten years afterwards, defending itself before a Committee of Parliament, the Company through its Treasurer declared "the necessity of such laws, in some cases ad terrorem, and in some to be truly executed." Seventeenth-century English law herself was terrible enough in all conscience, but "Dale's Laws" went beyond.

Offences ranged from failure to attend church and idleness to lese majeste.

The penalties were gross--cruel whippings, imprisonments, barbarous puttings to death.