FORNICATION, (Fornicatio, from the fornices in Rome, where the lewd women prostituted themselves for money), is whoredom, or the act of incontinency, between single persons; for if either of the parties is married, it is adultery. Formerly court-lets had power to inquire of and punish fornication and adultery; in which courts the king had a fine assessed on the offenders, as appears by the book of Domeday.
In the year 1650, when the ruling powers found it for their interest to put on the semblance of a very extraordinary strictness and purity of morals, not only incest and wilful adultery were made capital crimes, but also the repeated act of keeping a brothel, or committing fornication, were (upon a second conviction) made felony without benefit of clergy. But, at the restoration,
tion, when men, from an abhorrence of the hypocrisy of the late times, fell into a contrary extreme of licentiousness, it was not thought proper to renew a law of such unfashionable rigour. And these offences have been ever since left to the feeble coercion of the spiritual court, according to the rules of the canon law; a law which has treated the offence of incontinence, nay, even adultery itself, with a great degree of tenderness and lenity; owing perhaps to the constrained celibacy of its first compilers. The temporal courts therefore take no cognisance even of the crime of adultery otherwise than as a private injury. See ADULTERY.