In 1836 John Mewburn, a justice of the peace in the Niagara district of Upper Canada, meeting in quarter sessions, fined George Ness, a farm laborer, fifteen shillings and costs for disturbing the worship in St. John's Church “by talking and whistling during the time of divine service.” William Johnston and John Ferrin, as well as being fined, spent twenty-four hours in jail in 1840 for shooting their guns close enough to St. Andrews Church to annoy the parishioners during their Sunday service. In extending to the rough settler culture of Upper Canada the enforcement of a Sabbath observance that reflected the religious and moral enthusiasm of late-eighteenth-century England, Upper Canada's magistrates were part of an Anglo-American world whose cultures, though distinct, were also interconnected. As J. G. A. Pocock famously noted over a decade ago, and as many historians have since elaborated, colonial societies were part of “a constellation of cultures constituting the Atlantic region, between which boundaries were so far permeable that we need not pay much attention to their existence.”

Central to shaping this transatlantic British identity was religion; it was assumed that the colonies Britain created would be Christian societies. This entailed the challenge of preaching the gospel and establishing churches in new settlements over a vast geographic area, but also implanting English political and legal structures. Religion and law went hand in hand.