Page:Economic History of Virginia Vol 2.djvu/45

 sentenced to be imprisoned or hanged, according to the circumstances of his crime. Aggravated cases of robbery were doubtless punished with severity, but small offences like hog-stealing, especially when the person who suffered was the master, exposed the offender as a rule only to the pains of a public or private whipping. In some cases, in addition to public chastisement, he was compelled by order of court to continue in the same employment for a term of two years after the expiration of the time upon which he had agreed. It not infrequently happened that in condonation for the most serious forms of robbery, a servant bound himself upon the conclusion of the period covered by his indenture to enter into a second indenture by which he agreed to serve a second period. Whoever induced a man of this class to dispose of his master&#8217;s property by stealth, more particularly when the tempter became the beneficiary of the theft, was compelled to suffer imprisonment for a month