Definition
In legal and historical context, "Puritans" refers to the broad movement of English Protestant reformers, active primarily from the mid-sixteenth through the seventeenth centuries, who sought to purify the Church of England of what they regarded as remnants of Roman Catholic doctrine and ceremony. As a legal category, Puritans were a subset of the larger class of religious DISSENTERS — those who refused full conformity to the established Church of England — and their legal status was defined by the succession of statutes governing religious uniformity in England, including the Acts of Uniformity and the Test Acts.
The term carried no precise statutory definition. In legal sources, Puritans appear most often as part of the broader category of nonconformists or dissenters, subject to the same penal laws that applied to any who deviated from the established church. Their significance to Anglo-American legal history is primarily contextual: they were central actors in the constitutional crises of the seventeenth century and the founding legal cultures of several American colonies.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): Plural of puritan; in common use, often refers to the historical English religious movement or, loosely, to any person or group perceived as morally strict or censorious.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): One of a sect or party of English Protestants in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries who advocated greater purity of worship and stricter discipline; more broadly, any person rigidly strict in matters of religion or morals.
The gap between common and legal usage is significant in research contexts. Common usage treats "Puritans" as a cultural or theological label. Legal usage collapses them into the broader statutory category of DISSENTERS, meaning primary legal sources will rarely use the word "Puritans" at all — researchers must work through the nonconformist and dissenter framework to find the relevant law.
Common Confusion
Puritans are frequently conflated with SEPARATISTS, but the distinction matters legally and historically. Puritans generally sought reform from within the Church of England; Separatists (including the Pilgrim founders of Plymouth Colony) rejected the established church entirely and faced harsher legal consequences for doing so. Both groups fall under the broader category of Dissenters in English law, but their treatment under statute and in ecclesiastical courts was not identical. Colonial American legal sources sometimes use the terms interchangeably, which is an error.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers will find almost no primary English legal source that uses the word "Puritans" as a defined legal term. The operative legal categories were DISSENTERS, NONCONFORMISTS, and RECUSANTS. To trace the legal treatment of Puritans in English law, the correct entry points are the penal statutes governing religious nonconformity — the Acts of Uniformity (1559, 1662), the Conventicle Acts, and the Five Mile Act — rather than any statute naming Puritans directly.
In American colonial legal history, the term becomes more significant. The Massachusetts Bay Colony and Connecticut Colony were founded on Puritan principles, and their early codes — the Massachusetts Body of Liberties (1641) and the Laws and Liberties (1648) — reflect Puritan legal theology directly. Researchers working in colonial American law must understand Puritan thought to interpret these codes correctly, including their treatment of church membership, civil authority, and criminal punishment.
The seventeenth-century constitutional struggles in England — including the Civil War, the Interregnum, and the eventual Toleration Act of 1689 — were substantially driven by conflicts over the legal status of Puritan and nonconformist worship. Researchers in English constitutional history will encounter Puritans as a political and religious force shaping parliamentary development rather than as a defined legal class.
Be alert to temporal drift: by the Restoration period (post-1660), "Puritan" had become a pejorative in English usage, and sources from that era use it polemically rather than descriptively.
Historical Dictionary Support
Rapalje & Lawrence redirect the reader to DISSENTERS, which is the correct analytical move and confirms that even in nineteenth-century legal reference practice, "Puritans" had no independent legal definition. The redirection to DISSENTERS reflects the settled understanding that Puritan legal status was derivative of, not separate from, the broader nonconformist framework.
Notably, the Rapalje & Lawrence entry that follows the redirect is for PURLIEU — a Norman-French land law term entirely unrelated to Puritans — suggesting the editors treated the Puritans entry as purely cross-referential with no substantive legal content of its own. No historical legal dictionary in the standard reference shelf assigns Puritans a formal legal definition. This absence is itself informative: the term was always theological and political before it was legal.
Jurisdictional Note
In English law, the relevant jurisdiction is pre-1689 ecclesiastical and parliamentary law, after which the Toleration Act substantially altered the legal position of Protestant dissenters including former Puritans. In American law, the relevant jurisdictions are the New England colonies and early states, where Puritan legal culture persisted in statutory form well into the eighteenth century.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
See Law Mind Encyclopedia — Religious Dissent and Colonial Law; Established Church and Nonconformity; Colonial American Legal Codes.