Scholars of legal culture in the west are indebted in many ways to the instruction offered them by medieval specialists such as Brian Tierney and Richard Tuck and by early modem experts like Barbara Shapiro. The recovery of how "conscience" operated in the gradual separation of the "law" from the earlier theological-philosophical systems of thought undergirding a "western" consciousness owes much of its richness to these intrepid researchers.

Oddly enough, however, very little work informs the intersection of the law and conscience in the history of law and religion in early North American society. This is particularly odd given the long historiography on New England Puritanism, the insights offered on moral philosophy at Harvard by Norman Fiering and the ways in which legal historians such as David Konig have explicated the different ways Massachusetts and Virginia treated issues of conscience and enforcement mechanisms on key issues such as debt recovery.

If the literature on law and conscience in New England has at least enjoyed a cursory survey that connects its trajectory to Europe, the "middle colonies" remain a dark and uncharted ground. To the extent that "conscience" and the law have emerged as the foci of research for these areas of the first British Empire, they have largely taken the form of "religious liberty" questions explicated by Thomas Curry's First Freedom but seldom pursued to the level of litigation or enforcement of obligation. The proposed paper seeks to put the problem of conscience and the law at the center of re-conceptualizing how historians look at "early modem" North America. Changing notions of conscience and its manifestation in concrete social and legal exchanges might go a long way in clarifying whether freeholders and servants understood law and religion as mutually exclusive, or mutually reinforcing systems of thought. Only by raising such questions can one then hope to understand to what extent such convictions informed public law debates over "rights" and the legal responsibilities of both colonists and the Empire.