Obscenity

From xyclopedia - the history of pornography and sexual expression

When Sir Charles Sedley, in 1663, got drunk in a public tavern, climbed upstairs, took off all his clothes, and urinated onto the crowded street below, he provoked the first recorded occasion in Anglo-Saxon jurisprudence that the State punished an affront to public decency. Porn and censorship grew hand-in-hand after the Enlightenment. Before then, most Western societies worried more about sedition and blasphemy than obscenity. Not until the eighteenth century did common, as opposed to ecclesiastical, law apply to obscene libel in England.