Running afoul of Tidewater gentlemen was a dangerous proposition. Late seventeenth and early eighteenth-century visitors constantly remarked on their haughty sense of personal honor and their furious reaction to the slightest insult. While the Yankee elite generally settled their disputes through the instrument of written laws, Tidewater gentry were more likely to resort to a duel. Commoners were equally prideful: arguments in the tavern commonly led to nasty fights in which it was acceptable to kick, bite, strangle, gouge out eyes, and dismember genitals of one’s opponent. Lower-status people almost never challenged their betters for fear of savage retribution. As gentlemen could have lesser persons whipped for minor offenses. When one commoner spoke out against a governor, a court ordered that he be brutally beaten by forty men, be fined £200 (a decade’s income for a peasant), have a hole bored through his tongue, and then be forever banished from Virginia. Indeed, cases that came to court were resolved by gentlemen judges who believed that issues should be