Introduction
GREAT anniversaries summon us to commemorate the past. The 350th anniversary of the founding of Massachusetts also called for something more. It challenged us to think anew about the meaning of the seventeenth century, a complex period that found the American colonists still recognizably English, yet somehow set apart from European culture and society.
This task of reappraisal was central to “New England Begins,” a major exhibition at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts.1 “New England Begins” celebrated a New England that did not correspond to stock wisdom or standard images. The glories of the exhibition were the abundance of portraits, furniture, and silver that in their glowing colors and elaborated forms silently rebuked old and still persistent notions that the Puritanism of the colonists or the harshness of a frontier settlement had stifled the artistic impulse. To the contrary, “New England Begins” was a convincing demonstration of high standards and sophistication—of continuity, not of change or deprivation. Here were works of art that flowed from an aesthetic originating in Catholic Italy. Here, too, were other forms of culture embodying a deep, almost instinctive, conservatism, as in the Latin broadsides from Harvard College commencements or maps portraying how the colonists imposed themselves upon the wilderness. The theme of “New England Begins” was undoubtedly the transfer of culture from Europe to America.
It was no accident that this was the theme of the exhibition or that its scope was so encompassing. From the moment of its inception, the planning of “New England Begins” was entrusted to an interdisciplinary group chaired by the Curator of American Decorative Arts, Jonathan L. Fairbanks, and including members of his staff, as well as historians from other institutions in the Boston area. Early on, this group sensed that the issues being raised would merit more attention than the exhibition by itself would offer. The Colonial Society of Massachusetts agreed to be the sponsor of a conference addressed to such issues and entrusted the planning to David D. Hall and David Grayson Allen, both of whom were also engaged with the development of the exhibition. Seventeenth-Century New England contains all the essays that were presented at this conference, which met in Boston on 18 and 19 June 1982. The essays are grouped here, as they were for the conference itself, into two broad categories: Economy and Society and Religion and Mentality.
To its organizers the conference seemed to coincide with a new phase of New England studies. The 1960’s and early 1970’s had witnessed an influx of ideas and energies that cumulatively transformed the social history of colonial New England. Much of this influx was in the form of local studies of a single town. A cluster of books deserve to be mentioned as inaugurating this transformation: histories of seventeenth-century Sudbury and Boston by Sumner C. Powell and Darrett Rutman, and, in 1970, the annus mirabilis of such local studies, histories of Andover and Dedham by Philip Greven and Kenneth Lockridge.2
Several lines of influence would converge in these local histories and their successors. One was certainly the methods of historical demography as they had been popularized by the British historian Peter Laslett in The World We Have Lost. Laslett himself acknowledged the primacy of French historical demography, and some Americans went directly to that work. Various of the social sciences were influential in suggesting that history must rest upon quantifiable data that was used to test hypotheses and to construct models. Some older kinds of history, and especially intellectual or religious history, seemed quite lacking in this regard. From France came yet another strand of thinking, the emphasis associated with the Annates school on peasants in the setting of rural society. Local history as practiced by British historians provided something of a counterpart to an ideal type of peasant communalism, for English towns and villages appeared immensely different one from another. There were general patterns, to be sure, but these patterns were unevenly dominant depending on such factors as soil type and distances to market. Out of English social history came, therefore, the concept of localism. In general, the French and British points of view served to suggest that change came slowly in rural society.
These overlapping strands of influence were crucial to the conference and the exhibition. Consider, for example, the twin themes of continuity and cultural transfer. Scarcely twenty years ago historians of colonial America were emphasizing the disruptive consequences of immigration to the New World. The thrust of their argument was that a series of circumstances—the uprooting from an ordered web of relationships, the actual voyage to America, and most importantly, the “disorder” resulting from frustrated expectations—had functioned to Americanize the colonists, making them a people accustomed to disorder and fluidity, and America a society that lacked stable institutions. The history of the family seemed paradigmatic of this process; by comparison with Europe, the structure of the colonial family—so it was argued—became looser and less hierarchical as authority shifted from fathers to sons.3
This understanding of the seventeenth century would rapidly collapse as historians rediscovered the stability of New World institutions. The most stable institution of all now seemed to be the seventeenth-century New England family, with the town not far behind. By comparison with Europe, the demographers were demonstrating that the colonists lived longer and raised more children to adulthood. As for continuity, these families had practiced an inheritance system that functioned to preserve enough land—the essential form of economic security—in the hands of successive generations. “Familial continuity” and the social norm of consensus made the seventeenth-century New England town seem highly “traditional,” so much so, indeed, that some historians began to liken them to “peasant” communities. The old assumption that Americans “have been a permanently uprooted and mobile people from the beginning,” yielded to an emphasis on stability and order.4 And in place of the assumption that Americans began anew, improvising in response to the wilderness, appeared the story of the persistence of “English ways” in architecture, crops, and field systems. Moreover, the localism of English landed society would carry over to the colonies; these distinct units of culture were transported across the Atlantic in the minds of people who, in exchanging Europe for America, intended (consciously or not) to recreate familiar ways of doing things.5 Instead of reading the social history of post-Revolutionary America back into colonial times, historians were locating early New England within the context of European rural life.
Some of this revisionism has not stood the test of time, and certain lines of inquiry have proved less fruitful than anticipated. That the emphasis upon stability was overstated would become evident from a careful reappraisal of mobility rates in England and New England.6 Historians in the 1950’s had erred in regarding English society as extremely stable and hierarchical. Ironically, historians of the New England town were committing the same mistake. To characterize these towns as “peasant” societies was useful insofar as the term drew attention to an ethos of communal solidarity and to the nexus of land ownership, inheritance patterns, and family structure. Otherwise the term had little relevance to a society in which land was owned in freehold and where most adult males participated vigorously (or could, if they wished) in wider political, economic, and religious systems. In Bernard Bailyn’s afterword to the essays in Seventeenth-Century New England, he notes that none of them employ the word “frontier.” Nor do any invoke “peasant” culture or society.7 Instead these essays suggest adaptation and flexibility in response to market forces. Another difference between these essays and New England studies of some fifteen years ago is their silence on demography and family structure. We have learned much about these topics, yet the data remains inconsistent, incomplete, or curiously without broad meaning. The editors have therefore preferred other topics. There remains the question of when and with what consequences the colonists were drawn into a market economy. For England itself, the transition may have occurred long before the founding of the colonies.8 Some of the emigrants—certainly the fishermen who formed transient communities along the coast, but also many of the merchants and even, possibly, the farmers who emigrated from particular areas of England—were entrepreneurial in spirit.
The opening series of essays in Seventeenth-Century New England explain the interplay of environment and culture, of land, labor, and capital. Karen Ordahl Kupperman addresses a factor that has long deserved more adequate attention, the climate of early New England. Describing the weather that the colonists experienced, she also tells a story of long held expectations, reluctant adaptation, and realities that darkened the mood of the colonists in the closing decades of the century. Joan Thirsk describes experiments in agriculture and cropping among English farmers from about 1640 to 1750. Her essay reinforces the conclusion, long held by agricultural historians, that pre-industrial farmers lived in a dynamic world and were responsive to new crops, markets, and opportunities created by general economic changes. David Grayson Allen reviews the similarities between seventeenth-century England and New England before exploring local life in four Connecticut towns where the replication of English regional patterns was wider and more striking than has been found in comparable Massachusetts communities. Allen also analyzes several dimensions of New England localism and the degrees to which “English ways” persisted throughout the region’s early history. Daniel Vickers’ study of Essex County fishermen illustrates the cultural gap between the “worldly fishing periphery of New England [and] its settled Puritan core.” According to Vickers, the mainland colonists found it necessary for their economic survival to coexist with non-Puritan outsiders who, like other fishermen scattered along the Atlantic coast, lived in rough-and-tumble communities of their own.
The final essay in this section brings the vantage point of the historical geographer to bear upon the history of settlement in the Northwest Atlantic. Cole Harris describes a process of elimination and recombination in culture and economy as Europeans moved into the wilderness or set about harvesting the abundance of the sea. New relationships among land, labor, and capital, and selective pressures of the environment made it impossible, he argues, to recreate the “complex texture” of European society. His essay is a tale of change, but also of continuities.
The question of Puritanism and its significance is as inescapable as the question of continuity or change. Even more so than in the social history of early New England, the conference coincided with a shift in direction. To place this shift in perspective, we must return to the town studies and especially to Darrett Rutman’s Winthrop's Boston. Rutman was reacting to the work of Perry Miller, who in two magisterial books, The New England Mind: the Seventeenth Century and The New England Mind: From Colony to Province, had described Puritanism as a complex intellectual system. But from Rutman’s point of view Miller had failed to demonstrate that the pronouncements of the ministry expressed in any way the thinking of ordinary citizens. A telling fact for Rutman was the diminishing number of Bostonians who were church members. In place of intellectual and institutional coherence—which was what Rutman took Puritanism to mean—he described a community that was “fragmented almost from the very beginning,” one that improvised a church order and contradicted in practice its ideals of peace and order.9
Suddenly it seemed as though Puritanism was not a powerful factor in the making of New England. In an important study of the merchants who engaged in international trade, Bernard Bailyn had previously argued that this group resented the social norms of the magistrates and ministers, preferring flexibility and the values of the marketplace to any a priori or communal ethics. As the merchants rose, Puritanism waned.10 Was decline and fragmentation the story of New England Puritanism? Even in the agrarian community of Sudbury, the minister was unable to preserve peace when disputes broke out in the 1650’s over the division of the town commons. Farmers seemed more concerned with land and family security than with salvation. When social historians happened to refer to Puritanism, they had in mind not a highly elaborated theological system but an ethic of communal harmony and attitudes toward childrearing, neither of which was unique to the colonists.
The importance of Puritanism was called into question, finally, by new work on popular belief in early modern Europe. As Keith Thomas demonstrated in Religion and the Decline of Magic, ordinary people in seventeenth-century England resorted to all sorts of beliefs that did not square with Protestant Christianity. Indeed these were beliefs that helped such people to meet spiritual and psychological needs that Protestants ignored or tried to force in other channels. Religion and the Decline of Magic seemed to differentiate popular religion from the religion of orthodox and zealous Protestants, and in doing so, opened the way to suggestions that many of the colonists preferred occult or “magical” beliefs to the tenents of the ministers.11
Separately from this turmoil, literary historians and historians of religion were revising Miller’s portrait of New England Puritanism. According to more recent studies, the sermons of the ministers were less concerned with issues of free will and God’s sovereignty than with experiential piety. An emphasis on conversion, and, more broadly, on religion as experience, emerged in Edmund S. Morgan’s Visible Saints: The History of a Puritan Idea and in several other books.12 Patterns of experience became the basis for institutionalized procedures, for Morgan demonstrated that the colonists’ familiarity with conversion underlay their conception of church membership. Another theme that Miller had neglected was the colonists’ expectation that Christ’s kingdom would soon be reestablished. Apocalyptic expectations had surrounded and sustained the migration to New England and the emergence of Congregationalism. Could this apocalypticism be described as “popular religion”? In effect, religion was becoming more inclusive, a matter of ritual, experience, and prophecy as well as of the covenantal relationship between God’s will and man’s. As several of these essays demonstrate, religious motifs in this broad sense penetrated far into the culture of the colonists.
The conference thus took place at a time when the history of New England Puritanism and the history of New England society seemed no longer as divergent. The essays on religion and mentality all take up the task of finding bridges. Lillian B. Miller’s essay on the portrait in seventeenth-century New England takes as its point of the departure the false stereotype that Puritanism was hostile to the art of the portrait. She demonstrates that portrait painting in New England incorporated motifs common to many English portraits of the Tudor-Stuart period; the colonial artist may have been responsive to Puritanism, but he also worked within a broader tradition. Inquiring into the nature of lay Puritanism, Steven Foster describes the emergence of a “militance” in late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century England that had important consequences on both sides of the Atlantic. Foster challenges the story of “declension,” pointing out that in late seventeenth-century New England the ministers implemented new strategies that were effective in sustaining lay commitment. As Foster views it, popular Puritanism was closely linked with the Puritanism of the ministry.
David D. Hall describes a lore of portents and prodigies that was credible to many Europeans and Americans in the seventeenth century. This lore was surely “popular,” as the printing history of such stories indicates, and it circulated in New England via story telling. Yet the ministry was as much involved as were the plain people to whom they preached their sermons. Hall concludes that Puritanism was far more tolerant of folk belief than most historians have assumed, and, like Foster, he disputes the distinction of the religion of the ministers from the religion of the people. Robert St. George takes up the meaning of speech among the colonists, and finds it richly significant. Speech was threatening to these people, and in explicating its dangers, St. George uncovers structures of belief, as in the significance of gender, that owed little or nothing to Puritanism per se. These two essays tell of collective beliefs, a folklore if you will, that was endemic in late medieval culture. In this regard the colonists seem remarkably traditional in their mentality, even though as Puritans they were breaking with the past.
These concluding essays underscore the persistence and power of deeply rooted habits and beliefs. The essays in Seventeenth-Century New England acknowledge change and innovation while placing their main emphasis upon continuity. In arguing for a popular Puritanism, several of these essays help dispell the spectre of a social history without religion; they also make it plain that culture in New England was enriched or inherited from several directions. Many questions remain unanswered. Historians of material culture have mapped several different regions of production within New England. Are these regions meaningfully discrete in other respects? Authority became decentralized in early New England with the rise of the town. Yet most (if not all) of these towns remained parts of some larger whole. What were the patterns that linked these scores of semi-isolated communities? In what ways was rural society in New England responsive to a marketplace that stretched across to Europe? And was there a transition point within the century, a moment when the agrarian economy entered a new phase or when the mechanisms of consensus faltered?
We leave to the curious reader the task of adding to this list of queries and the pleasure of finding answers to them in the pages of Seventeenth-Century New England. It has been a singularly comfortable experience to share with the Editor of Publications for the Colonial Society, Frederick S. Allis, and the Associate Editor, Philip Chadwick Foster Smith, the preparation of this book for publication. We are grateful to Fritz Allis and Sinclair Hitchings for undertaking, with patience and skill, all of the housekeeping tasks associated with the conference of 18 and 19 June 1982. These essays contain little direct trace of the audience to which they were initially presented. Yet in the best tradition of the Colonial Society comments from the floor were informed and argumentative. To all those who, by participating in the discussions, helped enrich our understanding of the past, we offer a final word of thanks.
David D. Hall
David Grayson Allen
1. “New England Begins” opened on 5 May 1982 and closed on 22 August. The rebuilding program at the Museum of Fine Arts was a principal reason why the exhibition did not coincide exactly with the 350th anniversary (1980).
2. Sumner C. Powell, Puritan Village: The Formation of a New England Town (Middletown, Conn., 1963); Darrett B. Rutman, Winthrop's Boston: Portrait of a Puritan Town (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1965); Philip J. Greven, Four Generations: Population, Land, and Family in Colonial Andover, Massachusetts (Ithaca, N.Y., 1970); Kenneth A. Lockridge, A New England Town: The First Hundred Years (New York, 1970).
3. Oscar Handlin, “The Significance of the Seventeenth Century,” in Seventeenth-Century America, ed. James M. Smith (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1959), 3–12.
4. Greven, Four Generations, 268–269; Lockridge, A New England Town, 19–20.
5. The most self-conscious adaptation of “localism” to New England history is David Grayson Allen, In English Ways: The Movement of Societies and the Transferal of English Local Law and Custom to Massachusetts Bay in the Seventeenth Century (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1981).
6. W. R. Prest, “Stability and Change in Old and New England: Clayworth and Dedham,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 6 (1976), 359–374.
7. John W. Adams, “Consensus, Community, and Exoticism,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 12 (1981), 253–265.
8. As Alan Macfarlane speculates in The Origins of English Individualism (Oxford, 1978).
9. Rutman, Winthrop's Boston, viii.
10. Bernard Bailyn, The New England Merchants in the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge, Mass., 1955).
11. Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic (London, 1971).
12. Edmund S. Morgan, Visible Saints: The History of a Puritan Idea (New York, 1963); Charles Hambrick-Stowe, The Practice of Piety: Puritan Devotional Disciplines in Seventeenth-Century New England (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1982).
13. H. H. Lamb, Climate: Present, Past, and Future, 2 vols. (London, 1972, 1977), II, 463; and his The Changing Climate (London, 1966), 11, 65, 144; John Gribbin and H. H. Lamb, “Climatic Change in Historical Times,” in John Gribbin, ed., Climatic Change (Cambridge, 1978), 70–71; Martin L. Parry, Climatic Change, Agriculture, and Settlement (Hamden, Conn., 1978), 38–39, 66, 163–168; Andrew B. Appleby, Famine in Tudor and Stuart England (Stanford, Calif., 1978); and “Epidemics and Famine in the Little Ice Age,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History, X (1979–1980), 645; John D. Post, “Climatic Change and Historical Explanation,” ibid., 296; Gustav Utterstrom, “Climatic Fluctuations and Population Problems in Early Modern History,” Scandinavian Economic History Review, III (1955), 3–47. Professor Lamb sees evidence of severe weather in Asia during the seventeenth century. For a somewhat different interpretation of the evidence for the Little Ice Age, see Emmanuel LeRoy Ladurie, Times of Feast, Times of Famine: A History of Climate Since the Year 1000, trans. Barbara Bray (New York, 1971).
14. There apparently were no thermometers in New England in the seventeenth century, so this reconstruction relies on colonists’ statements and evidence about the weather. All dates have been converted into New Style by the addition of 10 days, so readers can judge such weather events as first and last snowfall or frost by modern standards.
15. Sir Ferdinando Gorges, A briefe Relation of the Discovery and Plantation of New England, 1622, reprinted in James Phinney Baxter, ed., Sir Ferdinando Gorges and His Province of Maine, 3 vols. (New York, 1967 [orig. publ. 1890]), I, 206–207; and A Briefe Narration of the Originall Undertakings of the Advancement of Plantations Into the Parts of America, 1658, ibid., II, 16–17; Raleigh Gilbert, quoted in Samuel Purchas, Hakluytus Posthumus or Purchas His Pilgrimes, 20 vols. (Glasgow, 1906 [orig. publ. 1625]), XIX, 296; Charles Edward Banks, “New Documents Relating to the Popham Expedition, 1607,” American Antiquarian Society, Proceedings, XXXIX (1929), 318, 321, 324, 327, 330, 334; William Strachey, The Historie of Travell into Virginea Britannia, Louis B. Wright and Virginia Freund, eds. (London, 1953), 173; John Smith, The Generall Historie of Virginia, New-England, and the Summer Isles, in Edward Arber and A. G. Bradley, eds., The Travels and Works of Captain John Smith, 2 vols. (Edinburgh, 1910), II, 696; and Rev. William Hubbard, A General History of New England from the Discovery to 1680, 2d ed. (Boston, 1848), 37. See also Richard A. Preston, Gorges of Plymouth Fort (Toronto, 1953), 141–150; David M. Ludlum, Early American Winters, 1604–1820 (Boston, 1966), 6; and Douglas R. McManis, European Impressions of the New England Coast, 1497–1620, University of Chicago Department of Geography, Research Paper No. 139 (Chicago, 1972), 106–108, 137.
16. William Bradford, Of Plymouth Plantation, 1620–1647, ed. Samuel Eliot Morison (New York, 1953), 70–71; Bradford and Edward Winslow, A Relation or Journall of the English Plantation setled at Plimoth in New England (London, 1622), 8–21, 25–30, 62, hereafter referred to by its common name, Mourt's Relation; Nathaniel Morton, New Englands Memoriall (Cambridge, Mass., 1669), 17–21; and William Wood, New Englands Prospect (London, 1634), 4.
17. Bradford, Of Plymouth Plantation, ed. Morison, 131–132; Edward Winslow, Good Newes from New-England (London, 1624), 48–50; and Morton, New Englands Memoriall, 37–39.
18. Wood, New Englands Prospect, 4. Ludlum, Early American Winters, 12, identifies the second of these as the winter of 1629–1630.
19. Wood, New Englands Prospect; John Winthrop, Winthrop's Journal: History of New England, 1630–1649, ed. James Kendall Hosmer, 2 vols. (New York, 1908), I, 55–58; Hubbard, General History of New England, 136, 138; and Thomas Hutchinson, The History of the Colony and Province of Massachusetts-Bay, ed. Lawrence Shaw Mayo, 3 vols. (Cambridge, Mass., 1936 [orig. publ. 1765]), I, 22.
20. Winthrop, History of New England, ed. Hosmer, 95, 98; Edward Johnson, Wonder-Working Providence of Sion's Saviour in New-England (Andover, Mass., 1867 [orig. publ. 1654]), 55, 57–58; Hubbard, General History of New England, 194; and “The Early Records of Charlestown,” in Alexander Young, ed., Chronicles of the First Planters of Massachusetts Bay, 1623–1636 (New York, 1970 [orig. publ. 1846]), 385–386.
21. Winthrop, History of New England, ed. Hosmer, 114, 119, 137–138, 143, 146; and John Winthrop to John Winthrop, Jr., 12 December 1634, in Everett Emerson, ed., Letters from New England: The Massachusetts Bay Colony, 1620–1638 (Amherst, Mass., 1976), 135; Johnson, Wonder-Working Providence, 57–58; and Hubbard, General History of New England, 197–198, 239; John Hull, “Diary,” in American Antiquarian Society, Transactions and Collections, HI (1857), 169.
22. Bradford, Of Plymouth Plantation, ed. Morison, 279–280; Winthrop, History of New England, ed. Hosmer, I, 155–157; Anthony Thacher to Peter Thacher, September 1635, in Emerson, ed., Letters from New England, 169; Richard Mather to William Rathband and Mr. T, 25 June 1636, ibid., 205; Hubbard, General History of New England, 162, 198–201, 239; John Josselyn, An Account of Two Voyages to New England, 2d ed., 1675, in Massachusetts Historical Society, Collections, 3d Ser., III (Boston, 1833), 380; Samuel Danforth, An Almanack (Cambridge, Mass., 1649); and Morton, New Englands Memoriall, 94–95.
23. Winthrop, History of New England, ed. Hosmer, I, 165, 167, 178; Hubbard, General History of New England, 306, 308.
24. Winthrop, History of New England, ed. Hosmer, I, 223.
25. Ibid., 258, 269; John Winthrop to John Winthrop, Jr., 22 January 1638, Winthrop Papers, 5 vols. (Boston, 1929–1947), IV, 10.
26. Winthrop, History of New England, ed. Hosmer, I, 270.
27. Ibid., 270–272, 278–279, 291, 306–307, Bradford, Of Plymouth Plantation, ed. Morison, 303; Danforth, Almanack, 1649; Josselyn, Two Voyages to New England, 227.
28. Johnson, Wonder-Working Providence, 137; John Josselyn, New-Englands Rarities Discovered (London, 1672), 109; and his Two Voyages to New England, 82.
29. Thomas Gorges, The Letters of Thomas Gorges, Deputy Governor of the Province of Maine, 1640–1643, ed. Robert E. Moody (Portland, Maine, 1978), 49, 58, 92, 98, 100–101, 110; Winthrop, History of New England, ed. Hosmer, II, 45, 54–55, 57, 81–82, 90–92; Danforth, Almanack, 1649; Josselyn, Two Voyages to New England, 383; and Johnson, Wonder-Working Providence, 170.
30. Winthrop, History of New England, ed. Hosmer, II, 158.
31. Ibid., 220, 224; and W. DeLoss Love, Jr., The Fast and Thanks giving Days of New England (Boston, 1895), 178, 319.
32. Winthrop, History of New England, ed. Hosmer, II, 263; John Winthrop, Jr., “Overland to Connecticut in 1645: A Travel Diary,” trans. William R. Carlton, New England Quarterly, X (1937), 497, 501–505; and Hubbard, General History of New England, 322.
33. Winthrop, History of New England, ed. Hosmer, II, 264, 277; Danforth, Almanack, 1649; Johnson, Wonder-Working Providence, 214; “Rev. John Eliot’s Records of the First Church in Roxbury, Massachusetts,” New England Historical and Genealogical Register, XXXIII (1879), 65.
34. Winthrop, History of New England, ed. Hosmer, II, 341; Nathaniel B. Shurtleff, ed., Records of the Governor and Company of the Massachusetts Bay in New England, 6 vols, in 5 (Boston, 1853–1854), II, 229–230, 240; Eliot, “Roxbury Church Records,” 65, 237; and Thomas Olcott to John Winthrop, Jr., 8 January 1649, Winthrop Papers, V, 301.
35. Bartholomew Gosnold, “Master Bartholomew Gosnold’s Letter to his Father,” in Purchas, Purchas His Pilgrimes, XVIII, 300–302; Edward Hayes, A Treatise, conteining important inducements for the planting in these parts, and finding a passage that way to the South Sea and China, in John Brereton, A Briefe and true Relation of the Discoverie of the North part of Virginia, 2d ed. (London, 1602), 15; James Rosier, A True Relation of the most prosperous voyage made by Captaine George Waymouth (London, 1605), sig. E2; and John Smith, A Description of New England, 1616, in Arber and Bradley, eds., Travels and Works, I, 198.
36. Winslow, Good Newes, 62. See also Mourt's Relation, 62; Sir Ferdinando Gorges, Briefe Relation, in Baxter, ed., Gorges and His Province, 209; and Christopher Levett, A Voyage into New England (London, 1624), 23, 26.
37. John Smith, Advertisements For the unexperienced Planters of New-England, or any where, in Arber and Bradley, eds., Travels and Works, II, 938; Thomas Morton, New English Canaan, in Peter Force, compiler, Tracts and Other Papers, 4 vols. (Gloucester, Mass., 1963 [orig. publ. 1836]), II, 14, 62; John Winthrop to John Winthrop, Jr., 23 July 1630, in Emerson, ed., Letters from New England, 50–51; and to Sir Nathaniel Rich, 22 May 1634, ibid., 116; Hubbard, General History of New England, 20; and Gorges, Letters of Thomas Gorges, ed. Moody, 47. The American climate and its interpretation in the early period is discussed for all the colonies in Karen Ordahl Kupperman, “The Puzzle of the American Climate in the Early Colonial Period,” American Historical Review, LXXXIX (1982), 1262–1289.
38. Wood, New Englands Prospect, 4.
39. Ibid., 3–8; Francis Higginson, New Englands Plantation, 1630, in Force, compiler, Tracts, I, 10–12.
40. Gorges, Letters of Thomas Gorges, Moody ed., 87, 114; Thomas Lechford, Plain Dealing: or, Newes from New-England (London, 1642), 114; Edmund Browne to Sir Simonds D’Ewes, 7 September 1638, in Emerson, ed., Letters from New England, 228. See also Josselyn, Two Voyages to New England, 247–249; Morton, New Englands Memoriall, 13; and Edward Ward, A Trip to New England (London, 1699), 48–49.
41. Gorges, Letters of Thomas Gorges, ed. Moody, 100–101, 112, 114; Winthrop, History of New England, ed. Hosmer, I, 138; and his letter to Sir Nathaniel Rich, in Emerson, ed., Letters from New England, 116; and Smith, Advertisements For the unexperienced Planters of New-England, or any where, in Arber and Bradley, eds., Travels and Works, II, 949.
42. Smith, Advertisements For the unexperienced Planters of New-England, or any where, in Arber and Bradley, eds., Travels and Works, II, 952–953; and John White, The Planters Plea, 1630, in Force, compiler, Tracts, II, 16.
43. Philip Vincent, A True Relation of the Late Battel fought in New England, between the English, and the Salvages (London, 1637), 19; Higginson, New Englands Plantation, in Force, compiler, Tracts, I, 11; White, Planters Plea, ibid., II, 16; Smith, Advertisements For the unexperienced Planters of New-England, or any where, in Arber and Bradley, eds., Travels and Works, II, 952–953.
44. John Eliot to Sir Simonds D’Ewes, 18 September 1633, in Emerson, ed., Letters from New England, 106. In fact, because of poor construction and wide flues in their chimneys, the colonists’ houses were cold; Charles F. Carroll, The Timber Economy of Colonial New England (Providence, R.I., 1974), 65.
45. Hubbard, General History of New England, 20–21; Smith, Advertisements For the unexperienced Planters of New-England, or any where, in Arber and Bradley, eds., Travels and Works, II, 952; Brereton, Briefe and true Relation, 11; Rosier, True Relation, sig. E2; Higginson, New Englands Plantation, in Force, compiler, Tracts, I, 9; White, Planters Plea, ibid., II, 13; Letters of Thomas Gorges, ed. Moody, 47, 110; Thomas Welde to his former parishioners at Tarling [Terling], June–July 1632, in Emerson, ed., Letters from New England, 96; Thomas Graves, “A Letter sent from New-England by Master Graves, Engineer, now there resident,” 1630, in Young, ed., Chronicles of Massachusetts Bay Planters, 265–266; and Wood, New Englands Prospect, 5–6. See Wood’s description of what the heat of Virginia was doing to the constitutions of English settlers there, ibid., 8–9. On beliefs about the effect of climate on the human constitution, see Sir William Vaughan, The Newlanders Cure (London, 1630), 6; Clarence Glacken, Traces on the Rhodian Shore: Nature and Culture in Western Thought from Ancient Times to the End of the Eighteenth Century (Berkeley, Calif, 1967), 12, 449–450; and John K. Wright, The Geographical Lore of the Time of the Crusades (New York, 1925), 180.
46. Hubbard, General History of New England, 20–21.
47. See White, Planters Plea, in Force, compiler, Tracts, II, 13; and Johnson, Wonder-Working Providence, 84, for criticism of the taste of maize. John Winthrop noted in 1630 that a cow and a goat were said to have died of eating Indian corn. History of New England, ed. Hosmer, I, 54.
48. John Gerard, The Herball or Generall Historie of Plantes, enlarged and amended by Thomas Johnson (London, 1636), 82; John Parkinson, Theatrum Botanicum: the Theater of Plants. Or, An Herball of Large Extent (London, 1640), 1138–1139; John Winthrop, Jr., “Of Maiz,” ed. Fulmer Mood, New England Quarterly, X (1937), 125.
49. Winslow, Good Newes, 62–63; Mourt's Relation, 60–61; Wood, New Englands Prospect, 7; Johnson, Wonder-Working Providence, 57; Josselyn, Two Voyages to New England, 249; Gerard, Herball, 82.
50. Winthrop, “Of Maiz,” 125–126.
51. On the wholesomeness, usefulness, and great increase of maize, see ibid., 131–132; Winslow, Good Newes, 62–63; Mourt's Relation, 41, 64; Higginson, New Englands Plantation, in Force, compiler, Tracts, I, 6–7; John Winthrop to Margaret Winthrop, 29 November 1630, in Emerson, ed., Letters from New England, 61; Welde to his former parishioners at Tarling, ibid., 227; Edmund Browne to Sir Simonds D’Ewes, ibid., 232; and Josselyn, New Englands Rarities Discovered, 52–53. On the need to look at the natural products, see Graves, “Letter sent from New-England” in Young, ed., Chronicles of Massachusetts Bay Planters, 265; White, Planters Plea, in Force, compiler, Tracts, II, 13; and Johnson, Wonder-Working Providence, 56.
52. Gabriel Archer, The Relation of Captaine Gosnols Voyage to the North part of Virginia, in Purchas, Purchas His Pilgrimes, XVIII, 308; and Brereton, Briefe and true Relation, 6–7.
53. Martin Pring, A Voyage set out from the Citie of Bristoll, in Purchas, Purchas His Pilgrimes, XVIII, 327.
54. Rosier, True Relation, sig. B2.
55. Samuel Maverick, A Briefe Discription of New England, circa 1660 (Boston, 1885), 7.
56. Mourt's Relation, 60–61; Winslow, Good Newes, 62–63. See also John Smith, New Englands Trials, 1620, in Arber and Bradley, eds., Travels and Works, I, 264; and Gorges, Briefe Relation, in Baxter, ed., Gorges and His Province of Maine, I, 229, for an example of contemporary thinking on the subject.
57. Morton, New English Canaan, in Force, compiler, Tracts, II, 46, and Book II generally; White, Planters Plea, 13–14; Higginson, New Englands Plantation, I, 8; Wood, New Englands Prospect, 9–11, 21; Vincent, True Relation, 19; John Underhill, Newes from America (London, 1638), 21; Graves, “Letter sent from New-England,” in Young, ed., Chronicles of Massachusetts Bay Planters, 265; and Welde to his former parishioners at Tarling, in Emerson, ed., Letters from New England, 96. One dissenter from this picture of abundance and fecundity was Thomas Gorges in Maine, who said that cows gave only half as much milk in America as they did in England. Gorges, Letters of Thomas Gorges, ed. Moody, 101–102.
58. Massachusetts Bay Company, “The Company’s First General Letter of Instructions to Endicott and his Council,” 1629, in Young, ed., Chronicles of Massachusetts Bay Planters, 156; and Records of Massachusetts Bay, I, 24–25. Turkeys had been brought from Mexico to Europe in the second decade of the sixteenth century and were plentiful in Norfolk by the end of the century. The Agrarian History of England and Wales, TV, 1500–1640, ed. Joan Thirsk (Cambridge, 1967), 194.
59. Edward Trelawney to Robert Trelawney, 10 October 1635, in Emerson, ed., Letters from New England, 175.
60. Josselyn, Two Voyages to New England, 336; and New Englands Rarities Discovered, 89–91; Wood, New Englands Prospect, 13–14; Graves, “Letter sent from New-England,” in Young, ed., Chronicles of Massachusetts Bay Planters, 265; Samuel Clarke, A True, and Faithful Account of the Four Chiefest Plantations of the English in America (London, 1670), typed ms, Widener Library, Harvard University, 27; Hubbard, General History of New England, 671–672; William Hammond to Sir Simonds D’Ewes, 26 September 1633, in Emerson, ed., Letters from New England, 112; John Winthrop to Sir Nathaniel Rich, ibid., 116; Higginson, New Englands Plantation, in Force, compiler, Tracts, I, 7. Thomas Lechford agreed that oats and rye thrived, but said barley did poorly. Plain Dealing, 109. See Howard S. Russell, A Long, Deep Furrow: Three Centuries of Farming in New England (Hanover, N.H., 1976), 39–45, for a complete discussion of early planting.
61. Wonder-Working Providence, 62. He may have been mistaken about the grain; see Russell, Long, Deep Furrow, 40–41.
62. Massachusetts Bay Records, I, 358–359.
63. Wood, New Englands Prospect, 7; Hubbard, General History of New England, 23; Darrett Rutman, Husbandmen of Plymouth: Farms and Villages in the Old Colony, 1620–1692 (Boston, 1967), 50–52.
64. Russell, Long, Deep Furrow, 134–136. See Thomas Minor, The Diary of Thomas Minor of Stonington, Connecticut, 1653–1684, Sidney H. Miner and George D. Stanton, Jr., eds. (New London, Conn., 1899) for the annual round of planting and harvesting, including the fall and spring sowing.
65. Brereton, Briefe and true Relation, 7–8; Smith, Description of New England, in Arber and Bradley, eds., Travels and Works, I, 197; Hubbard, General History of New England, 671; Vincent, True Relation, sig. B; Graves, “Letter sent from New England,” in Young, ed., Chronicles of Massachusetts Bay Planters, 265; Charles Webster, The Great Instauration: Science, Medicine and Reform, 1626–1660 (London, 1975), 2, 8, 16; and Cecelia Tichi, New World, New Earth: Environmental Reform in American Literature from the Puritans through Whitman (New Haven, Conn., 1979), 54–62.
66. Vincent, True Relation, sig. A4; Richard Whitbourne, A Discourse and Discovery of New-found-land (London, 1620), 57; John Mason, A Briefe Discourse of the Newfound, land. (Edinburgh, 1620), sig. B2V.
67. Wood, New Englands Prospect, 7–9, 84; Johnson, Wonder-Working Providence, 55, 120, 171; Hubbard, General History of New England, 20. For a vivid description of Johnson’s technological vision, see Tichi, New World, New Earth, 54–62, and Alan Heimert, “Puritanism, the Wilderness, and the Frontier,” New England Quarterly, XXVI (1953), 368–369. On the actual effect of agriculture and forest clearance on local climate, see Lamb, Climate: Present, Past and Future, I, 7, 50; Crispin Tickell, Climatic Change and World Affairs (Cambridge, Mass., 1977), 26; John E. Oliver, Climate and Man's Environment: An Introduction to Applied Climatology (New York, 1973). 164–168; and Alexander T. Wilson, “Isotope Evidence from Past Climatic and Environmental Change,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History, X (1979–1980), 810–812; William Cronon, Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists and the Ecology of New England (New York, 1983).
68. John Hull, “Diary,” American Antiquarian Society, Transactions and Collections, III (1857), 177, 179, 183. Ludlum, Early American Winters, 15, says the winter of 1656–1657 was severe, but gives no citation.
69. Hull, “Diary,” 184; Hubbard, General History of New England, 647, 654; Samuel Danforth, “Records of the First Church in Roxbury, Massachusetts,” New England Historical and Genealogical Register, XXXIV (1880), 87.
70. Hull, “Diary,” 175–178, 190, 197, 199, 200–203, 206, 207; Thomas Minor, Diary, 54; Michael Wigglesworth, “God’s Controversy with New England,” Massachusetts Historical Society, Proceedings, 1st Ser., XII (1871–1873), 83; Danforth, “Roxbury Church Records,” 87–88.
71. Hull, “Diary,” 208–210, 213; Hubbard, General History of New England, 642; Morton, New Englands Memorial, 172–173; Danforth, “Roxbury Church Records,” 88.
72. Hull, “Diary,” 211, 215; 220–221; Danforth, “Roxbury Church Records,” 163–165; Morton, New Englands Memorial, 177, 180; Hubbard, General History of New England, 642; Love, Fast and Thanksgiving Days, 179.
73. Hull, “Diary,” 223, 225–226, 228, 230; Minor, Diary, 76–78, 88–89, 92–95; Danforth, “Roxbury Church Records,” 298–301; Simon Bradstreet, “Memoires,” New England Historical and Genealogical Register, IX (1855), 44–45; and J.Hammond Trumbull, ed., The Public Records of the Colony of Connecticut, from 1665 to 1678 (Hartford, 1852), 89–90.
74. Hull, “Diary,” 230, 232, 234–235, 237; Danforth, “Roxbury Church Records,” 301, 360–363; Hubbard, General History of New England, 648; Rev. William Adams of Dedham, Massachusetts, “Diary,” Massachusetts Historical Society, Collections, 4th Ser., I (1852), 12; Edward Taylor, “Diary,” in John H. Lockwood, Westfield and Its Historic Influences, 1669–1910 (Springfield, Mass., 1922), I, 134–135.
75. Hull, “Diary,” 239–241; Increase Mather, “Diaries,” Massachusetts Historical Society, Proceedings, 2d Ser., XIII (1900), 343, 399.
76. Hull, “Diary,” 240–241; Thomas Minor, Diary, 131; Bradstreet, “Memoires,” 47–48; Increase Mather, “Diaries,” 402; and Peter Easton, “Diary,” Rhode Island His torical Society, Collections, XI (1918), 78–80; Benjamin Church, Diary of King Philip's War, 1675–76, ed. Alan and Mary Simpson (Chester, Conn., 1975), 95, 100–102.
77. Hull, “Diary,” 243; Thomas Minor, Diary, 146, 152, 154; Peter Thatcher, of Milton, Massachusetts, Diary, 1678–99, 10–14, 16–17, (microfilm of typescript), Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston.
78. Josselyn, Two Voyages to New England, 336; Robert Hooke, “Method for Making a History of the Weather,” 1663, in Thomas Sprat, History of the Royal Society of London, For the Improving of Natural Knowledge (London, 1667), 175.
79. Peter N. Carroll, Puritanism and the Wilderness: The Intellectual Significance of the New England Frontier, 1629–1700 (New York, 1969); Ann Leighton, Early American Gardens: For Meate or Medicine (Boston, 1970), 180; Heimert, “Puritanism, Wilderness, and Frontier,” 370–371.
80. For the howling wilderness image, see Johnson, Wonder-Working Providence, sig. A2, 18, 19, 23, 59, 81, 84, 104, 191, 209–210; Morton, New Englands Memorial, 13, 14, 83; Hubbard, General History of New England, 52; “Early Records of Charlestown,” in Young, ed., Chronicles of Massachusetts Bay Planters, 375; Michael Wigglesworth, “Autobiography,” New England Historical and Genealogical Register, XVII (1863), 137; and his “God’s Controversy with New England,” Massachusetts Historical Society, Proceedings, 1st Ser., XII (1871–1873), 83–84; Increase Mather, A Brief Relation of the State of New England (London, 1689), 3–4, 12; and his “To the Reader,” in Samuel Torrey, An Exhortation Unto Reformation (Cambridge, Mass., 1674), sig. A2; Thomas Shepard, Eye-Salve: Or, A Watchword from our Lord Jesus Christ unto his Church (Cambridge, Mass., 1673), 11; “Petition from the Town of Northampton to the General Court, April 19, 1665,” reprinted in James Russell Trumbull, History of Northampton, Massachusetts from its Settlement in 1654 (Northampton, Mass., 1898), I, 156–157; John Higginson, The Cause of God and His People in New England (Cambridge, Mass., 1663), 10–11.
81. Increase Mather, “Diaries,” 409; M. Halsey Thomas, ed., Diary of Samuel Sewall, 1674–1729, 2 vols. (New York, 1973), I, 47, 49. Mather stated that 1680 was the worst year ever for the wheat blast in Connecticut, noting that hundreds of acres did not yield enough to feed one family. Mather, “Diaries,” 408.
82. Hooke, “Method for a History of the Weather,” in Sprat, History of the Royal Society, 173–179; Robert Boyle, “General Heads for a Natural History of a Countrey, Great or small,” Philosophical Transactions, I (London, 1665–1666), 186–189.
83. Raymond P. Stearns, Science in the British Colonies of America (Urbana, Ill., 1970), Chaps. 5, 10; John Winthrop to John Winthrop, Jr., Emerson, ed., Letters from New England, 135–136.
84. Pike, “Observable Seasons,” New Hampshire Historical Society, Collections, III (1832), 62–67.
85. See David D. Hall, “Puritanism and Popular Religion in Seventeenth-Century New England,” paper delivered to the Organization of American Historians, San Francisco, April 1980.
86. John Calvin, A Commentarie of John Calvine, upon the first booke of Moses called Genesis, trans. Thomas Tymme (London, 1578), 114.
87. Johnson, Wonder-Working Providence, 220; John Tulley, An Almanack (Cambridge, Mass., 1692).
88. Winthrop, History of New England, ed. Hosmer, I, 306–307; II, 81–82, 224; Sewall, Diary, ed. Thomas, I, 166–168; John Marshall, “Diary, 1697–1711,” Massachusetts Historical Society, Proceedings, 2d Ser., I (1884–1885), 150–151, 155; XIV (1900–1901), 32; Cotton Mather, Diary of Cotton Mather, ed. Worthington C. Ford, Massachusetts Historical Society, Collections, 7th Ser., VII (1911), 165–166; Love, Fast and Thanksgiving Days. Hull, “Diary,” 185, gives an example in which the ritual was not answered.
89. Danforth, “Roxbury Church Records,” New England Historical and Genealogical Register, XXXIV (1880), 88. A providential shower of rain helped English soldiers in King Philip’s War. Captain Thomas Wheeler, A True Narrative of the Lord's Providences in Various Dispensations Towards Captain Edward Hutchinson of Boston and my self, And those that went with us into the Nipmuck Country, 1675 (Boston, n.d.), Old South Leaflets, No. 155.
90. Johnson, Wonder-Working Providence, 57 (emphasis added); Bradford, Of Plymouth Plantation, ed. Morison, 131; New Englands First Fruits (London, 1643), 4–5; Hubbard, General History of New England, 74, 650.
91. Johnson, Wonder-Working Providence, 55, 120, 170–171.
92. Hubbard, General History of New England, 662; Morton, New Englands Memorial, 172–173, 177, 180; Winthrop, History of New England, ed. Hosmer, II, 277; Eliot, “Roxbury Church Records,” 65; Danforth, “Roxbury Church Records,” 163, 165; Noadiah Russell, Diary of the Reverend Noadiah Russell of Ipswich, Massachusetts, and Middletown, Connecticut, For the Old Style Year 1687 (Hartford, Conn., 1934), 9.
93. Bradstreet, “Memoires,” 43, 44, 46–47, 50; Experience Mayhew, Indian Converts (London, 1727), 1–5; Samuel Clough, The New-England Almanack (Boston, 1701); Josselyn, New Englands Rarities, 113; and his Two Voyages to New England, 388–389; Russell, Diary, 7–8; Morton, New Englands Memorial, 159, 177–179; Hubbard, General History of New England, 384, 627–628, 642, 656; Danforth, “Roxbury Church Records,” 163, 165–166, 361.
94. Sewall, Diary, ed. Thomas, I, 330. See also Cotton Mather, Magnalia Christi Americana, ed. Thomas Robbins, 2 vols. (Hartford, Conn., 1853), II, 361–372.
95. Clough, New-England Almanack (Boston, 1703); John Tulley, An Almanac (Boston, 1693), sig. C; Bradstreet, “Memoires,” 43–44, 50; Increase Mather, “Diaries,” 408–409; his Heaven's Alarm to the World (Boston, 1681); and his Kometographia. Or A Discourse Concerning Comets (Boston, 1683), passim, especially 20; Cotton Mather, Magnalia, ed. Robbins, and his The Boston Ephemeris: An Almanack (Boston, 1683); Josselyn, Two Voyages to New England, 245, 387; J.F., Perpetuall and Naturall Prognostications of the Change of Weather (London, 1591), sig. C3V–C4V; Adams, “Diary,” 12; Morton, New Englands Memorial, 23, 90–91, 95, 161–163, 170–173, 182, Hubbard, General History of New England, 51, 324–325, 339, 420–425, 427, 516–517, 642–648. See Perry Miller, The New England Mind: From Colony to Province (Boston, 1961), 142–146, 180, 438; and Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic: Studies in Popular Beliefs in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century England (Harmondsworth, England, 1973), especially Chapter 4.
96. Increase Mather, “Diaries,” 409; Bradstreet, “Memoires,” 50; Hull, “Diary,” 249; Sewall, Diary, ed. Thomas, I, 55; Thomas Minor, Diary, 17, 183; John Pike, “Journal, 1682–1709,” Massachusetts Historical Society, Proceedings, 1st Ser., XIV (1875–1876), 122–123; William Vaughan, “A Letter from William V., Esq., containing a Journal of Transactions during his Imprisonment, etc., to Nathaniel Weare, Agent in London,” in George E. Hodgdon, Reminiscences and Genealogical Record of the Vaughan Family of New Hampshire (Rochester, N.Y., 1918), Appendix I, 88.
97. Sewall, Diary, ed. Thomas, I, 90–95; Increase Mather, “Diaries,” 410; Clough, New-England Almanack, 1701.
98. Sewall, Diary, ed. Thomas, I, 155, 166, 266, 272, 285–286, 293, 297, 304–306, 311–312, 316–317, 326–330; Pike, “Observable Seasons,” 63–64; Cotton Mather, Diary, ed. Ford, 166; Russell, Diary, 6–8.
99. Cotton Mather, Diary, ed. Ford, 191–193; Samuel Clough, New-England Almanack, 1701, and his Kalendarium Nov-Anglicanum, or an Almanack of the Coelestial Motions (Boston, 1705); Sewall, Diary, ed. Thomas, I, 348; Pike, “Observable Seasons,” 64.
100. Hutchinson, History of Massachusetts-Bay, ed. Mayo, II, 76n.; Mather, Diary, ed. Ford, 216.
101. Hutchinson, History of Massachusetts-Bay, ed. Mayo, II, 76n.; Sewall, Diary, ed. Thomas, I, 369–382; Manasseh Minor, The Diary of Manasseh Minor, Stonington, Conn., 1696–1720 (n.p., 1915), 21–23; Clough, New-England Almanack, 1701; Daniel Travis, An Almanack (Boston, 1721); Marshall, “Diary,” Massachusetts Historical Society, Proceedings, 2d Ser., I (1884–1885), 150–152 and XIV (1900–1901), 32.
102. Earl of Bellomont in E. B. O’Callaghan, ed., Documents Relative to the Colonial History of the State of New York (Albany, 1854), IV, 409; Peter Kalm, Peter Kalm's Travels in North America, ed. Adolph B. Benson, 2 vols. (New York, 1937 [orig. publ. 1750, trans. 1770]), I, 277; Manasseh Minor, Diary, 26–28.
103. For descriptions of this year’s weather, see Sewall, Diary, ed. Thomas, I, 384–390, 393–394, 396–397; Marshall, “Diary,” Massachusetts Historical Society, Proceedings, I, 152; Clough, New-England Almanack, 1701; Pike, “Observable Seasons,” and “Journal,” 132–133; Cotton Mather, Diary, ed. Ford, 247; William Brattle, “Records of the First Church, Cambridge,” The Genealogical Magazine, I (1906), 359; Manasseh Minor, Diary, 26–28.
104. Sewall, Diary, ed. Thomas, I, 417–418, 419, 421–425, 427–428; Brattle, “Cambridge Church Records,” 360; Cotton Mather, Diary, ed. Ford, 334; Richard Brown, “Diary,” in Joshua Coffin, A Sketch of the History of Newbury, Newburyport, and West Newbury, from 1635 to 1845 (Boston, 1845), 167.
105. Gorden Manley, “Central England Temperatures: Monthly Means, 1659–1973,” Quarterly Journal of the Royal Meteorological Society, C (1974), 389–405. See also Thompson Webb, III, “The Reconstruction of Climatic Sequences from Botanical Data,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History, X (1979–1980), 749–772. Susan Swan has found some evidence of Little Ice Age patterns in colonial Mexico. “Mexico in the Little Ice Age,” ibid., XI (1980–1981), 633–648.
106. William Hubbard, The History of the Indian Wars in New England, 1677, 1685, ed. Samuel G. Drake, 2 vols. (New York, 1971 [orig. publ. 1865]), II, 256–257; Increase Mather, The History of King Philip's War, ed. Samuel G. Drake, (Boston, 1862), 47; Carroll, Puritanism and the Wilderness, Chapter 10.
107. Cotton Mather, The Present state of New-England (Boston, 1690), 28–29. Mather reprinted the proclamation of the General Court. Ibid., 47–49.
108. Sacvan Bercovitch, American Jeremiad, 81.
109. Edmund S. Morgan, “The American Indian: Incorrigible Individualist,” in his The Mirror of the Indian (Providence, 1958); Richard R. Johnson, “The Search for a Usable Indian: An Aspect of the Defense of Colonial New England,” Journal of American History, LXIV (1977), 623–651, especially 643.
110. Increase Mather, Heaven's Alarm, 13; Cotton Mather, Magnalia, ed. Robbins, II, 336; Bercovitch, American Jeremiad, 76–77, 84–85.
111. Robert G. Pope, “New England vs. the New England Mind: The Myth of Declension,” in Alden T. Vaughan and Francis J. Bremer, eds., Puritan New England: Essays on Religion, Society, and Culture (New York, 1977), 318, 321; David Thomas Konig, Law and Society in Puritan Massachusetts: Essex County, 1620–1692 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1979), 158, 168.
112. T. H. Breen, “War, Taxes, and Political Brokers: The Ordeal of Massachusetts Bay, 1675–1692,” in his Puritans and Adventurers: Change and Persistence in Early America (New York, 1980); Richard L. Bowen, “The 1690 Tax Revolt of Plymouth County Towns,” New England Historical and Genealogical Register, CXII (1958), 4–14; Johnson, “Usable Indian,” 625–626; James Axtell, The European and the Indian: Essays in the Ethnohistory of Colonial North America (New York, 1981), 314–315.
113. Bercovitch, American Jeremiad, 88–89.
114. David Grayson Allen, In English Ways: The Movement of Societies and the Transferal of English Local Law and Custom to Massachusetts Bay in the Seventeenth Century (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1981), 228–229; Carroll, Timber Economy, 93.
115. Kenneth L. Lockridge, “The Population of Dedham, Massachusetts, 1636–1736,” Economic History Review, 2d Ser., XIX, (1966), 327–328; Susan L. Norton, “Population Growth in Colonial America: A Study of Ipswich, Massachusetts,” Population Studies, XXV, (1971), 435; Terry L. Anderson and Robert Paul Thomas, “White Population, Labor Force and Extensive Growth of the New England Economy in the Seventeenth Century.” Journal of Economic History, XXXIII (1973), 634–667; and Gary M. Walton and James H. Shepherd, The Economic Rise of Early America (Cambridge, 1979), 51–52.
116. Clough, New-England Almanack, 1701. For comparative prices, see Pike, “Journal,” 117–118; Records of the Towne Meetings of Lyn, 1691–1701/2 (Lynn, Mass., 1949), 29, 39, 44, 52, 73–74; Records of Massachusetts Bay, II, 12, 27, 181, 254, 286; Nathaniel B. Shurtleff, ed., Records of the Colony of New Plymouth in New England, Miscellaneous Records, 1633–1689 (Boston, 1857), 123, 125, 131, 134, 138, 142, 144, 146, 153, 156–157; John Graves, “Diary,” ed. Annie Kelsey Maher, The Connecticut Magazine, X (1906), 18–22; Hubbard, General History of New England, 246; Darrett B. Rutman, “Governor Winthrop’s Garden Crop: The Significance of Agriculture in the Early Commerce of Massachusetts Bay,” in Vaughan and Bremer, eds., Puritan New England, 160, 162; William B. Weeden, Economic and Social History of New England, 1620–1789 (New York, 1963 [orig. publ. 1890]), II, Appendix A. Dearth conditions may have partly motivated the attempt on the part of the Boston selectmen and the legislature to erect a controlled public market in 1696. See Gary B. Nash, The Urban Crucible: Social Change, Political Consciousness, and the Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge, Mass., 1979), 130–131; G. B. Warden, Boston, 1689–1776 (Boston, 1970), 53–54; Karen J. Friedmann, “Victualling Colonial Boston,” Agricultural History, XLVII (1973), 189–205.
117. Cotton Mather, Diary, ed. Ford, 191–193.
118. Hutchinson, History of Massachusetts-Bay, ed. Mayo, II, 76n.; Sewall, Diary, ed. Thomas, I, 374–375.
119. Sewall, Diary, ed. Thomas, I, 358–359, 389–390, 393–394; Clough, New-England Almanack, 1701; Brattle, “Records of First Church, Cambridge,” 359.
120. Sewall, Diary, ed. Thomas, I, 440–441.
121. For the detailed evidence, see Joan Thirsk, ed., The Agrarian History of England and Wales, V, 1640–1750 (Cambridge, 1984), chapters 13 and 16.
122. E. A. Wrigley and R. S. Schofield, The Population History of England, 1541–1871: A Reconstruction (London, 1981), 175.
123. Bamaby Googe, Foure Bookes of Husbandry (London, 1577), 67.
124. Thirsk, ed., Agrarian History of England and Wales, V, chapter 19.
125. C. W. Chalklin, Seventeenth-Century Kent (London, 1965), 13–14; H. C. Darby, The Draining of the Fens, 2d ed. (Cambridge, 1968), 13ff.
126. (London, 1607), 205.
127. Ibid., 185, 204, 207–209.
128. Public Record Office, London, C24/498/22. For a general account of the tobacco-growing venture, see Joan Thirsk, “New Crops and their Diffusion: Tobacco-Growing in Seventeenth-Century England,” in C.W. Chalklin and M.A. Havinden, eds., Rural Change and Urban Growth, 1500–1800 (London, 1974), 76–103.
129. J. H. Bettey, “The Cultivation of Woad in the Salisbury Area during the Late Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries,” Textile History, DC (1978), 113–115; Joan Thirsk, Economic Policy and Projects: The Development of a Consumer Society in Early Modern England (Oxford, 1978), 86–87; Calendar of State Papers, Domestic, 1581–1590 (London, 1865), 532.
130. Thirsk, ed., Agrarian History of England and Wales, V, chapters 16 and 19.
131. Robert Reyce, Suffolk in the XVIIth Century: The Breviary of Suffolk by Robert Reyce, 1618; Now Published for the First Time from the MS. in the British Museum, with Notes by Lord Francis Hervey (London, 1902), 31–33, as cited in Joan Thirsk and J. P. Cooper, eds., Seventeenth-Century Economic Documents (Oxford, 1972), 335–336.
132. Esther Moir, “Benedict Webb, Clothier,” Economic History Review, 2d Ser., X (1957), 262–263; Thirsk and Cooper, eds., Seventeenth-Century Economic Documents, 220–221.
133. John Worlidge, Systema Agriculturœ; The Mystery of Husbandry Discovered (London, 1675), 26.
134. See, for example, the Wiltshire return in Public Record Office, London, E163/15/1.
135. Thirsk, Economic Policy and Projects, 71–72.
136. Thirsk, ed., Agrarian History of England and Wales, V, chapter 19.
137. Ibid.
138. Ibid.; Thirsk and Cooper, eds., Seventeenth-Century Economic Documents, 86; K. W. G. Goodman, “Hammerman’s Hill: The Land, People, and Industry of the Titterstone Clee Hill Area of Shropshire from the Sixteenth to the Eighteenth Centuries” (D.Phil, thesis, University of Keele, 1978), 175.
139. See Public Record Office, London, E134, 34 Charles II, Easter 9.
140. Thirsk and Cooper, eds., Seventeenth-Century Economic Documents, 179.
141. James Colville, ed., Letters of John Cockburn of Ormistoun to his Gardener, 1727–1744, Scottish History Society, Publications, XXV (Edinburgh, 1904), passim.
142. Thirsk, ed., Agrarian History of England and Wales, V, chapters 11 and 18.
143. John Sheail, “Rabbits and Agriculture in Post-Medieval England,” Journal of Historical Geography, IV (1978), 351–354.
144. D. A. Baker, "Agricultural Prices, Production, and Marketing with Special Reference to the Hop Industry: North-East Kent, 1680–1760" Ph.D. thesis, University of Kent, 1976), Part II, 536 ff., but especially 567–570.
145. Susan M. Kingsbury, ed., Records of the Virginia Company of London, 4 vols. (Washington, D.C., 1906–1935), III, 1607–1622 (1933), 109, 394, and also I, 1619–1622 (1906), 258; Samuel Hartlib, Samuel Hartlib his Legacie: Or An Enlargement of the Discourse of Husbandry Used in Brabant & Flaunders, 2d ed. (London, 1652), 17 ff. and Appendix.
146. Carl Bridenbaugh, “The Old and New Societies of the Delaware Valley in the Seventeenth Century,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, C (1976), 162.
147. For examples of this language, see John Winthrop, The History of New England from 1630 to 1649 … , ed. James Savage, 2d ed., 2 vols. (Boston, 1853), II, 91, 378; J. Franklin Jameson, ed., [Edward] Johnson's Wonder-Working Providence, 1628–1651, Original Narratives of Early American History (New York, 1910), 210, which is echoed later in the century by William Hubbard in A General History of New England from the Discovery to MDCLXXX, Massachusetts Historical Society, Collections, 2d Ser., V–VI (Boston, 1848 [orig. publ. Boston, 1815]), 541. Other commentators, such as Samuel Maverick, were equally guilty in failing to discuss perceptively New England in light of old England even though he and other writers wrote detailed descriptions of New England localities (“A Briefe Diescription of New England and the Severall Townes Therein, Together with the Present Government Thereof,” Massachusetts Historical Society, Proceedings, 2d Ser., I [1884–1885], 231–249).
148. For population estimates, see Joan Thirsk, Economic Policy and Projects: The Development of a Consumer Society in Early Modern England (Oxford, 1978), 159 and sources cited; and Terry L. Anderson and Robert Paul Thomas, “White Population, Labor Force and Extensive Growth of the New England Economy in the Seventeenth Century,” Journal of Economic History, XXXIII (1973), 655–657. Many of the points in this paragraph are discussed in other connections by David Grayson Allen, In English Ways: The Movement of Societies and the Transferal of English Local Law and Custom to Massachusetts Bay in the Seventeenth Century (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1981), passim.
149. Thirsk, Economic Policy and Projects; Alan Everitt, “The Marketing of Agricultural Produce,” in The Agrarian History of England and Wales, IV, 1500–1640, ed. Joan Thirsk (Cambridge, 1967), 466–592. While English villagers operated upon localistic premises, such as what to grow for the nearby agricultural market, it is not clear whether they were consciously aware of similarities in nearby communities or of regional or subregional economies. Thus, what may have been localism to them might be more aptly described as having a wider geographic basis than the single locality.
150. Keith Wrightson and David Levine, Poverty and Piety in an English Village: Terling, 1525–1700 (New York, 1979), especially Chapter 1, “The National Context,” 2, and 1–18 passim.
151. This world of 17th-century England and New England, expressed in similar language in my In English Ways, has been vigorously criticized by David Thomas Konig (review, American Journal of Legal History, XXVI [1982], 264–268) who argues that my interpretation of English local life is based upon “questionable (or outdated) assumptions,” is filled with “statistics of dubious use” regarding wealth and wealth distribution in old and New England, misguidedly discusses local “traits,” and “grossly” misuses a quotation about the judicial prerogatives that some New England selectmen took upon themselves.
Konig’s first argument should be placed in light of the preceeding textual discussion as well as many parts of In English Ways that he ignores, such as what I have to say about county-local conditions in Norfolk (pp. 70–71). He criticizes me in that instance for not using A. Hassel Smith’s book-length study of Norfolk, which in fact I had read though only citing in my text his more pertinent article on Norfolk J.P.’s. Smith’s book adds very little about conditions in pre-migration Hingham to the many other local sources that I used.
Concerning my dubious statistics, Konig insists that I used glebe terriers to make comparisons of wealth distributions. Such a feat would be impossible. As the book repeatedly makes clear, the terriers provided a representative view of landholdings in different parts of England. The comparative wealth figures were based on extensive inventory evidence on both sides of the Atlantic and, in one instance, on a tax rate list. Regarding my Massachusetts probate data, he claims that my “sample” was too small and that my characterizations of wealth distributions were too arbitrary. My tables and text are clearly limited to the first generation and say so. The extant (not “sample”) inventories that I used have been tested at several points for their representativeness (pp. 23n.–24n., 135n.), a point Konig wholly ignores. The fact that the top 10% of first-generation inhabitants with inventories controlled between 27 and 49% of all inventoried wealth, depending upon the town, enables me to state that inhabitants from a town like Rowley retained a North Country “consciousness of social place,” particularly when such evidence is linked with other, corroborative circumstances like the social placement of houselots, the geometrically-proportioned size of landholdings, and the unusual ratios of moveable to real property found in inventories. Konig has tried to discredit my claims by broadening them beyond recognition without carefully understanding the impact of accumulated details that underscore my interpretation. He further distorts my story in arguing that many local “traits” (his word), like attitudes about timber conservation, should be seen as essentially English, and not as regional characteristics. Yet he fails to note the different reasons for establishing such regulations in three of my towns—Rowley (a tradition of wood scarcity in Yorkshire); Hingham (the presence of a woodcrafting industry in old and new Hingham); and Newbury (the fear of squatters taking over more common land).
Another example of “dubious statistics” concerns my view of a weak county and colony government during the early years after settlement, although, as I state, this situation was increasingly modified as the century progressed. Instead of taking on the whole argument, Konig questions a relatively minor point raised in a single sentence concerning the low rate of probate filings in the decades after the establishment of the county courts, a statistic that, in passing, I suggested as indicative of the initial weakness of the institution. After two paragraphs of discussion on this single point, Konig has not supplied us with a useful alternative interpretation because he has not taken into account two obvious factors, the relatively high death rate experienced in the colony during the first two decades after settlement and the age distribution of the settlers, many of whom were middleaged or older. Had he tested my viewpoint against my list of 1636 multi-aged Watertown land grantees, for instance, rather than the 1642 list of young (p. 182) Newbury proprietors, his results would have been different. Oddly, Konig also thinks that I ought to compare patterns of testacy in Massachusetts and in English localities, a task that would require laborious population reconstructions and complicated English probate research (see p. 79n. for details) for reasons of doubtful importance and probably unsatisfactory results.
Finally, Konig claims that I argue that my Massachusetts towns were “fully able to order [their] own affairs” by exercising powers “previously attributed only to higher levels of authority.” But I quite explicitly point out the latitude that colony law and earlier town practices gave to townsmen in governing themselves. That each of my five towns showed so many striking differences in local administration and governance should be adequate proof that local government was practiced with a wide degree of discretion. Whether, as in the instance he cites, the Watertown selectmen ever called themselves a “court” is quite irrelevant if in fad they took upon themselves, as I say, a “most conspicuous judicial role in dealing with” a variety of matters, as their records abundantly show. Konig seems to think that these selectmen were mere agents of the county court when, in a few instances, they enforced county orders. Yet since other selectmen’s records do not show such actions, I am more inclined to think that these particular town leaders, who ran their community like the select vestries in East Anglia, regarded illegal actions of their inhabitants as, in effect, a part of their responsibility, too.
By attacking In English Ways on minor, often irrelevant, misleading, or tactless points, Konig fails to perceive the broader themes and implications of the book. Convinced that Anglo-American history of the period must be viewed through county (or higher) institutions and through the socially and economically more powerful men who ran them, Konig construes the seventeenth century as virtually devoid of the yeomen, husbandmen, small tradesmen, and other humbler folk whose daily activities centered around their agricultural pursuits and local personal and institutional relationships—not trips to courts, shire to wns, or provincial capitals. Whether these Englishmen, some of whom later settled in New England, were concerned with the wider issues and world that Konig refers to remains for him to prove.
152. T. H. Breen, “Transfer of Culture: Change and Design in Shaping Massachusetts Bay, 1630–1660,” New England Historical and Genealogical Register, CXXXII (1978), 3–17; Allen, In English Ways; David Grayson Allen, “Vacuum Domicilium: The Social and Cultural Landscape of Seventeenth-Century New England,” in Jonathan L. Fairbanks and Robert F. Trent, eds., New England Begins: The Seventeenth Century, 3 vols. (Boston, 1982), I, 1–10, and catalog entry, 49.
153. For the Dorchester bylaws, see Dorchester Town Records 1632–1687, Boston Record Commissioners, Report, IV, 2d ed. (Boston, 1883), 1–2 (3 April 1633), 23 (2 May 1637).
154. For documentation on all 29 towns founded in the Bay Colony before 1650, see David Grayson Allen, “In English Ways: The Movement of Societies and the Transferal of English Local Law and Custom to Massachusetts Bay in the Seventeenth Century” (Ph.D. diss., University of Wisconsin, 1974), 415–426.
155. For the most current reappraisal of local-colony relations in Connecticut, see Thomas Jodziewicz, “Dual Localism in Seventeenth-Century Connecticut: Relations between the General Court and the Towns, 1636–1691” (Ph.D. diss., William and Mary College, 1974); Charles McLean Andrews, The River Towns of Connecticut: A Study of Wethersfield, Hartford, and Windsor, Johns Hopkins University Studies in Historical and Political Science, ed. Herbert B. Adams, 7th Ser., VII–IX (Baltimore, 1889), 27.
156. On the geographic origins of the earliest settlers of the four Connecticut towns under discussion, see, among other sources, Charles Edward Banks, The Planters of the Commonwealth: A Study of the Emigrants and Emigration in Colonial Times … (Boston, 1930) and his Topographical Dictionary of 2885 English Emigrants to New England, 1620–1650, ed. Elijah Ellsworth Brownell (Philadelphia, 1937); and the New England Historical and Genealogical Register, I to date (1847– ). Lists of early settlers and information on their English origins come also from several town histories and genealogies, including: Henry R. Stiles, The History of Ancient Windsor, Connecticut, … (New York, 1859), 122–140 and passim, and his A Supplement to the History and Genealogies of Ancient Windsor, Conn., … (Albany, N.Y., 1863); Maude Pinney Kuhns, The ‘Mary and John': A Story of the Founding of Dorchester, Massachusetts, 1630 (Rutland, Vermont, 1943); William DeLoss Love, The Colonial History of Hartford Gatheredfrom the Original Records (Hartford, Conn., 1914); J. Gardner Bartlett, “The English Ancestral Homes of the Founders of Cambridge,” Cambridge [Massachusetts] Historical Society, Publications, XIV (1919), 79–103; Lucius Barnes Barbour, Families of Early Hartford, Connecticut (Baltimore, 1977); Families of Early Milford, Connecticut, compiled by Susan Woodruff Abbott, edited and prepared for publication by Jacquelyn L. Ricker (Baltimore, 1979); and Bernard Christian Steiner, A History of the Plantation of Menunkatuck and of the Original Town of Guilford, Connecticut, Comprising the Present Towns of Guilford and Madison, … (Baltimore, 1897), especially 12–13, 17, 41–48, 124–131.
157. Barbara Kerr, Bound to the Soil: A Social History of Dorset, 1750–1918 (London, 1968), 50–67, especially 53–55; A. J. Buckle, “Agriculture,” in The Victoria History of the Counties of England, Dorset, ed. William Page (London, 1908), II, 275; Eric Kerridge, The Agricultural Revolution (London, 1967), 117–118; Edward Hitchcock, Final Report on the Geology of Massachusetts (Amherst and Northampton, Mass., 1841), 17, 434.
158. On similarities in governmental practices with Dorchester, see Dorchester Town Records, 3 (8 October 1633), and “Annals of the Town of Dorchester by James Blake, 1750,” Dorchester Antiquarian and Historical Society, Collections, No. 2 (Boston, 1846), 12, for examples. On early town government, see Windsor Town Acts, 1650–1714, Connecticut State Library, Hartford, Conn., passim, and extracts from those records in Stiles, History of Ancient Windsor, 141–162. For the role of townsmen in early Windsor, see Andrews, River Towns of Connecticut, 88n, 97–98, and on their continuity in office, Linda Auwers Bissell, “Family, Friends, and Neighbors: Social Interaction in Seventeenth-Century Windsor, Connecticut” (Ph.D. diss., Brandeis University, 1973), 168–169, 172–173, 176.
159. On Windsor’s land divisions and the landholdings of individuals, see Windsor Register of Deeds, Vol. 1, 1640–1682 (microfilm), Connecticut State Library.
160. Joan Thirsk, “The Farming Regions of England,” in Agrarian History of England and Wales, IV, 65, 68, 71, 73–75; Kerridge, Agricultural Revolution, 115–121, 149–150. For an account of other New England settlers from the same general area but with very different occupational interests, see R. D. Brown, “Devonians and New England Settlement before 1650,” Devonshire Association for the Advancement of Science, Literature and Art, Report and Transactions, XCV (1963), 219–243.
161. Stiles, History of Ancient Windsor, 147. For some inventories illustrating the dimensions of Windsor’s early economy, see Connecticut Probate Records, Nos. 1640 (1667), 2139 (1656), 2140 (1673), 2198 (1683), 3896 (1688), 4268 (1683), 4419 (1662), 4610 (1662), 4611 (1673), and 6179 (1655), Connecticut State Library.
162. Compiled from the 1686 tax list, printed in Documents of and Relating to the Town of Windsor Connecticut, 1639–1703 (Hartford, Conn., 1930), 143–192.
163. Hartford Town Votes, Volume I, 1635–1716, Connecticut Historical Society, Collections, VI (Hartford, Conn., 1897), 3, 8–9, 12, 28, 46, 69–70, 80–81, 121; cf. Wrightson and Levin, Poverty and Piety, 104–110.
164. Land distribution practices are based on a compilation of grants from the early divisions, Hartford Town Votes, especially 22–24, 49–53; and Love, Colonial History of Hartford, 131–150. For small group enclosure in Hartford, see Hartford Town Votes, 44, 60–61 for examples; and on practices in Watertown, Allen, In English Ways, 128–129. For land sales and exchanges in early Hartford, see Original Distribution of the Lands in Hartford among the Settlers, 1639, Connecticut Historical Society, Collections, XIV (1912), passim, especially in the index, 633–716, where such activities are arranged under individual landholders. For some specific but random examples of individuals and their sales and exchanging pursuits, see Richard Lord, ibid., 65–66, John Talcott, 76–82, and Richard Goodman, 82–89.
165. Thirsk, “Farming Regions of England,” 54–55; Kerridge, Agricultural Revolution, 89–91.
166. Connecticut Probate Records, Nos. 1036 (1684), 5928 (1684), and 5605 (1675). For some other representative inventories, see ibid., Nos. 1025 (1648), 2320 (1689), 2725 (1693), and 5371 (1660); and J. Hammond Trumbull, ed., Public Records of the Colony of Connecticut, I (Hartford, Conn., 1850), 448–449, 455–456, 488–489.
167. Leonard W. Labaree, Milford, Connecticut: The Early Development of a Town as Shown in its Land Records (New Haven, Conn., 1933); Thirsk, “Farming Regions of England,” 50–52; Kerridge, Agricultural Revolution, 91–113.
168. Labaree, Milford, Connecticut, 8; and for examples of town meeting actions, see Milford Register of Deeds, Vols. 1–2, 1639–1707, 19 Jan. 1645[6], 19 June 1646, 24 October 1651, and 7 October 1653 (microfilm), Connecticut State Library; Allen, In English Ways, 38–54.
169. Milford Register of Deeds, Vols. 1–2, 77–99, especially 82–84; History of Milford Connecticut 1630–1939, compiled and written by the Federal Writers’ Project of the Works Progress Administration for the State of Connecticut (n.p., 1939), 23–24.
170. Connecticut Probate Records, New Haven District, No. 269 (1665), 15114 (1690); New Haven Probate Records, in 12 vols., 1647–1781, vol. 1, part 2, 83–84 (1681) (microfilm), Connecticut State Library; Maverick, “A Briefe Diescription of New England,” 245. For some other examples, see New Haven Probate Records, vol. 1, pt. 2, 3–4 (1666), 29–30 (1672), 73–75 (1679), 101–102 (1683), 138 (1684), 147–148 (1686); vol. 2, pt. 1, 74 (1690), 83 [1683].
171. Bruce C. Daniels, The Connecticut Town: Growth and Development, 1635–1790 (Middletown, Conn., 1979), 186–190; Allen, “Vacuum Domicilium,” catalog entry, 41–42. On characteristics of Wealden agriculture and society, see Thirsk, “Farming Regions of England,” 57–59; Kerridge, Agricultural Revolution, 132–133; Alan Everitt, “Farm Labourers,” in Agrarian History of England and Wales, IV, 410–411; Alan R. H. Baker, “Field Systems of Southeast England,” in Alan R. H. Baker and Robin A. Butlin, eds., Studies of Field Systems in the British Isles (Cambridge, 1973), 384–393; and especially C. W. Chalklin, “The Rural Economy of a Kentish Wealden Parish 1650–1750,” Agricultural History Review, X (1962), 29–45. Like East Anglia and because of the same open manor environment, strong local leadership at the parish or town level developed in the Weald. For the corresponding occurrence in Guilford, see Guilford Town Records, Vol. A, 1645–1664, pt. 2, 9 (microfilm), Connecticut State Library; and Steiner, History of Guilford, 78–79.
172. Register of Terriers, Vol. 1, 1648–1684 (microfilm), Connecticut State Library; Guilford Town Records, Vol. A, pt. 2, 9, 12–14 (n.d.); Steiner, History of Guilford, 88, 90, 167, 247; Allen, In English Ways, 63–64; Guilford Town Records, Vol. A, 132, Vol. B, 13; Chalklin, “Rural Economy of a Kentish Wealden Parish,” 36.
173. New Haven Probate Records, Vol. 1, pt. 2, 41–43 (1671); Thirsk, Economic Policy and Projects, 24–25. For some other examples, see New Haven Probate Records, Vol. 1, pt. 2, 13–14 (1668), 37 (1670), and 124–125 (1684).
174. Percy Wells Bidwell and John L Falconer, History of Agriculture in the Northern United States, 1620–1860 (Washington, D.C., 1925), 32–37; Bruce C. Daniels, “Economic Development in Colonial and Revolutionary Connecticut: An Overview,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3d Ser., XXXVII (1980), 429–434, especially 431–432.
175. One of the few historians who has given the patterns of internal and external trade of agricultural produce some attention has been Darrett Rutman, “Governor Winthrop’s Garden Crop: The Significance of Agriculture in the Early Commerce of Massachusetts Bay,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3d Ser., XX (1963), 396–415. For some related issues in the different agricultural economy of eighteenth-century Massachusetts, see Bettye Hobbs Pruitt, “Agriculture and Society in the Towns of Massachusetts, 1771: A Statistical Analysis” (Ph.D. diss., Boston University, 1981), especially Chapter 1, “Farmers and the Farm Community,” 6–40.
176. Howard S. Russell, A Long, Deep Furrow: Three Centuries of Farming in New England (Hanover, N.H., 1976), 80, 120–121; Johnson's Wonder-Working Providence, 179, 196, 249; Nathaniel Uring, History of the Voyages and Travels of Captain Nathaniel Uring … (London, 1745), 111.
177. T. H. Breen and Stephen Foster, “Moving to the New World: The Character of Early Massachusetts Immigration,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3d Ser., XXX (1973), 189–222. Something like this occurred at New Haven, where London mer chant interests tried to establish a commercial center to rival Boston. The attempt failed and settlers there were obliged either to leave or turn to husbandry (Hubbard, General History of New England, 317–327, 527). Conversely, some settlers found new opportunities available in the New World and turned to new occupations on at least a part-time basis (Allen, In English Ways, 102–103). By and large, however, New England settlers came from rural backgrounds, and those from boroughs were often refugees from the countryside. In a world in which occupational distinctions were still fluid, borough men were never far away from agriculture, and tradesmen carried on part-time activity in livestock and grain growing (ibid., xv–xvi).
178. Johnson's Wonder-Working Providences, 116; Allen, In English Ways, 79 (sources cited).
179. The Diary of Thomas Minor, Stonington, Connecticut. 1653 to 1684., Sidney H. Miner and George D. Stanton, Jr., eds. (New London, Conn., 1899); [Peter] Thacher’s Journal,” in A. K. Teele, ed., The History of Milton, Mass. 1640 to 1887 (Boston, 1923), 641–657; “Diary of Lawrence Hammond,” Massachusetts Historical Society, Proceedings, 2d Ser., VII (1891–1892), 144–172. For examples of men with wider or more limited social worlds, see carpenter John Marshall’s diary, ibid.,2d Ser., I (1884), 149–165; Peter Easton’s journal, Rhode Island Historical Society, Collections, XI (1918), 78–80; and that of John Paine, Mayflower Descendent, VIII (1906), 180–184.
180. David Grayson Allen et al., eds., The Diary of John Quincy Adams (Cambridge, Mass., 1981), I, 323
181. Anderson and Thomas, “White Population,” 655–657. As the number of new towns created dropped precipitously during the last quarter of the century, second-and third-generation New Englanders continued to live in the towns of their fathers and grandfathers. Only with the rise of the fourth generation and the temporary hiatus in inter-colonial rivalries and Indian threats were a substantial number of new towns founded. This occurred for the most part after 1713. See In English Ways, 232–235.
182. Sarah Kemble Knight, The Journal of Madam Knight (Boston, 1972); Isabel S. Mitchell, Roads and Road-Making in Colonial Connecticut (New Haven, Conn., 1933), especially 19, 29–30; Hartford Town Votes, 235, 240, 322, passim; Winthrop, History of New England, ed. Savage, I, 181–182, 333; M. Halsey Thomas, ed., Diary of Samuel Sewall, 1674–1729 (New York, 1973), I, 16, 161, 174, 175.
183. Compiled from Vital Records of Rowley Massachusetts to the End of the Year 1849 (Salem, Mass., 1928), 239–433. See also Susan L. Norton, “Marital Migration in Essex County, Massachusetts, in the Colonial and Early Federal Periods,” Journal of Marriage and the Family, XXXV (1973), 406–418, especially 410; and Bissell, “Family, Friends, and Neighbors,” 140, 142.
184. For examples of social and economic circumstances reshaping inheritance customs, see Susan Amussen, “Governors and Governed: Class and Gender Relations in English Villages, 1590–1725” (Ph.D. diss., Brown University, 1982), Chapter V. Stating the general proposition in another way, would an early 17th-century York-shireman have recognized and understood the mid-18th-century Yorkshire landscape any more (or less) than the transplanted 17th-century Yorkshireman might have recognized and understood the society in the Rowley, Massachusetts, of 1750? Both places had changed considerably during the previous century and a quarter, and such developments could, and did, modify preexisting customs.
185. Daniel Denison Slade, communicator, “Autobiography of Major-General Daniel Denison,” New England Historical and Genealogical Register, XLDC (1892), 127–133; Sewall, Diary, ed. Thomas, I, 1, 10, 17, 61, 201–203; Steinei, History of Guilford, 59.
186. See generally Fairbanks and Trent, eds., New England Begins: The Seventeenth Century, 3 vols. (Boston, 1982).
187. E. B. O’Callaghan, ed., Documentary History of the State of New York (Albany, N.Y., 1849) I, 678.
188. George Francis Dow and Mary G. Thresher, eds., Records and Files of the Quarterly Courts of Essex County, 9 vols. (Salem and Worcester, Mass., 1911–1975), III, 328.
189. John A. Albro, ed., The Works of Thomas Shepard. … , 3 vols. (Boston, 1853), III, 293–294.
190. Cotton Mather, Magnalia Christi Americana; or, The Ecclesiastical History of New England, 2 vols. (Hartford, Conn., 1853), I, 65–66.
191. Quoted in J. W. Gough, The Mines of Mendip (Newton Abbott, England, 1967), 122–123.
192. Quoted in Joan Thirsk, “The Farming Regions of England,” in The Agrarian History of England and Wales, IV, 1500–1640, ed. Joan Thirsk (Cambridge, 1967), 111.
193. Michael Walzer, The Revolution of the Saints: A Study in the Origins of Radical Politics (Cambridge, Mass., 1965), 211.
194. Christopher Hill, Society and Puritanism in Pre-Revolutionary England (New York, 1964), 457
195. Quoted in R. C. Richardson, Puritanism in North-West England: A Regional Study of the Diocese of Chester to 1642 (Manchester, England, 1972), 144.
196. Nathaniel B. Shurtleff, ed., Records of the Governor and Company of the Massachusetts Bay in New England, 6 vols, in 5 (Boston, 1853–1854), I, 88, 109, 186; II, 100–101, 211–212; John Winthrop, Winthrop's Journal: “History of New England,” 1634–1649, ed. James K. Hosmer, 2 vols. (N.Y., 1908), I, 54; Massachusetts Historical Society, Winthrop Papers, 5 vols. (Boston, 1929–1947), III, 216; Percy W. Bidwell and John I. Falconer, History of Agriculture in the Northern United States, 1620–1860 (Washington, D.C., 1925), 55; Darrett B. Rutman, Winthrop's Boston: Portrait of a Puritan Town, 1630–1649 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1965), 78, 157.
197. Winthrop Papers, II, 114.
198. Ibid., II, 146.
199. Records of Massachusetts Bay, I, 395, 402, 403, 404, 406; Winthrop, History of New England, ed. Hosmer, I, 119; Sidney Perley, The History of Salem, Massachusetts, 3 vols. (Salem, Mass., 1924–1928), I, 232–234.
200. Winthrop Papers, III, 322.
201. James Phinney Baxter, ed., The Trelawney Papers, in Documentary History of the State of Maine (Portland, Maine, 1884), III, 33.
202. William Bradford, Bradford's History of Plymouth Plantation, ed. William T. Davis (New York, 1908), 277–278, 283–284.
203. Winthrop, History of New England, ed. Hosmer, II, 61; Baxter, ed., Trelawney Papers, 86, 86n.
204. Winthrop, History of New England, ed. Hosmer, I, 165, 169; Records of Massachusetts Bay, I, 158, 230.
205. Winthrop, History of New England, ed. Hosmer, I, 310; Records of Massachusetts Bay, I, 257–258.
206. Records of Massachusetts Bay, I, 147, 326–327; William P. Upham, ed., “Town Records of Salem, 1634–1659,” Essex Institute, Historical Collections, IX (1869), 15, 27, 28, hereafter cited as “Salem Town Records”; Thomas F. Waters, Ipswich in the Massachusetts Colony, 2 vols. (Ipswich, Mass., 1905–1917), I, 80.
207. “Salem Town Records,” 16, 33, 36, 62, 78, 80, 83, 84, 88, 92. The biographical data on these men were drawn from ibid.; Essex County Court Records, vol. I; and Perley, History of Salem, vols. I, II.
208. Winthrop, History of New England, ed. Hosmer, I, 310.
209. A Volume Relating to the Early History of Boston Containing the Aspinwall Notarial Records from 1644 to 1651, Boston Record Commissioners, Reports, XXXII (Boston, 1903), 24, 79, 217–218, 222–223, 279–280, 361, 390; Bernard Bailyn, The New England Merchants in the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge, Mass., 1955), 79–81.
210. George Corwin Account Books, 1658–1664, 1663–1672, Essex Institute, Salem, Mass.; Essex County Court Records, I, 214–217; III, 330–333; V, 8–11, 246.
211. Daniel F. Vickers, “Maritime Labor in Colonial Massachusetts: A Case Study of the Essex County Cod Fishery and the Whaling Industry of Nantucket, 1630–1775” (Ph.D. dissertation, Princeton University, 1981), Appendix: Cod Prices in Massachusetts, 1634–1775, 326–329.
212. Essex County Court Records, II, 386–387, 401–402; Archie N. Frost, ed., Verbatim Transcripts of the Records of the Quarterly Courts of Essex County, Massachusetts, 57 vols. (Salem, Mass., 1936–1939), VII, 103, 104, 106, 141.
213. Corwin Account Books, 1658–1664, 1663–1672; Essex County Court Records, V, 11, 372, 419–420; VI, 67; Frost, ed., Verbatim Transcripts of Essex Court Records, XL, 138.
214. Corwin Account Book, 1663–1672; Essex County Court Records, V, 6–12.
215. The cost of outfitting a four-man company (three fishermen and one shoreman) usually ran between £100–£150 sterling per year. See Corwin Account Books, 1658–1664, 1663–1672.
216. Seventeenth-century price data are not specific enough by month in order to measure this phenomenon accurately, but see the figures for the eighteenth century amassed in Ruth Crandall, “Wholesale Commodity Prices in Boston During the Eighteenth Century,” Review of Economic Statistics, XVI (1934), 182, and reworked in Vickers, “Maritime Labor,” 84. For an example of seasonal fluctuations in prices during the seventeenth century, see Essex County Court Records, V, 9–10.
217. Corwin Account Books, 1658–1664, 1663–1672. In a sample of 29 voyages outfitted by Corwin between 1660 and 1664, 34 of 87 fishermen (39%) owned shares in the boats they operated. Of 11 fishermen who died at sea between 1645 and 1675 and whose inventories survive, 5 (or 45%) were boatowners. See Essex County Court Records, I–VI. For specific examples of partnerships, see ibid., II, 320–387; III, 40–41, 156–157, 209; V, 372–373; VI, 67; Thomas Lechford, “Notebook Kept by Thomas Lechford, Esq., Lawyer in Boston, Massachusetts from June 27, 1638 to July 29, 1641,” American Antiquarian Society, Transactions and Collections, VII (Worcester, Mass., 1885), 406–407.
218. Corwin Account Books, 1658–1664, 1663–1672.
219. William Hubbard, A General History of New England from the Discovery to MDCLXXX, Massachusetts Historical Society, Collections, 2d Ser., VI (Boston, 1815), 421; Essex County Court Records, II, 368; VII, 78.
220. “Downing’s Account of Fish, 1676,” Documentary History of the State of Maine, Maine Historical Society, Collections, 2d Ser., IV (Portland, Maine, 1889), 372–376; G. Browne Goode, ed., The Fisheries and Fishery Industries of the United States, Section V: History and Methods of the Fishery, 2 vols. (Washington, D.C., 1887), I, 191–194. For daily totals offish caught per man, see Essex County Court Records, III, 103; Baxter, ed., Trelawney Papers, 57; Box 1, Folder 1, 1758–1769, Joshua Burnham Papers, Essex Institute, Salem, Mass.
221. Corwin Account Book, 1658–1664. On “walking taverns,” see John Josselyn, “An Account of Two Voyages to New England (1638, 1663),” Massachusetts Historical Society, Collections, 3d Ser., III (Boston, 1833), 351.
222. Records of Massachusetts Bay, IV, ii, 552.
223. Charles T. Libby et al., eds., Province and Court Records of Maine, 6 vols. (Portland, Maine, 1928–1974), I, 52; II, 88, 98–99, 115, 132, 209.
224. Essex County Court Records, III, 107–108; V, 109–110.
225. John Noble and John F. Cronin, eds., Records of the Court of Assistants of the Colony of the Massachusetts Bay, 1630–1692 (Boston, 1928), III, 61.
226. Essex County Court Records, I–VIII. Of 42 cases of “assault,” “battery,” and “striking,” recorded in the years 1640–1642, 1650–1652, 1660–1662, 1670–1672, 1680–1682, 11 (or 26%) involved residents of Marblehead, a town which accounted for no more than 8% of Essex County’s population. See Evarts B. Greene and Virginia D. Harrington, eds., American Population before the Federal Census of 1790 (New York, 1932), 19–21.
227. Josselyn, “Account of Two Voyages,” 352.
228. Corwin Account Books, 1658–1664, 1663–1672; Essex County Court Records, II, 26.
229. Records of Massachusetts Bay, V, 212.
230. Winthrop Papers, V, 38.
231. The names of 205 fishermen were drawn from the Corwin Account Books, 1658–1664, 1663–1672; Essex County Court Records, I–VI; William B. Trask et ah, Suffolk Deeds, 14 vols. (Boston, 1880–1906); and Lechford, “Notebook.” Only fishermen for whom actual voyages could be identified were included. Their origins and careers were traced in Perley, History of Salem, E—HI; John J. Babson, History of the Town of Gloucester, Cape Ann, including the Town of Rockport (Gloucester, Mass., 1860); Essex County Court Records, I–IX; Vital Records of Salem, Massachusetts, to the End of the Year, 1849, 6 vols. (Salem, Mass., 1916–1925); Vital Records of Gloucester, Massachusetts, to the End of the Year 1849, 3 vols. (Topsfield, Mass., 1911–1924); Vital Records of Marblehead, Massachusetts to the End of the Year 1849, 3 vols. (Salem, Mass., 1903–1908); Essex County Probate Files, Registry of Probate, Essex County Courthouse, Salem, Massachusetts; “Salem Town Records”; William H. Bowden, ed., “Marblehead Town Records, 1648–1683,” Essex Institute, Historical Collections, LXIX (1933), 207–329.
232. Essex County Court Records, V, 373.
233. W. Noel Sainsbury et ah, Calendar of State Papers, Colonial Series (London, 1860), American and West Indies, V, 1661–1668, 559, 560; VII, 1669–1674, 257; IX, 1675–1676, 600; XI, 1681–1685, 294; XIX, 1701, 529–530; XXX, 1717–1718, 318; XXXIX, 1732, 225.
234. This average was calculated from a sample of 51 annual incomes drawn from the years 1666–1671 in Corwin Account Book, 1663–1672. Here as elsewhere in this paper, Massachusetts currency values were converted into British sterling using John J. McCusker, Money and Exchange in Europe and America, 1600–1775: A Handbook (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1978).
235. Ralph Davis, The Rise of the English Shipping Industry in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (London, 1962), 135, 151–152; Harold Innis, The Cod Fisheries: The History of an International Economy (Toronto, 1929), 70n–71n, 101; Gillian T. Cell, English Enterprise in Newfoundland, 1577–1660 (Toronto, 1969), 16.
236. Calendar of State Papers, Colonial, 1700, XVIII, 522.
237. Essex County Court Records, I–IX; Essex County Probate Files. Fishermen in “mid-career” were defined as those whose estates were probated within ten years of their last recorded voyage. For the techniques of sampling used, see Vickers, “Maritime Labor,” 140, n. 102.
238. Corwin Account Book, 1658–1664. For sampling techniques, see Vickers, “Maritime Labor,” 140, n. 104. By the second quarter of the eighteenth century, as the Table makes clear, the indebtedness recorded in the probated estates of fishermen had greatly diminished. The account books of merchants tell a similar story: the phenomenon of chronic indebtedness, so characteristic of Corwin’s era, had almost disappeared by the middle of the following century.
|
Persistent Debtors |
Mixed |
Persistent Creditors |
|
|
George Corwin (Salem) 1659–1660 |
18 |
10 |
2 |
|
Miles Ward (Salem) 1745–1760 |
0 |
10 |
0 |
|
William Stevens (Gloucester) 1769–1775 |
2 |
8 |
6 |
|
William Knight (Marblehead) 1767–1775 |
0 |
5 |
3 |
Obviously, credit was no longer essential to the manning of the fishery. As more and more mariners decided to settle in the outports, marry, and raise up their sons in the trade, the scarcity of labor began to ebb. Merchants no longer had to compete with one another over the fishing hands they needed, and their generosity in advancing goods evaporated. The precise timing of this transition is hard to pinpoint, but the plethora of debt cases involving fishermen heard before the Essex County Inferior Court of Common Pleas in the 1720’s and 1730’s suggests that it was in the course of these two decades that the purse strings were drawn. See the George Corwin Account Book, 1658–1664; Miles Ward Account Books, 1736–1745, 1745–1753, 1753–1764; William Stevens Account Book, 1769–1775; and William Knight Account Book, 1769–1775, all in the Essex Institute, Salem, Mass.; Files of the Inferior Court of Common Pleas for Essex County, Essex Institute, Salem, Mass.; and Vickers, “Maritime Labor,” 211–215.
239. Corwin Account Books, 1658–1664, 1663–1672; Essex County Court Records, III, 102, 103, 267–268.
240. Essex County Court Records, I–VI. Mean wealth and indebtedness were calculated for the 24 fishermen whose estates were inventoried between 1645 and 1675.
|
Physical Estate |
|||
|
Above Average |
Below Average |
||
|
Indebtedness: |
Above Average |
5 |
4 |
|
Below Average |
4 |
11 |
|
This shows no positive (and possibly a weak negative) correlation between debt and poverty.
241. Essex County Probate Files, No. 19, 545.
242. Josselyn, “Account of Two Voyages,” 352.
243. Corwin Account Books, 1658–1664, 1663–1672; Essex County Court Records, I–VI. Of 14 fishermen for whom probate records survive and who were indebted to identifiable individuals at the time of their deaths, 9 owed more than 50% of their debts to one creditor.
244. Corwin Account Books, 1658–1664, 1663–1672.
245. Essex County Probate Files, No. 28,248; Essex County Court Records, VII, 411; VIII, 194–195; IX, 199–200. See also the references to Tucker’s descendants in the valuation lists of 1735 and 1749 contained in “Tax and Valuation Lists for Massachusetts Towns Before 1776,” Harvard University Microfilm Edition, Reel no. 12.
246. Essex County Court Records, I–IX; Essex County Probate Files. Of 13 inventories of fishermen who died at sea, only 4 contained land or animals. Of 20 fishermen who worked at sea before 1675 and lived to age 50 or older (meaning those who had retired), 14 possessed animals, but on average worth only £4.9 sterling; and though all 20 had some real estate, few owned more than an acre or two.
247. Movement of these families out of Marblehead, Gloucester, and Salem was measured, using Bettye Hobbs Pruitt, ed., The Massachusetts Tax Valuation List of 1771 (Boston, 1978). See Vickers, “Maritime Labor,” 142, n. 120.
248. Edwin A. Churchill, “Too Great the Challenge: The Birth and Death of Falmouth, Maine, 1624–1676” (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Maine at Orono, 1979). 289–290.
249. Corwin Account Books, 1658–1664, 1663–1672; Essex County Court Records, I–VI; Perley, History of Salem, I–III; Babson, History of Gloucester; Vital Records of Salem; Vital Records of Marblehead; Vital Records of Gloucester; “Salem Town Records”; “Marblehead Town Records.” Fishermen were identified and their presence in Essex County traced through all of these sources. Ages at emigration were calculated for those 42 fishermen whose ages were noted in the court records. For example, “Edward Woolen, aged thirty-four years” in 1659 (Essex County Court Records, II, 186) who fished for Corwin between 1668 and 1670, first appeared in Essex County in 1651 (Perley, History of Salem, I, 211). His age at emigration was, therefore, 26.
250. Essex County Court Records, VIII, 318.
251. Ibid., VII, 30; IX, 145, 349; Perley, History of Salem, III, 48–49; Corwin Account Book, 1663–1672.
252. Essex County Probate Files, No. 9780; Essex County Court Records, II, 390; Sidney Perley, “Marblehead in the Year 1700, No. 6,” Essex Institute Historical Collections, LXXII (1911), 165.
253. Essex County Court Records, I, 256; III, 14; Perley, History of Salem, I, 314; II, 13; III, 240; Essex County Probate Files, No. 17, 639.
254. Vickers, “Maritime Labor,” 119, 143n–144n.
255. Essex County Court Records, I–VIII; the Essex County figure was calculated from David Warner Koch, “Income Distribution and Political Structure in Seventeenth-Century Salem, Massachusetts,” Essex Institute, Historical Collections, CV (1969), 53–56.
256. Fishermen identified in the sources mentioned in n.8, p. 102, were traced in Richard Pierce, ed., Records of the First Church in Salem, 1629–1730 (Salem, Mass., 1974).
257. Records of Massachusetts Bay, II, 57; V, 8.
258. Cotton Mather, Magnalia Christi Americana, quoted in Samuel Roads, Jr., The History and Traditions of Marblehead (Boston, 1880), 9.
259. Essex County Court Records, I, 134, 170, 320.
260. Ibid., I, II.
261. Cotton Mather, The Fisherman's Calling (Boston, 1712), 44.
262. Ibid., 42–43; Cotton Mather, Sailour's Companion and Counsellour (Boston, 1709), vi.
263. Mather, Sailour's Companion and Counsellour, vi; Mather, Fisherman's Calling, 43.
264. Corwin Account Books, 1658–1664, 1663–1672.
265. Essex County Court Records, V, 223; VII, 70–72.
266. Ibid., I–V. Liquor-related offenses were counted for sample periods, 1650–1652, 1660–1662, 1670–1672. Of 63 offenses, 17 (27%) were committed by inhabitants of Marblehead.
267. Charles E. Clark, The Eastern Frontier: The Settlement of Northern New England, 1670–1763 (New York, 1970), 114; Records of Massachusetts Bay; II, 172; III, 184; Francis Jennings, The Invasion of America: Indians, Colonialism and the Cant of Conquest (New York, 1975), 40, 40n; Vickers, “Maritime Labor,” 168–169.
268. This description of eastern Massachusetts in the eighteenth century draws especially on Kenneth A. Lockridge, “Land, Population, and the Evolution of New England Society, 1630–1790,” Past and Present, XXXIX (1968), 62–80; Robert A. Gross, The Minutemen and Their World (New York, 1976), 68–108; Douglas Lamar Jones, “The Strolling Poor: Transiency in Eighteenth-Century Massachusetts,” Journal of Social History, VIII (1974–1975), 28–54; Philip J. Greven, Jr., Four Generations: Population, Land, and Family in Colonial Andover, Massachusetts (Ithaca, 1970), 175–258; Maris A. Vinovskis, “Mortality Rates and Trends in Massachusetts before 1850,” Journal of Economic History, XXXII (1972), 195–202.
269. John Barnard, “Autobiography of the Reverend John Barnard,” Massachusetts Historical Society, Collections, 3d Ser., V (1836), 240. Barnard’s picture is confirmed in his obituary in the Essex Gazette, 30 January–6 February 1770. The most complete portrayal of this process of stabilization can be found in Christine Heyrman’s forthcoming study, Commerce and Culture: The Maritime Communities of Colonial Massachusetts, 1690–1750.
270. John Winthrop, “A Modell of Christian Charity,” in Perry Miller and Thomas H. Johnson, eds., The Puritans: A Sourcebook of Their Writings (New York, 1963), I, 199.
271. Growing out of musings and readings scattered over a number of years and of recent editorial involvement with volume one of the Historical Atlas of Canada, this paper is not easily footnoted. Largely for reasons of expediency, I finally have decided to footnote it minimally. Direct quotations and references are noted, some wider literatures are introduced by a few key references, and here and there mention is made of specialized studies. Where the most accessible reference on a particular topic will be a plate in the Historical Atlas of Canada (forthcoming, 1986), it is so footnoted. I have been particularly sparing of references to early New England, as most readers of this paper will know the literature on that area better than I do.
272. E. P. Thompson, “The Grid of Inheritance,” in Jack Goody, Joan Thirsk, and E. P. Thompson, Family and Inheritance: Rural Society in Western Europe, 1200–1800 (Cambridge, 1976).
273. Cited by Juliet Clutton-Brock, “The Animal Resources,” in David M. Wilson, ed., The Archaeology of Anglo-Saxon England (London, 1976; pbk ed., Cambridge, 1981), 391.
274. For an example of the pressure on the forest and of the steps taken to protect it, see E. P. Thompson, Whigs and Hunters: The Origin of the Black Act (London, 1975).
275. The recent literature on early New England emphasizes local variety and the transatlantic persistence of local English ways, yet embodies a certain ambivalence. To take one example, in T. H. Breen, Puritans and Adventurers: Change and Persistence in Early America (New York, 1980), both the persistent localism of early New England and the influence of “the American environment” are stressed.
276. For a review of the main recent literature in North American historical geography, see Cole Harris, “The Historical Geography of North American Regions,” American Behavioral Scientist, XXII (1978), 115–130.
277. A helpful introduction (with an ample bibliography) to the English economic background of seventeenth-century North America is in D. C. Coleman, The Economy of England, 1450–1750 (Oxford, 1977).
278. James E. Vance, The Merchant's World: The Geography of Wholesaling (Englewood Cliffs, NJ., 1970). See also Carville V. Earle, “The First English Towns of North America,” Geographical Review, LXIX (1977), 34–50.
279. I have previously argued parts of the case presented in this section. See R. Cole Harris, “The Simplification of Europe Overseas,” Annals, Association of American Geographers, LXVII (1977), 469–483; and also R. Cole Harris and Leonard Guelke, “Land and Society in Early Canada and South Africa,” Journal of Historical Geography, III (1977). 135–153
280. For an admirable summary of the recent English literature, see Keith Wrightson, English Society, 1580–1680 (London, 1982). For an erudite introduction to the French countryside in the late seventeenth century, see Pierre Goubert, “Les cadres de la vie rurale,” in Fernand Braudel et ah, Histoire honomique et sociale de la France, 1660–1789 (Paris, 1970).
281. If there is little doubt that the century after the Black Death was a time of relative opportunity for the poor of northwestern Europe because the pressure on land had relaxed and the value of labor had risen, the extent of this opportunity, at least in relation to later North American experience, easily can be exaggerated. Control of land remained elusive for many people, as numerous peasant revolts testify. Only thirty years after the Black Death in Hertfordshire, peasants revolted against their landlord, the abbot of St. Albans, to obtain more common pasture, bridle paths, and hunting and fishing privileges, demands that were granted under the pressure of a mob then quickly withdrawn. The Peasant Revolt in Hertfordshire: A Symposium, Hertfordshire Local History Council, Occasional Paper, No. 51 (Stevenage Old Town, Herts, 1981).
282. Joan Thirsk, “The Farming Regions of England,” in The Agrarian History of England and Wales, IV, 1500–1640, ed. Joan Thirsk (Cambridge, 1967), 1–112. For an example of life in a pastoral village during this period, see D. G. Hey, An English Rural Community: Myddle under the Tudors and Stuarts (Leicester, 1974).
283. The rate of population growth declined abruptly after about 1640 and, overall, conditions for the poor probably improved slightly before the end of the century. The labored but essential study of the demographic vital statistics for this period in England is in E. A. Wrigley and R. S. Schofield, The Population History of England, 1541–1871 (London, 1981).
284. On the importance of stability as well as mobility, see Philip J. Greven Jr., Four Generations: Population, Land, and Family in Colonial Andover, Massachusetts (Ithaca, N.Y., 1970).
285. R. H. Smith, “Population and its Geography in England, 1500–1730,” in R. A. Dodgshon and R. A. Butlin, eds., An Historical Geography of England and Wales (London, 1978), 221–224. Also R. W. Malcolmson, Life and Labour in England, 1700–1780 (London, 1981), 71–74 and 93–96.
286. Louis Hartz, The Founding of New Societies: Studies in the History of the United States, Latin America, South Africa, Canada, and Australia (New York, 1964).
287. The outstanding general description of this fishery is Henri Louis Duhamel du Monceau, Traite generale des peches et histoire des poissions qu'elles fournissent, tantpour la subsistance des hommes; … (Paris, 1772). The most comprehensive modern treatment, though far from the easiest to read and increasingly dated, is Harold A. Innis, The Cod Fisheries: The History of an International Economy, rev. ed. (Toronto, 1954). On the French fishery, see Charles de La Morandiere, Histoire de la peche francaise de la morue dans l’ Amérique septentrionale, 3 vols. (Paris, 1962–1966); and on the early English fishery, Gillian T. Cell, English Enterprise in Newfoundland, 1577–1660 (Toronto, 1969) and C. Grant Head, Eighteenth Century Newfoundland: A Geographer's Perspective (Ottawa, 1976).
288. Henry Percival Biggar, The Early Trading Companies of New France: A Contribution to the History of Commerce and Discovery in North America (New York, 1965 [orig. publ. Toronto, 1901]).
289. See articles on particular groups in Bruce G. Trigger, ed., The Handbook of North American Indians, Northeast (Washington, D.C., 1978), XV.
290. For a cartographic indication of the extent of depopulation, see Conrad Heidenreich, “Trade, Warfare, and Epidemics, 1600–1653,” Historical Atlas of Canada (Toronto, forthcoming), I, plate 35.
291. W. Gordon Handcock, “An Historical Geography of the Origins of English Settlement in Newfoundland: A Study of the Migration Process” (Ph.D. thesis, Birmingham, 1979).
292. Innis, The Cod Fisheries, 95–138.
293. John Mannion, “St. John’s,” Historical Atlas of Canada (Toronto, forthcoming), I, plate 28.
294. La Morandière, Histoire de la pêche française, I, 481–484.
295. The basic accounts in English are: Andrew H. Clark, Acadia: The Geography of Early Nova Scotia to 1760 (Madison, Wise, 1968); and Naomi Griffiths, The Acadians: Creation of a People (Toronto, 1973).
296. In detail the volume of Acadian trade will never be known. A. H. Clark, reacting to a view of the Acadians as simple, subsistent farmers, emphasized their commercial connections, but we do know that in the eighteenth century the Acadians supplied less than 10% of the foodstuffs for Louisbourg, a considerable potential market close at hand. As none of those who left accounts of the Acadian settlements make any mention of the prosperity that, for some at least, would have been the likely corollary of a considerable trade, it is still the most plausible inference that Acadian agriculture was primarily subsistent.
297. James Pritchard and Thomas Wien, “North Atlantic Trade,” Historical Atlas of Canada (Toronto, forthcoming), I, plate 48.
298. General accounts are William J. Eccles, The Canadian Frontier, 1534–1760 (New York, 1969); and Edwin E. Rich, The Fur Trade and the Northwest to 1857 (Toronto, 1968). The organization of the fur trade in Montreal is best described by Louise Dechêne in Habitants et marchands de Montréal au XVIIe siècle (Paris, 1974). Estimates of the trade’s white manpower are disputed; data are fragmentary and where quantitative records exist it is not clear what fraction of the trade they represent.
299. Gratien Allaire, “Les engagés de la fourrure, 1701–1745: une étude de leur motivation” (Ph.D. thesis, Concordia University, Montreal, 1981).
300. Dechêne, Habitants et marchands, 353–413.
301. Dechêne, Habitants et marchands, 521; Jean Hamelin, Économie et société en Nouvelle-France (Quebec, 1960), 61.
302. Dechêne, Habitants et marchands, 241–258.
303. R. C. Harris, The Seigneurial System in Early Canada: A Geographical Study (Madison, Wise, 1966). For a different view see, Fernand Ouellet, “Seigneurial Property and Social Groups in the St. Lawrence Valley, 1663–1760,” in Michael S. Cross and Gregory S. Kealey, eds., Economy and Society during the French Regime to 1759: Readings in Canadian Social History (Toronto, 1983), I.
304. Hubert Charbonneau, Vie et mort de nos ancêtres: étude démographique (Montreal, 1975)
305. Hubert Charbonneau, “French Origins of the Canadian Population,” Historical Atlas of Canada (Toronto, forthcoming), I, plate 45.
306. Sumner Chilton Powell, Puritan Village: the Formation of a New England Town (Middletown, Conn., 1963).
307. For example, David T. Konig, “English Legal Change and the Origins of Local Government in Northern Massachusetts,” in Bruce C. Daniels, ed., Town and Country: Essays on the Structure of Local Governments in the American Colonies (Middletown, Conn., 1978), 12–43
308. Joseph S. Wood, “Village and Community in Early Colonial New England,” Journal of Historical Geography, VIII (1982), 333–346.
309. Charles S. Grant, Democracy in the Connecticut Frontier Town of Kent (New York, 1961).
310. Catalogue of Portraits in the Essex Institute, Salem, Massachusetts, Covering Three Centuries, introd. by Henry Wilder Foote (Salem, Mass., 1936), 117.
311. Nicholas Hilliard, A Treatise Concerning the Arte of Limning, Walpole Society, Publications, I (1912), 29; quoted in Roy Strong, The English Icon: Elizabethan and Jacobean Portraiture (London, 1969), 13. Hilliard describes how Elizabeth chose to sit for her portrait in “the open alley of a goodly garden where no tree was near, nor any shadow at all.”
312. James Savage, A Genealogical Dictionary of the First Settlers of New England Showing Three Generations of Those who Came Before May, 1692, 4 vols. (Boston, Mass., 1860–1862), IV, 483; Inventory of John Wensley’s estate, 24 May 1686; Administration of John Wensley’s estate, 27 April 1711, executrix Mercy Bridgham, widow [Wensley’s daughter], Suffolk County Probate Office, Boston; Fairbanks and Trent, eds., New England Begins, III, 466.
313. In the portrait of Elizabeth of York, the white rose represents the house of York; her husband, Henry VII, holds the red rose of Lancaster in his portrait at the National Portrait Gallery, London. Portraits of Queen Elizabeth I contain many of the symbols that appear in later English portraits: the eglantine (a single white rose), emblematic of chastity; a pillar, symbolizing constancy and fortitude; the sword of justice; the olive of peace; and spring flowers, emblematic of youth, the Golden Age, everlasting calm. See Roy Strong, The Elizabethan Image: Painting in England 1540–1620 (London, 1969), 46; Mary Ann Dwight, Introduction to the Study of Art (New York, 1856), 199–233.
314. John Phillips, The Reformation of Images: Destruction of Art in England, 1535–1660 (Berkeley, Calif. 1973), 27, 152, 186, 190.
315. Cotton Mather, The Soul Upon the Wing (Boston, 1733), 10.
316. Allan I. Ludwig, Graven Images: New England Stonecarving and its Symbols, 1650–1815 (Middletown, Conn., 1966), 202–216.
317. Louisa Dresser, XVIIth Century Painting in New England: A Catalogue of an Exhibition Held at the Worcester Art Museum . . .July and August, 1934 (Worcester, Mass., 1935); Louisa Dresser, “Portraits in Boston, 1630–1720,” in Journal of the Archives of American Art, VI (1966), 1–34; Louisa Dresser, “The Background of Colonial American Portraiture: Some Pages from a European Notebook,” American Antiquarian Society, Proceedings, LXXVI (1966); Samuel M. Green, “English Origins of Seventeenth Century New England,” in Ian M. G. Quimby, ed., American Painting to 1776: A Reappraisal (Charlottesville, Va., 1971), 15–69.
318. See Perry Miller and Thomas H. Johnson, eds., The Puritans, 2 vols. (New York, 1963). I. 7, 10; Louis B. Wright, Middle-Class Culture in Elizabethan England (Ithaca, N.Y., 1958), 14–15.
319. The mid-sixteenth century suppression of images may be said to have begun in 1538 when pilgrims’ shrines were destroyed, but the formal iconoclastic campaign got underway on 21 February 1548 with the order of the Privy Council for the removal of images, sent to Archbishop Cranmer. See Strong, The Elizabethan Image, 14. Even when the reformists were no longer in control, however, the official Anglican position in relation to images reflected the iconoclastic enthusiasm unleashed by the Reformation. In Jewel’s Apology of 1562, for instance, the value of images in teaching the illiterate is pointed out, but it is also argued that it is better to remove images since they lead to idolatry. Wright has suggested that when “Fanatical asceticism swept England in the 1640’s … Cavaliers and Roundheads alike were guilty of vandalism.” Wright, Middle-Class Culture, 14. See also Phillips, Reformation of Images, 1, 9, and passim; Strong, English Icon, 2–3.
320. Matthieu Coignet, Instruction aux Princes, transl. Edward Hoby, in G. Smith, Elizabethan Critical Essays (Oxford, 1904), I, 342–344.
321. William Ames, The Marrow of Theology, transl. John D. Eusden from the 1629 Latin edition (Boston, 1968), Book II, Chapters 38–44, 282–83. For Ames’s portrait, see Fairbanks and Trent, eds., New England Begins, II, 157–158; illus., 114.
322. Samuel Willard, A Compleat Body of Divinity (Boston, 1726), 54.
323. Dresser, XVIIth Century Painting, 135. The curators at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, believe that the 1680 copy is not the same image as the van der Vliet, Fairbanks and Trent, eds. New England Begins, II, 157.
324. Justin Winsor, ed., The Memorial History of Boston, 4 vols. (Boston, 1881), I, 208 and illustrations.
325. Oliver Cromwell was painted by Sir Peter Lely on commission from James Waynwright soon after his installation as Protector on 16 December 1653. Lely’s image became to a limited extent the official one from which many copies were taken (illus., Oliver Millar, Sir Peter Lely, 1618–80 [London, 1978], 47). Lely’s portrait was probably copied from Samuel Cooper’s miniature taken from life. Cromwell is supposed to have said to Cooper, “Paint my picture truly like me. & not Flatter me at all, but … remark all these ruffhess pimples warts & every thing as you see me.” (ibid.)
It is interesting to note that Lely was not inhibited by a sense of Puritan disapproval of portraiture; with two other artists he is supposed to have proposed to the Long Parliament before its dissolution in April 1653 that he paint a series of pictures to be placed in the palace of Whitehall representing all the memorable achievements since the Parliament’s first sitting, including pictures of principal battles and sieges of the Civil War—“beset” with portraits of appropriate generals and commanders. The artists also suggested two large group-portraits for the Banqueting House, one of the “whole Assemblie of Parliament” and another of the “Council of State.” This offer was not accepted. Millar, Lely, 14.
326. Strong, English Icon, 1; F. C. Dietz, English Government Finance, 1455–1558 (Bloomington, 111., 1920); and his English Public Finance (New York, 1932). Portraiture dominated English art up to the eighteenth century and even later. When Lely arrived in England from the Netherlands in the mid-seventeenth century and tried to pursue “the natural bent of his Genius in Landtschapes with small Figures, and Historical Compositions,” he found “the practice of Painting after the Life generally more encourag’d” and so “apply’d himself to Portraits … ,” according to the seventeenth-century observer Richard Graham. Quoted by Millar, Lely, 9. The cavalier poet Richard Lovelace commiserated with Lely on the necessity to paint portraits instead of other kinds of pictures in “an ‘un-understanding land’, where only portraits were in demand.” A Panegyrick to the best Picture of Friendship Mr. Pet. Lilly (London, circa 1647–1660).
327. From about 1250 on in England, when painters began to leave the monasteries where they were employed by monks and became itinerant workers, they took on both the social status and condition of other craftsmen—scribes, servers, goldsmiths, glaziers, etc. According to Ernest William Tristram, the wages of all craftsmen in the thirteenth century were “practically on the same scale, the average earnings of skilled workers being from four pence to seven pence. A scribe working on inscriptions in a painted chamber at Westminster received five pence a day.” (English Medieval Wall Painting, 3 vols. [London, 1950], I, 419ff). Tristram’s conclusions are born out by a study of the account books at Canterbury Cathedral of fees paid to workers, including “paynters-stainers,” as late as the sixteenth century. Also see Charles Haskins, The Ancient Trade Guilds and Companies of Salisbury (Salisbury, 1912), 59–61 for entry relating to raising money for the great ditch; for subscriptions taken in 1607 to send deputations to London, which lists donations of guilds and craftsmen, see N. J. Williams, ed., Tradesmen in Early Stuart Wiltshire: A Miscellany (Trowbridge, 1960), 7677. For status and incomes of London painters, see Mary Edmond, Limners and Picture-makers, Walpole Society, XLVII, Annual Volume (London, 1980), 60–242. Also see Strong, English Icon, 24–25, 49–50.
328. Wills, inventories, parish records, and cathedral account books were studied in the records offices at Kent, Trowbridge, Reading, Norwich, and Cambridge; at Oxford University Library, Cambridge University Library, Canterbury Cathedral, the Council House, Salisbury, and Salisbury Cathedral. Estates of the few painters, stainers, and limners listed were generally quite modest. See “Wills, Administrations, Bonds and Inventories in the Archdeaconry of Wiltshire, 1557 to 1779,” Typed, ms., London, 1961; “Index to Wills etc. from the Salisbury Diocesan Registrar,” Typed ms., 1971; Index to Bishop’s Register for Diocese of Salisbury, including Parishes in Berks and Wilts Counties”; Sub Dean of Sarum, “Index to Wills,”—all in Wiltshire County Record Office; Miss M. A. Farrow, comp., Index of Wills Proved in the Consistory Court of Norwich … 1604–1686 ([Norwich], 1950); “Norwich Diocesan Archives, Probate Inventories, 1688–1849,” listed by Thomas F. Barton for Norwich Consistory Court.
329. The little we know about the role of the painter in seventeenth-century New England corroborates the craft status we find he held in England. The “painter-stainer” Thomas Child of Boston, for instance, was responsible for the establishment of a house painting business that trained apprentices in decorative painting; Joseph Allen was described by Nathaniel Mather to his brother Increase as a craftsman with “a good skill in watchmaking, clockmaking, graving, limning, & that by his owne ingenuity & industry chiefly. …” (Massachusetts Historical Society, Collections, 4th Ser., VIII [Boston, 1868], 52). In the accounts of Simeon Stoddard Account Book, Stoddard Papers, Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston, we find the notation “paid the limner,” but Stoddard did not bother to note the name. Harvard College paid Smith £4.4 for his copy of Dr. Ames’s portrait (Harvard College Accounts, in Massachusetts Historical Society, Proceedings, 1st Ser., VI [1862–1863], 340). Also see Abbott Lowell Cummings, “Decorative Painters and House Painting at Massachusetts Bay, 1630–1725,” in Ian M. G. Quimby, ed., American Painting to 1776: A Reappraisal (Charlottesville, Va., 1971), 71–117.
330. Perry Miller, The New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century (Cambridge, Mass., 1954), 90, 173; Michael Zuckerman, “Pilgrims in the Wildnerness. Community, Modernity, and the Maypole at Merry Mount,” New England Quarterly, L (1977), 265.
331. Strong, English Icon, 37.
332. William Segar, Honor Military and Civill (London, 1602), 254–255. Segar was quoting Scipio. See also Wright, Middle-Class Culture, 297–334.
333. Sir Philip Sidney, A Defence of Poetry, ed. J. A. Van Dorsten (London, 1966), 11, 25, 47; Andrew D. Weiner, Sir Philip Sidney and the Poetics of Protestantism (Minneapolis, Minn., 1978), 37–39.
334. (1638). Joseph R. McElrath, Jr., and Allan P. Robb, eds., The Complete Works of Anne Bradstreet (Boston, 1981), 149–152. The idea that the arts should be used to inspire men to what Dr. Ames called “good action” was contained in the doctrine of “technologia,” which, according to Perry Miller, “carried the emanations of divine energy into things, from things to the mind of men in the form of the arts, where it galvanized them into right conduct. …” The New England Mind, 173–174.
335. Urian Oakes, New-England Pleaded With (Cambridge, Mass., 1673), 23.
336. Cotton Mather, Magnalia Christi Americana, or, the Ecclesiastical History of New England (London, 1702), Bk. I, 163; Bk. IV, 9. See also Sacvan Bercovitch, The Puritan Origins of the American Self (New Haven, Conn., 1975), 8–14. The Winthrop portrait which Mather discussed was later destroyed by fire. A portrait of Winthrop, presumably taken from life in England, circa 1629, is at the American Antiquarian Society.
Mather’s historical goals were pursued through the eighteenth century. When Thomas Prince began his Annals of New England in the 1730’s, he dedicated the first volume to the ruling heads of Massachusetts Bay’s government—Governor Jonathan Belcher, Lieutenant-Governor Spencer Phipps, and members of the Council and House of Representatives of the colony—in the hopes that these officials would continue “the same vital and pure Christianity and liberty both civil and ecclesiastical” followed by their predecessors, and imitate “their virtues.” (A Chronological History of New-England in the Form of Annals … from the Discovery of Captain Gosnold, in 1602, to the Arrival of Governor Belcher in 1730 … 3d ed. (Boston, 1852), v–vi.
337. Sidney M. Gold, “A Study in Early Boston Portrait Attributions: Augustine Clement, Painter-Stainer of Reading, Berkshire, and Massachusetts Bay,” Old-Time New England, LVIII (1968), 61–78; Edith Gaines, ed., “Collector’s Notes,” Antiques (November, 1968), 662, 666, 668.
338. Winsor, ed., Memorial History of Boston, I, 541, 82, 94; portrait illus., 308. A copy of Endicott’s portrait by Smibert (1737) is at the Massachusetts Historical Society; in 1873, the original was in the possession of a descendant, William P. Endicott of Salem. Copies are also in Essex Institute and Senate Chamber of Massachusetts. See William C. Endicott, American Antiquarian Society, Proceedings (1873), 113.
339. Fairbanks and Trent, eds., New England Begins: The Seventeenth Century, III, 416.
340. According to David Hall, Increase was playing “political games” in publishing this biography of his father; but even if he were, he must have conceived that such a biography would be effective. (Letter to the author.) The Foster woodcut of Mather is illustrated in Wendy J. Shadwell, American Printmaking: The First 150 Years (Washington, D.C., 1969), Plate 1.
341. Strong, English Icon, 29.
342. Christopher Hill, Society and Puritanism in Pre-Revolutionary England (New York, 1964), 454. See also R. C. Richardson, Puritanism in North-West England (Manchester, England, 1972), 90–91.
343. Edmund S. Morgan, The Puritan Family (Boston, 1944), 134–136, 173–174; Richardson, Puritanism in North-West England, 92–93.
344. Joan Thirsk, “The Family,” Past and Present, 27 (1964), 118.
345. Morgan, Puritan Family, 19–21.
346. Nicholas Roberts to Samuel and Elizabeth Shrimpton, July 1671; 10 October 1674, Shrimpton Papers, Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston.
347. Nathaniel Mather to Increase Mather, 26 March 1684, Massachusetts Historical Society. Morgan has pointed out the importance placed by the Puritans on maintaining kinship relationships, especially when separations occurred. The Puritan Family, 150.
348. 3 May 1675, Shrimpton Papers, Massachusetts Historical Society.
349. Louisa Dresser, “Portrait of Miss Eggington, Granddaughter of John Cotton,” Wadsworth Athenaeum, Bulletin, 5th Ser., III (1959), 1–9. Also see Dresser, “Boston Portraits,” 9. A label on the back of this picture identifies the portrait as John Cotton’s granddaughter “taken after death.” The curators of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, believe that the portrait, or possiblyjust the head, was taken from life. Given the awkward assembling of the head and the rest of the body, I would agree with the nineteenth-century inscription until further evidence is available. Fairbanks and Trent, eds., New England Begins, III, 457. The custom of taking portraits from death beds, particularly of youngsters, continued into the eighteenth century: Charles Willson Peale was occasionally asked to do so, and only reluctantly consented.
350. J. L. Sibley, Biographical Sketches of Graduates of Harvard University, 3 vols. (Cambridge, Mass.), III, 327–334, s.v. Henry Gibbs; Walter Kendall Watkins, “The Robert Gibbs House, Boston,” Old-Time New England, XXII (1932), 193–196; Fairbanks and Trent, eds., New England Begins, III, 458–459.
351. Fairbanks and Trent, eds., New England Begins, III, 460–462, 462–463. The portrait of John Freake, circa 1674, is at the Worcester Art Museum, Worcester, Mass.
352. Roy Strong, English Icon, 27.
353. See Miller and Johnson, eds., The Puritans, I, 19–41, especially 29–31; Miller, The New England Mind, 154–180, especially 165–169; Bercovitch, Puritan Origins, 910; E. H. Gombrich, “Icones Symbolicae: The Visual Image in Neo-Platonic Thought,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, XI (1948), 163–192.
354. Bernard Berenson, Italian Painters of the Renaissance (Cleveland, Ohio, 1962), 153.
355. Quoted in Strong, English Icon, 29.
356. Fairbanks and Trent, eds., New England Begins, III, 472.
357. Will of Thomas Smith, 20 October 1688; and Inventory of Thomas Smith, 25 April 1691. Suffolk County Probate Court Office, Boston. A mariner’s career was the assumption of Dr. F. L. Weis, who found a Thomas Smith, mariner, mentioned in Bermuda manuscripts. See Dresser, XVIIth Century Painting, 135. Smith’s occupation is corroborated by his will, which calls him mariner, and by the items included in his inventory which suggest a life involved in overseas trade, including trade with Holland.
358. John Weever, Ancient Funerall Monuments (London, 1631), 10.
359. Mather, Magnalia Christi Americana, Bk. III, 50.
360. Alexander D. Wainwright, “Jonathan Belcher: Notes on a Recently Acquired Portrait of an Early Benefactor of the Princeton Library,” Princeton University Library, Chronicle, XIV (1953), 169–176, especially 172.
361. Frank R. Holmes, comp., Dictionary of the Ancestral Heads of New England Families, 1620–1700 (Baltimore, 1974); William H. Whitmore, “Boston Families Prior to A.D. 1700,” in Winsor, ed., Memorial History of Boston, I, 557–588. Many studies have built on Whitmore’s lists. See Frederick C. Jaher, The Urban Establishment: Upper Strata in Boston, New York, Charleston, Chicago, and Los Angeles (Urbana and Chicago, 1982), 15–20; James Henretta, “Economic Development and Social Structure in Colonial Boston,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3d Ser., XXII (1965), 574–582; Bernard Bailyn, The New England Merchants in the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge, Mass., 1955), 135–139.
362. Charles Knowles Bolton, The Founders: Portraits of Persons Born Abroad who Came to the Colonies in North America before the Year 1701, 3 vols. (Boston, 1919, 1926); Rosamond Humm, Children in America: A Study of Images and Attitudes (Atlanta, 1978), 12; Fairbanks and Trent, eds., New England Begins, III, 458.
363. Whitmore, “Boston Families,” in Winsor, ed. Memorial History of Boston, I, 559–588.
364. Inventory of Estate of Henry Shrimpton, 24 July 1666, Suffolk County Probate Office, Boston.
365. Will of Samuel Shrimpton, 5 June 1697; Inventory of Samuel Shrimpton, 22 January 1704; Executors Accompt., May 1712; Accmpt. Estate Samuel Shrimpton Dec’d, 15 May 1712, Suffolk County Probate Office.
366. From the mid-fourteenth century to the Reformation, alabaster carvings in the form of small panels or figures were produced in various centers in England. Intended as altar pieces, they frequently were made in series narrating incidents in the lives of saints. Norwich churches and the cathedral owned such works. See P. Lasko and N.J. Morgan, eds., Medieval Art in East Anglia 1300–1520 (Norwich, 1973), 30; illus., 41, 42, 55, 56. The presence of such images in Shrimpton’s estate, and in others in the early eighteenth century, suggests the secularization process taking place in former Puritan families: Henry Shrimpton, the family’s founder, had been a member of the Boston congregation.
367. Will of Elizabeth Stoddard, 11 April 1713; Inventory of Elizabeth Stoddard, 15 July 1713. Suffolk County Probate Office. Also see Inventory in Stoddard Papers, Massachusetts Historical Society.
368. Early Records in Probate, New Series, I; Abbott Lowell Cummings, ed., Rural Household Inventories (Boston, 1964); Abbott Lowell Cummings, Bed Hangings (Boston, 1961).
369. Bailyn, New England Merchants, 139–140.
370. Strong, English Icon, 37–41; also see ars moriendi files at Warburg Institute Photographic Library, University of London on the numerous 16th and 17th century Italian, Dutch, and English paintings that include the memento mori symbolism.
371. For discussion of the emblem and its tradition, see Mario Praz, Studies in Seventeenth-Century Imagery (Rome, 1964); R. Freeman, English Emblem Books (London, 1948). For meanings of emblem in the seventeenth century, see Henry Cockburn, The English Dictionarie of 1623 (New York, 1930), 59; Edward Phillips, comp., The New World of Words: or, Universal English Dictionary (London, 1706).
372. Fairbanks and Trent, eds., New England Begins, HI, 469, 474; Dresser, XVIIth Century Painting in New England, 135.
373. See Nancy Lee Beatty, The Craft of Dying: A Study in the Literary Tradition of the Ars Moriendi in England (New Haven, Conn., 1970).
374. Quoted in Beatty, The Craft of Dying, 2–5, 141, 148–149, 197.
375. Peter Benes, The Masks of Orthodoxy: Folk Gravestone Carvings in Plymouth County, Massachusetts, 1689–1805 (Amherst, Mass., 1977), 43, 47, 56, 91, 93, 103.
376. Benes, Masks of Orthodoxy, 2, 45; Joseph Allard has interpreted this painting as representing a Puritan “saint of the same general category as Cotton Mather.” “The Painted Sermon: The Self-Portrait of Thomas Smith,” Journal of American Studies X (1976). 347.
377. Martha Gandy Fales, “The Early American Way of Death,” Essex Institute, Historical Collections, C (1964), 75–84; Edwin Dethlefsen and James Deetz, “Death’s Heads, Cherubs, and Willow Trees: Experimental Archaeology in Colonial Cemeteries,” American Antiquity, XXXI (1966), 502–510; David E. Stannard, The Puritan Way of Death: A Study in Religion, Culture and Social Change (New York, 1977), 111–112.
378. Benes, Masks of Orthodoxy, 56.
379. Quoted in Marian Smith, ed., The Artist in Tribal Society: Proceedings of a Symposium held at the Royal Anthropological Institute (New York, 1961), 124.
380. Norman Grabo, “The Veiled Vision: The Role of Aesthetics in Early American Intellectual History,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3d Ser., XIX (1962), 499.
381. Michael Wigglesworth, “The Prayse of Eloquence,” 1650, in Miller and Johnson, eds., The Puritans, II, 674–675. Also see Emory Elliott, Power and the Pulpit in Puritan New England (Princeton, N.J., 1975), viii.
382. My view of the relevant perspectives, like my title, is indebted to an unpublished but seminal essay by Patrick Collinson, “The Godly: Aspects of Popular Protestantism in Elizabethan England” (paper delivered at the Past and Present Conference on Popular Religion, 1966). Some of the paper’s argument and evidence is summarized in idem, The Elizabethan Puritan Movement (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1967), 372–382. Collinson’s The Religion of Protestants: The Church in English Society, 1559–1625 (Oxford, 1982), which deals with the same themes at greater length, especially in chaps. 5–6, appeared too late to be more than noted at a few points in this essay.
383. The “Orders” are printed in Roland Greene Usher, ed., The Presbyterian Movement in the Reign of Queen Elizabeth as Illustrated in the Minute Book of the Dedham Classis, 1582–1589 (Royal Historical Society, Publications, 3d Ser., VIII [London, 1905]), 99–101. (Item 8 is found at 99.) For the context, see Collinson, The Elizabethan Puritan Movement, 222–239, and for the hawks, Nicholas Bownd, The Doctrine of the Sabbath … (London, 1595), 131–132.
384. The covenant of the New England Dedham is reprinted and discussed in Kenneth Lockridge, A New England Town, the First Hundred Years: Dedham, Massachusetts, 1636–1736 (New York, 1970), 6–9. Similar arrangements may be found at Kilsby in Northamptonshire and in the proposed “Orders and dealings” for the town of Northampton itself. See W. J. Sheils, The Puritans in the Diocese of Peterborough, 1558–1610 (Northamptonshire Record Society, Publications, XXX [Northampton, 1979]), 56, 120–122; W. Ryland, D. Akins and R.M. Sergeantson, eds., The Victoria History of the County of Northamptonshire, II (Westminster, 1906), 44–45. For the problems local feuds caused the ministers of the Dedham classis (as well as their willingness to use coercion when mediation failed), see Usher, ed., The Presbyterian Movement in the Reign of Queen Elizabeth, 47, 71.
385. The phrases in quotation come from George Gifford, A Briefe Discource of Certaine Points of the Religion … which may bee termed the Countrie Divinitie … (London, 1583), f. 84 [i.e., 83]r. The authoritarian, coercive aspects of Puritanism seem curiously absent from New England local studies, especially when one considers the importance assigned the point in the recent English historiography. Cf. Paul Slack, “Poverty and Politics in Salisbury, 1597–1666,” in Peter Clark and Paul Slack, eds., Crisis and Order in English Towns, 1500–1700 (London, 1972), 164–203; Peter Clark, English Provincial Society from the Reformation to the Revolution: Religion, Politics and Society in Kent, 1500–1640 (Hassocks, Sussex), chap. 5, esp. 173–184; idem, “‘The Ramoth-Gilead of the Good’: Urban Change and Political Radicalism at Gloucester, 1540–1640,” in Peter Clark et al., eds., The English Commonwealth, 1547–1640: Essays in Politics and Society Presented to Joel Hurstfield (Leicester, 1979), 167–187; Keith Wrightson and David Levine, Poverty and Piety in an English Village: Terling, 1575–1700 (New York, 1979). For an overview of this approach see Christopher Hill, “Parliament and People in Seventeenth-Century England,” Past & Present, 92 (1981), 118–122. But cf. the observations of Patrick Collinson, partly confirmatory, partly skeptical: “Magistracy and Ministry, a Suffolk Miniature,” in R. Buick Knox, ed., Reformation, Conformity, and Dissent: Essays in Honour of Geoffrey Nuttall (London, 1977), 70–91; Collinson, The Religion of Protestants, 153–177, 216–230, 239–241.
386. George Selement and Bruce C. Woolley, eds., Thomas Sliepard's Confessions (Colonial Society of Massachusetts, Collections, LVIII [Boston, 1981]), 193–194, hereafter cited as Selement and Woolley, eds., Thomas Shepard's Confessions. See also the fifteenth of the “Common Grevances Groaninge for Reformation” in Wyeth’s home county of Suffolk (Allyn B. Forbes et al., eds., Winthrop Papers, 1498–1649 [Boston, 1929–1947], I, 304), where complaint is made of “many bad minded people” who “doe take occasion by Justices and ecclesiasticall courtes to ponish and often to [force to] doe pennance” those who leave a sermonless parish to hear a neighboring preacher.
387. “Rev. Michael Wigglesworth, His Memoir, Autobiography, Letters, and Library,” New England Historical and Genealogical Register, XVII (1863), 137.
388. The Batley connection is established in “Lane Family Papers,” New England Historical and Genealogical Register, XI (1857), 110n.–111n. For incipient sectarianism at Morley and Woodkirk chapelries in the parish, see Ronald A. Marchant, The Puritans and the Church Courts in the Diocese of York, 1560–1642 (London, 1960), 108–111, and for the separatist sentiments of Rogers’s company, John Winthrop, The History of New England, from 1630 to 1649 … ed. James Savage (Boston, 1853), I, 335.
389. Increase Mather, The Life and Death of Mr. Richard Mather, Dorchester Antiquarian and Historical Society, Collections, III (Boston, 1850 [orig. publ. Cambridge, Mass., 1670]), 45; R. C. Richardson, Puritanism in North-West England: A Regional Study of the Diocese of Chester to 1642 (Manchester, 1972), 16–17, 153–176; Mark H. Curtis, “The Trials of a Puritan in Jacobean Lancashire,” in C. Robert Cole and Michael E. Moody, eds., The Dissenting Tradition: Essaysfor Leland H. Carlson (Athens, Ohio, 1975), 78–99; Richard Parkinson, ed., The Life of Adam Martindale (Chetham Society, Remains, IV [Manchester, 1845]), 12, 12n.–13n.
390. J. A. Newton, “Puritanism in the Diocese of York (excluding Nottinghamshire), 1603–40” (Ph.D. diss., Univ. of London, 1955), 293–304; John Bossy, The English Catholic Community, 1560–1850 (New York, 1976), 88–89.
391. Samuel Rawson Gardiner, ed., Reports of Cases in the Courts of Star Chamber and High Commission (Camden Society, Publications, N.S., XXXIX [1886]), 149ff.; John Stedman of Sutton Survey in Selement and Woolley, eds., Thomas Shepard's Confessions, 73–74. See also the divisive impact of Arthur Hildersham’s long (if frequently fugitive) ministry at Ashby-de-la-Zouch, Leicestershire, n. 3, p. 208 below, and the discussions in Shiels, The Puritans in the Diocese of Peterborough, 131–134; Collinson, The Religion of Protestants, 230–239, 252–268; idem, “Cranbrook and the Fletchers: Popular and Unpopular Religion in the Kentish Weald,” in Peter Newman Brooks, ed., Reformation Principle and Practice: Essays in Honour of Arthur Geoffrey Dickens (London, 1980), 171–202; William Hunt, The Puritan Moment: The Coming of Revolution in an English County (Cambridge, Mass., 1983), 146–155.
392. An Entire Commentary upon the Whole Epistle of St. Paul to the Ephesians … , Nichol’s Series of Commentaries, XI (Edinburgh, 1866 [orig. publ. London, 1618]), 323
393. Selement and Woolley, eds., Thomas Shepard's Confessions, 173.
394. Parkinson, ed., The Life of Adam Martindale, Chetham Soc, Remains, TV, 46–47; Richard Bernard, The Isle of Man: or, the Legall Proceeding in Man-shire against Sinne, 11th ed. (London, 1640), 16–17.
395. Winthrop Papers, I, 297; J. Horsfall Turner, ed., The Rev. Oliver Heywood, B.A., 1630–1702 … , I (Brighouse, Eng., 1881), 98, 156; Nehemiah Wallington, Historical Notices of Events Occurring Chiefly in the Reign of Charles I … , ed. R. Webb, I (London, 1869), 132–133; Thomas Wright, ed., The Autobiography of Joseph Lister, of Bradford in Yorkshire … (London, 1842), 8–9. For other instances of conventicling and general discussion, see Stephen Foster, “New England and the Challenge of Heresy, 1630–1660: The Puritan Crisis in Transatlantic Perspective,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3d Ser., XXXVIII (1981), 626–629, as well as the sources cited in ibid., 626n–627n.
396. For cases of anti-Puritan rioting and other abuse, see Brian Manning, “Religion and Politics: The Godly People,” in Politics, Religion and the English Civil War, ed. Brian Manning (London, 1973), 91–95. Another instance, not noted in Manning, may be found in Roger Hayden, ed., The Records of a Church of Christ in Bristol, 1640–1687 (Bristol Record Society, Publications, XXVII [Gateshead, Eng. 1974]), 84, 86. And for Puritan participation in violence towards “papists” and the “vulgar,” see Brian Manning, The English People and the English Revolution, 1640–1649 (London, 1976), 238–254; Hunt, The Puritan Moment, 284–310, passim.
397. William Bradford, History of Plymouth Plantation (Boston, 1912), I, 17–18.
398. Selement and Woolley, eds., Thomas Shepard's Confessions, 106–109. The editors unfortunately confuse this John Trumbull with another man of the same name, a cooper who hailed from Newcastle and settled at Roxbury. The tangle is unraveled in J. Henry Lea, “Contributions to a Trumbull Genealogy,” New England Historical and Genealogical Register, XLLX (1895), 148–152, but Lea’s suggestion, 151, that the Cambridge John Trumbull was born in Wapping does not seem to fit either: the locale was hardly “without means.” See Paul Seaver, The Puritan Lectureships: The Politics of Religious Dissent, 1560–1662 (Stanford, Calif., 1970), 186–199.
399. For contemporary verdicts on this point, see Richard Baxter, Reliquiae Baxterianae … (London, 1691), 88, 89, 90; John Corbet, An Historicall Relation of the Military Government of Gloucester, in John Washbourn, ed., Bibliotheca Gloucestrensis (Gloucester, 1825 [orig. publ. London, 1645]), 10, 14. On the importance of market towns to the Puritan movement, see Richardson, Puritanism in North-West England, 11–14; Margaret Spufford, Contrasting Communities: English Villagers in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Cambridge, 1974), 232n; Collinson, “Magistracy and Ministry,” in Knox, ed., Reformation, Conformity, and Dissent, 73–79; Collinson, The Religion of Protestants, 247–248. There is a prudent and well-informed discussion of the social and geographic conditions conducive to religious nonconformity in Spufford, Contrasting Communities, 298–318.
400. William Prynne, A New Discovery of the Prelates Tyranny . . . (London, 1641), 214; Richardson, Puritanism in North-West England, 182–183; Peter Clark, “Thomas Scott and the Growth of Urban Opposition to the Early Stuart Regime,” Historical Journal, XXI (1978), 1–26; S.P. 16/276, f. 124r., Public Record Office; Stephen Foster, Notesfrom the Caroline Underground: Alexander Leighton, the Puritan Triumvirate, and the Laudian Reaction to Nonconformity, Studies in British History and Culture, VI (Hamden, Conn., 1978), 47–48.
401. Cf. Hayden, ed., The Records of a Church of Christ in Bristol, 85, 88; Winthrop Papers, II, 178; Roger Howell, Jr., Newcastle-upon-Tyne and the Puritan Revolution (Oxford, 1967), 89–94, 102–103; T. H. Breen and Stephen Foster, “Moving to the New World: the Character of Early Massachusetts Immigration,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3d Ser., XXX (1973), 206–207, 222; Kenneth W. Shipps, “The Puritan Emigration to New England: A New Source on Motivation,” New England Historical and Genealogical Register, CXXXV (1981), 83–97.
402. Oliver Hey wood, Oliver Hey wood's Life of John Angler of Denton, ed. Ernest Axon (Chetham Society, Remains, N.S., XCVII [Manchester, Eng., 1937]), 68–69.
403. George H. Williams et al., eds., Thomas Hooker: Writings in England and Holland, 1626–1633, Harvard Theological Studies, XXVIII (Cambridge, Mass., 1975), 49, 6770; Kenneth W. Shipps, “Lay Patronage of East Anglican Puritan Clerics in Pre-Revolutionary England” (Ph.D. diss., Yale University, 1971), 116; Cotton Mather, Magnalia Christi Americana, or the Ecclesiastical History of New England … , ed. Thomas Robbins (Hartford, Conn., 1853), I, 345.
404. SP16/142/f.239r., Public Record Office; “Letter of the Rev. Thomas Welde, 1633,” Colonial Society of Massachusetts, Transactions, XIII (1912), 130–131; John Eliot to Richard Baxter, Oct. 7, 1657, in F.J. Powicke, ed., “Some Unpublished Correspondence of the Reverend Richard Baxter and the Reverend John Eliot,” Bulletin of the John Rylands Library, XV (1931), 159–160; Shipps, “Lay Patronage of East Anglian Clerics in Pre-Revolutionary England,” 116–118, 204 (for the indirect impact of Hooker on the laity of Braintree).
405. The insularity of country life in Stuart England is emphasized, perhaps overemphasized, in Alan E veritt, Change in the Provinces: The Seventeenth Century, Leicester University Department of English Local History, Occasional Papers, 2d Ser., I (Leicester, 1969). The special role as “brokers” of the national culture that was ordinarily reserved to the professional and landed classes is discussed in Clive Holmes, Seventeenth-Century Lincolnshire, History of Lincolnshire, VII (Lincoln, 1980), 47–87; F.J. Levy, “How Information Spread among the Gentry, 1550–1640,” Journal of British Studies, XXI (1982), 11–34. The beginnings of an educated public eager for “News” has been discussed in many places, but perhaps in its broadest cultural context in D. F. McKenzie, The London Book Trade in the Later Seventeenth Century, the Sandars Lectures for 1976 (privately printed, 1982), 1–11. For the ordinary man’s other source of information, see Peter Clark, “The Alehouse and the Alternative Society,” in Donald Pennington and Keith Thomas, eds., Puritans and Revolutionaries: Essays in Seventeenth-Century History Presented to Christopher Hill (Oxford, 1978), 47–72.
406. The classic study of this second, “golden age” of English Puritanism is William Haller, The Rise of Puritanism; Or, The Way to the New Jerusalem as Set Forth in Pulpit and Press from Thomas Cartwright to John Lilburne and John Milton, 1570–1643 (New York, 1938). A number of works deal in whole or in part with Puritan practical divinity, but all are to one extent or another superseded by the recent publication of Charles E. Hambrick-Stowe, The Practice of Piety: Puritan Devotional Disciplines in Seventeenth-Century New England (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1982). See also Collinson, The Religion of Protestants, 258–273.
407. Selement and Woolley, eds., Thomas Shepard's Confessions, 102–105.
408. Ibid., 184–186.
409. Bownd, The Doctrine of the Sabbath, 223–230 (the quotation occurs at 224 margin). Cf. Richard Greenham, A Treatise of the Sabbath, in The Workes, Collected into One Volume, ed. Henry Holland (London, 1605), 213; Hunt, The Puritan Moment, 196–202, 274–275.
410. Nicholas Bownd, The Holy Exercise of Fasting … (Cambridge, 1604), 227–229. See Foster, Notes from the Caroline Underground, 16–18, 50; Horton Davies, Worship and Theology in Englandfrom Andrewes to Baxter and Foxe, 1603–1690 (Princeton, 1975), 245–249; Collinson, The Religion of Protestants, 260–264.
411. Hildersham’s remarks may be found at Addl. MSS, 4275, f.289, British Library. In the course of his ministry at Ashby from 1543 to 1631 he was suspended on four occasions, spent the years 1613 to 1625 in prison or in hiding (while carrying on clandestine activities), encouraged a bitter factional dispute in the parish, and patronized conventicles of his following. See Stuart Barton Babbage, Puritanism and Richard Bancroft (London, 1962), 185–186; Benjamin Brook, The Lives of the Puritans (London, 1813), III, 383n–384n.
412. Quoted in Spufford, Contrasting Communities, 231–232.
413. Selement and Woolley, eds., The Confessions of Thomas Shepard, 176–177; Thomas Shepard, Theses Sabbaticae, Or, the Doctrine of the Sabbath (London, 1649), 48. On the origins of Puritan Sabbatarianism, see Patrick Collinson, “The Beginnings of English Sabbatarianism,” Studies in Church History, I (1964), 207–221; and for a general study, Winton U. Solberg, Redeem the Time: the Puritan Sabbath in Early America (Cambridge, Mass., 1977).
414. See the instances cited in Foster, Notes from the Caroline Underground, 7–8; idem, “New England and the Challenge of Heresy,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3d Ser., XXXVIII (1981), 629, 629n. Cf. also the remarks of Richard Baxter and Thomas Hooker on the separation of the godly: Reliquiae Baxterianae, 91; Williams et al., eds., Thomas Hooker, 117.
415. I have discussed the crisis of the 1630s and its impact on New England elsewhere. See Stephen Foster, “English Puritanism and the Progress of New England Institutions, 1630–1660,” in David D. Hall et al., eds., Saints and Revolutionaries: Essays on Early American History (New York, 1983), 3–37.
416. Winthrop Papers, III (Boston, 1943), 12–13. For the notion that the English alone among Protestant nations understood the “Practicall part” of religion, “the power of godlinesse and the profession thereof, with difference from carnall and formall christions,” see Thomas Goodwin et ah, An Apologeticall Narration … (London, 1643 [i.e., 1644]), 4, 22–23; Thomas Hooker to John Cotton, c. April 1633, Williams et al., eds., Thomas Hooker, 297–298; Shepard, Theses Sabbaticae, Sig. A4r.
417. See Foster, “English Puritanism and the Progress of New England Institutions,” in Hall et al., eds., Saints and Revolutionaries, 17–24.
418. Memoirs of Roger Clap (Dorchester Antiquarian and Historical Society, Collections, I [Boston, 1844]), 21.
419. Winthrop Papers, I, 190–215, III, 342–343.
420. For age at conversion, see Robert Pope, The Half-Way Covenant: Church Membership in Puritan New England (Princeton, 1969), 280–285, and the discussion (as well as the sources cited) in Gerald F. Moran and Maris A. Vinoskis, “The Puritan Family and Religion: a Critical Reappraisal,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3d Ser., XXXLX (1982), 45–46.
421. For a rather dramatic instance of the scarcity of means in early New England, see Jonathan Mitchell’s advice to his brother in 1649. When the latter brought Mitchell the classic complaint of formal knowledge with weak feeling, his solution was familiar in outline—a better organized, more intensive and more integrated spiritual life in place of one practiced in snatches—yet curious in detail, barely mentioning or omitting entirely the ministry, good books, the sabbath or any kind of collective activity besides conferences with a single close friend. Mr. Mitchell's letter to his Brother (Boston, 1732), 3, 4, 11, 13–14. Cf. the stock consolations of Richard Greenham in a similar situation (Workes, 40) or the considerably less solitary regimen proposed by Henry Sands to a troubled John Winthrop (Winthrop Papers, I, 198).
422. For a different account of the restructuring of the New England imagination after 1660, emphasizing the unique and American aspects of the process, see Hambrick-Stowe, The Practice of Piety, 246–277.
423. For English Puritan admiration for the New England fasts, see the diary of Samuel Rogers for August 1636, quoted in Shipps, “The Puritan Emigration to New England,” New England Historical and Genealogical Register, CXXXV (1981), 88. The incidence of public days has been calculated from the table in W. DeLoss Love, Jr., The Fast and Thanksgiving Days of New England (Boston, 1895), 466–478. See also Richard P. Gildrie, “The Ceremonial Puritan: Days of Humiliation and Thanksgiving,” New England Historical and Genealogical Register, CXXXVI (1982), 3–16. The count of fasts and thanksgivings given by Gildrie (ibid., 16 [table]) differs significantly from that derived from Love’s table because he includes only those public days called on the authority of the General Court. There are, however, a few instances of fasts set exclusively by the colony’s churches acting together on their own initiative, and in quite a large number of cases the Council alone, in between sessions of the entire legislature, appointed days of humiliation or thanksgiving. I have consequently followed the Love table here rather than the more recent study.
424. The classic account of the Jeremiad tradition is that of Perry Miller, “Errand into the Wilderness,” in Errand into the Wilderness (Cambridge, Mass., 1956), 1–15; the equally classic revisionist argument on the same subject is Sacvan Bercovitch, The American Jeremiad (Madison, Wisconsin, 1978), 3–30. There is, however, an unfortunate tendency to let Miller’s short article (originally an occasional piece) obscure the complexity of his full dress statements of the same theme, which do take into account the multiple English strands combined into this New England institution. Cf. The New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century, 2d ed. (Cambridge, Mass., 1954), 463–491; The New England Mind: From Colony to Province (Cambridge, Mass., 1953), 19–52.
425. John Cotton, God's Promise to his Plantations . . . (London, 1630), 19; Williams et al., eds., Thomas Hooker, 228–252; Thomas Shepard, Wine for Gospel Wantons; Or Cautions against Spiritual Drunkeness (Cambridge, Mass., 1668). English Puritans, however, never systematically identified their nation, even at its most perverse, with Israel of the prophetic period; indeed, on the eve of the great migration an obvious analogy was the day of humiliation in Joshua 7:6, with the subsequent sanctification of Israel by the stoning of Achan. (The contemporary parallels were not hard to find.) Cf. Henry Burton, Israels Fast, Or a Meditation upon the Seventh Chapter of Joshua, a Faire Precedent for These Times (London, 1628); Arthur Hildersham, The Doctrine of Fasting and Praier, and Humiliation for Sinne (London, 1633). (The later title takes its text from Ecclesiastes but makes extensive use of the seventh chapter of Joshua.)
426. See also Hambrick-Stowe, The Practice of Piety, 100–103, 247–249.
427. Josias Nicholls, An Order of Household Instruction … (London, 1596), Sig. G jr.; Robert Cleaver and John Dod, A Godly Forme of Houshold Government … (London, 1630), Sigs. [X5r.–X6v.]. For this literature and its uses, see Helen C. White, English Devotional Literature (Prose) 1600–1640, University of Wisconsin Studies in Language and Literature XXIX (Madison, Wise, 1931); Hambrick-Stowe, The Practice of Piety, 157–161; Margaret Spufford, Small Books and Pleasant Histories: Popular Fiction and its Readership in Seventeenth-Century England (Athens, Ga., 1981), 194–218.
428. These totals are compiled from Charles Evans, American Bibliography, I (Chicago, 1903); Roger P. Bristol, Supplement to Charles Evans’ American Bibliography (Charlottesville, Va., 1970). I have dropped all obvious ghosts from the count, but some spurious titles have undoubtedly crept in anyway, without, however, much altering the general drift of the figures presented in the text. The definition of intellectual and imaginative content is necessarily a bit arbitrary, but these figures do include catechisms, law codes (as opposed to individual statutes), and the minority of proclamations with substantial religious commentary. The omission of all three of these categories would do little except to make the contrast between the earlier and later decades of the seventeenth century more marked still.
429. For Johnson, see George Parker Winship, The Cambridge Press, 1638–1692 … (Philadelphia, 1945); Benjamin Franklin, V, ed., Boston Printers, Publishers, and Booksellers: 1640–1680 (Boston, 1980), 303–309. The history of printing in seventeenth-century New England is an often told story, but for a concise and critical account, see Samuel Eliot Morison, The Puritan Pronaos: Studies in the Intellectual Life of New England in the Seventeenth Century (New York, 1936), 110–129. In the ten years prior to Johnson’s permanent settlement in 1665, the Cambridge press produced 17 titles in English with some sort of intellectual content; for the ten years 1665 to 1674 (the year of Johnson’s death) the number is 72. In the next ten years, 1675–1684, the equivalent is 131 titles, with the large majority coming from Boston, not Cambridge.
430. Carl Bridenbaugh, Cities in the Wilderness: The First Century of Urban Life in America (New York, 1938), 32–34; Winship, The Cambridge Press, 280–281, 328. See also, Bernard Bailyn, The New England Merchants in the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge, Mass., 1955), 95–98.
431. The figures are derived from Worthington C. Ford, The Boston Book Market, 1679–1700 (Boston, 1917), 88–182; Roger Thompson, “Worthington Chauncey Ford’s Boston Book Market, 1679–1700: Some Corrections and Additions,” Massachusetts Historical Society, Proceedings, LXXXVI (1974), 68–78. (The eighty-four copies—from five separate entries—are of John Fox, Time and the End of Time, a tract by a nonconformist English minister first published in 1670 and running to at least an eighth edition by 1700. For the author—not to be confused with the Elizabethan martyrologist—see Dictionary of National Biography, s.v. “Fox, John.”) After quantity of individual shipments, the next most interesting figure would be overall frequency of importation, and here the lists in Ford, The Boston Book Market, 121–150, are particularly revealing. They are invoices between John Ive (the agent for John Usher) and Richard Chiswell and probably represent the entire transactions for a period of just over a year (3 March 1684 to 13 April 1685) between the most important of the Boston booksellers and the major London wholesaler of books to the colonies. Three lists yield 202 separate entries in all, a total of 1,755 volumes, but only two titles, Charles Hoole’s Sententiae Pueriles and his edition of Cato, accounted for more than a hundred copies each. (For Hoole’s Cato, see Thompson, “Worthington Chauncey Ford’s Boston Book Market,” Massachusetts Historical Society, Proceedings, LXXXVI, 69, 74). Only twenty-one titles were shipped in lots of 20 or more, and eleven of these are schoolbooks (most, like Hoole, in Latin) or works of reference. Of the ten titles remaining, the leader was an English edition of the Bay Psalm book at 70 copies, followed by James Janeway, A Token for Children (60 copies), and Time, and the End of Time (50 copies). By 1685 there had already been five American editions of the psalms, and there would be another two by 1700, while both Janeway and Fox subsequently went through numerous colonial reprintings. The obvious conclusion would be that the import trade served as a supplement to the products of the domestic presses and not, as is generally supposed, the other way around.
432. For the Bay Psalm Book, see Winship, The Cambridge Press, 21–34, 143–149; for The Day of Doom, see below, n. 60. For an edition of a 1,000 copies in 1705, see Worthington C. Ford, ed., Diary of Cotton Mather, 1681–1708 (Massachusetts Historical Society, Collections, 7th Ser., VII [Boston, 1911]), 520. A similarly large edition in 1717 may be found at ibid., VIII (Boston, 1913), 462. Other press runs from the first half of the 18th century may be found in Rollo G. Silver, “Publishing in Boston, 1726–1757: The Accounts of Daniel Henchman,” American Antiquarian Society, Proceedings, N.S., LXVI (1956).
433. The discussion that follows is heavily indebted to Graham Pollard, “The English Market for Printed Books,” Publishing History, IV (1978), 7–48; John Feather, “Cross Channel Currents: Historical Bibliography and Vhistoire du livre,” The Library, 6th Ser., II (1980), 1–15. An account of the constraints placed on the import trade at a somewhat later date may be found in Stephen Botein, “The Anglo-American Book Trade before 1776: Personnel and Strategies,” in William L. Joyce et al., eds., Printing and Society in Early America (Worcester, Mass., 1983), 48–82. (Botein characterizes the book trade before about 1750, p. 16, as “sluggish.”)
434. Ford, The Boston Book Market, 13–14, 83–84. See also W. T. Baxter, The House of Hancock: Business in Boston, 1724–1775, Harvard Studies in Business History, X (Cambridge, Mass., 1945), Chaps. II–IV, esp. 45–48; and his “Daniel Henchman, A Colonial Bookseller,” Essex Institute, Historical Collections, LXX (1934), 1–30. Cf., Pollard, “The English Market for Printed Books,” Publishing History, IV (1978), 29; Feather, “Cross Channel Currents,” Library, 6th Ser., II (1980), 6–8; Bailyn, New England Merchants, 99–101.
435. See Pollard, “The English Market for Printed Books,” Publishing History, IV (1978), 25–34; Terry Belanger, “Bookseller’s Sales of Copyright: Aspects of the London Book Trade, 1718–1768” (Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 1970), 1–6 (summarizing the state of the trade at the end of the 17th century); idem, “Publishers and Writers in Eighteenth-Century England,” in Isabel Rivers, ed., Books and Their Readers in Eighteenth-Century England (New York, 1982), 7–18.
436. The definitive account of the conger by Cyprian Blagden is hidden away beneath an understated title as Norma Hodgson and Cyprian Blagden, eds., The Notebook of Thomas Bennet and Henry Clements (1686–1710) With Some Aspects of Book Trade Practice (Oxford Bibliographical Society, Publications, N.S., VI [Oxford, 1953]), 67–100, hereinafter cited as Hodgson and Blagden, eds., Notebook. Evidence for the early activities of Boulter and Chiswell may be found in ibid., 216–218. See also Pollard, “The English Market for Printed Books,” Publishing History, TV (1978), 25–34.
437. For Bayly, see Hodgson and Blagden, eds., Notebook, 83–84, 122. The other methods of obtaining copies of titles to which another stationer held copyright were “exchange” (barter) and pre-sale subscription. See ibid., 74–75; Cyprian Blagden, “The Memorandum Book of Henry Rhodes, 1695–1720,” The Book Collector, III (1954), 108–113; John Dunton, The Life and Errors of John Dunton, Citizen of London … (London, 1818), 62. Comparison of the inventory of the stock of the New England bookseller Michael Perry in 1700 with those of a few of his counterparts in provincial English cities indicates the fundamental similarity of their operations. In each instance most of the entries are for one or two copies of a moderately expensive title intended for the bibliophiles, while severely practical titles (especially school texts and catechisms) and religious best sellers occur in somewhat larger quantities. There is, however, a single, highly significant difference: Perry alone did carry a few items in lots of a hundred or even more, all of them printed in New England. Like his London suppliers, and in this one respect unlike his English provincial equivalents, he was also a significant publisher and (judging from some of the domestic titles bearing the imprint of other Boston booksellers) a wholesaler. Cf., The Boston Book Market, 163–182; Robert Davies, A Memoir of the York Press (London, 1868), 342–371; W. Harry Rylands, “Booksellers and Stationers in Warrington, 1639 to 1657, with a Full List of a Stationer’s Shop there in 1647,” Historical Society of Lancashire and Cheshire, Transactions, XXXVII (Liverpool, 1888), 67–115; C. W. Chilton, “The Inventory of a Provincial Bookseller’s Stock of 1644,” The Library, 6th Ser., I (1979), 126–143.
438. For the conger publication of Tillotson, see Hodgson and Blagden, eds., Notebook, 85, 186–187; for Tillotson in America, Norman Fiering, “The First American Enlightenment: Tillotson, Leverett, and Philosophical Anglicanism,” New England Quarterly, LIV (1981), 307–344. A mid-eighteenth century “network” of readers of imported titles on liberal religion is uncovered and described in Elizabeth Carroll Reilly, “The Wages of Piety: The Boston Book Trade of Jeremy Condy,” in Joyce, et al., eds. Printing and Society in Early America, 83–125. On the other hand, one has only to examine Clifford K. Shipton and James E. Mooney, comp., National Index of American Imprints through 1800: The Short-Title Evans, 2 vols. ([Worcester, Mass.], 1969), s.v. “Doolittle, Thomas,” “Flavell, John,” “Janeway, James,” “Keach, Benjamin,” and “Wilcox, Thomas,” to note the sustained popularity of works by Dissenting Restoration divines in eighteenth-century New England reprints. For some of this literature, see C. John Sommerville, Popular Religion in Restoration England, Univ. of Fla. Social Science Monographs, LIX (Gainesville, Fla., 1977), 33–60; Hambrick-Stowe, The Practice of Piety, 266–268. See also David D. Hall, “The World of Print and Collective Mentality in Seventeenth-Century New England,” in John Higham and Paul K. Conkin, eds., New Directions in American Intellectual History (Baltimore, 1979). 166–180; and his “The Uses of Literacy in New England, 1600–1850,” in Joyce, et al., eds., Printing and Society in Early America, 28–36.
439. Using the same sources as in n. 2, p. 220 above, with the same precautions against ghosts, yields 54 English titles reprinted in America between 1664 and 1700, and I have not counted catechisms, publications of an official nature, almanacs and prognostications, writing manuals, or extracts from newspapers. A handful of the 54 probably earned a quick American reprint because their topicality precluded waiting for imported copies, and some of the rest may have been out of print in England itself (though the well-known deficiencies in the Wing Short Title Catalogue, even in the revised volumes, preclude any very definite conclusions on this point). Nonetheless, English supplies should have been available for many, perhaps most. As of 1664, Thomas Shepard’s The Sincere Convert had already gone through thirteen English editions in twenty-three years but still required an American reprinting in that year. Edward Reyner’s Preceptsfor Christian Practice, first published in 1644, reached its thirteenth edition by 1668, yet enjoyed an American reprinting in 1667. And when William Dyer’s Christ's Famous Titles appeared in Massachusetts in 1672, it had already had English editions in 1662 and 1668 and would have a third the next year, 1673, as well as eight further editions by the end of the century—a circumstance that did not preclude another Boston edition in 1704. Numerous other instances could be adduced without difficulty. Equally, I cannot find any English title in the sources in n. 5, p. 222 above that achieved any degree of volume import and that did not subsequently enjoy multiple New England editions.
440. Cotton Mather, Magnalia Christi Americana, I, 454; Winship, The Cambridge Press, 179–180. After eliminating known and probable ghosts, Richard Mather is still left with more titles in English bearing a pre-1700 New England imprint than any other minister of the founding generation.
441. The early editions of The Day of Doom present a bibliographical tangle. Cf, Matt B. Jones, “Notes for a Bibliography of Michael Wigglesworth’s ‘Day of Doom’ and ‘Meat Out of the Eater,’” American Antiquarian Society, Proceedings, N.S., XXXIX (1929), 77–80; O. M. Brack, Jr., “Michael Wigglesworth and the Attribution of ‘I Walk’d and did a Little Molehill View,’” Seventeenth-Century News, XXVII (1970), 41–44; and Wigglesworth’s own account, reprinted in full in John Langdon Sibley, Biographical Sketches of Graduates of Harvard University … , I (Cambridge, Mass., 1873), 271–272. My own hypothesis is that the figure of 1800 copies sold used by Wigglesworth refers to both the first edition and a now lost 1663–1664 edition suggested by Brack, and that the latter was probably a reissue of the former with some sheets dropped and others added. (The “yeer’s end” by which the 1800 copies were sold would then become 25 March 1664, and the date of the next American edition would be pushed back to 1668.)
442. The popularity of The Day of Doom has to be seen in context: Samuel Smith’s The Great Assize, four sermons on the day of judgment, reached thirty-nine editions between 1615 and 1697; Bernard’s The Isle of Man, an exposition of the nature of sin in the form of an arraignment and trial of various allegorical vices, first published in 1626, ran to nineteen editions by 1683; and the Puritan classic The Plain Man's Pathway to Heaven by Arthur Dent, a comprehensive doctrinal and practical guide in the form of a dramatic dialogue, was at the very least in its twenty-ninth edition when Wigglesworth returned to New England in 1664. The Day of Doom was distinguished by only two things: its ballad form and its near monopoly position in the imaginative life of seventeenth-century New Englanders. (As a matter of fact, there are even English precedents for the use of a ballad to inculcate Protestant dogma: cf. Spufford, Small Books and Pleasant Histories, 10–11; John W. King, English Reformation Literature: The Tudor Origins of the Protestant Tradition [Princeton, 1982], 209–231, 470–472.) In England, in competition with the titles just described and The Pilgrim's Progress, the work enjoyed only the modest success of three editions in twenty-one years.
443. The 30% figure is taken from Morison, The Puritan Pronaos, 124. The count was made without the benefit of the newmaterial added to the total New England bibliography by the Bristol Supplement to Evans’s American Bibliography, but the percentage would not, in fact, change very much. See, in general, David Levin, Cotton Mather: The Young Life of the Lord's Remembrancer, 1663–1703 (Cambridge, Mass., 1978).
444. Cf., a study of all English titles published in 1623 (the year of Shakespeare’s first folio), which notes that of the fifty-seven sermons to appear that year, few were either reissued or reprinted. Their first press run, that is, was exhausted, but there was no market, except in twelve instances, for a second edition. Judith Simmons, “Publications of 1623,” The Library, 5th Ser., XXI (1966), 211–212.
445. This is not to say that there were not some ultra-practical works of the manual variety available in New England, both by English and native authors (including the Mathers). See Hambrick-Stowe, The Practice of Piety, 272–277. I do think, however, Hambrick-Stowe concentrates a little too exclusively on this genre, given its minority position in the total number of religious titles printed in seventeenth-century New England, and is a little generous in his awarding of the description “manual” to works like The Pilgrim's Progress. Whatever its didactic quality, the experience of reading Bunyan’s allegory was not the same as in consulting John Corbet’s Self-Imployment in Secret. The denomination of Bayly’s work as of “central importance” to Puritan piety (Hambrick-Stowe, The Practice of Piety, 269) is particularly unfortunate if one is talking about New England Puritans. The work had only one American edition in English (in 1718), and, as Eliot’s choice of it for his Indian converts suggests, it was clearly regarded as a piece of spiritual juvenalia. Thus, in the only mentions of the book that I can find among New England spiritual autobiographies, Richard Eccles credits it (amongst other titles) with helping to open his eyes when he “was brought up in popery a good many years,” and John Brock, unlike Eccles raised in a Puritan household, treats it as a godly child’s first book of divine knowledge, which he read “through admonitions of [my] Parents” well before he was out of grammar school. See Selement and Woolley, eds., Thomas Shepard's Confessions, 175; Clifford K. Shipton, ed., “The Autobiographical Memoranda of John Brock, 1636–1659,” American Antiquarian Society, Proceedings, N.S., LIII (1943), 97. Cf., the very similar role assigned to the book by Bayly’s most famous English reader: John Bunyan, Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners, ed. Roger Sharrock (Oxford, 1962), 8.
446. A Treasurie or Store-House of Similies … , 2d ed. (London, 1609), 220–221.
447. John Field and Thomas Wilcox, An Admonition to the Parliament, in W. H. Frere and C. E. Douglas, eds., Puritan Manifestoes: A Study of the Origin of the Puritan Revolt, 2d ed. (London, 1954), 16. Cf., The Cambridge Platform in Williston Walker, The Creeds and Platforms of Congregationalism (New York, 1893), 211.
448. David D. Hall, The Faithful Shepherd: A History of the New England Ministry in the Seventeenth Century (Chapel Hill, N. C, 1972), 95; Emil Oberholzer, Jr., Delinquent Saints: Disciplinary Action in the Early Congregational Churches of Massachusetts (New York, 1956), esp. Tables I–IX, 253–260; David Thomas Konig, Law and Society in Puritan Massachusetts, Essex County, 1629–1692 (Chapel Hill, N. C, 1979), 90–107; David Grayson Allen, In English Ways: The Movement of Societies and the Transferal of English Local Law and Custom to Massachusetts Bay in the Seventeenth Century (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1981), 226–227. William E. Nelson in Dispute and Conflict Resolution in Plymouth County, Massachusetts, 1725–1825 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1981), 26–44, argues that in this jurisdiction the church remained the more important judicial agency prior to 1774. The colony of New Plymouth does seem to have been a standing exception to the generalizations made here about grand juries in the late 17th century (see below, nn 6, p. 234; 7, p. 235, and it is possible that the difference carried over into the eighteenth century in Plymouth County. But see also J. M. Bumsted, “The Pilgrims Progress: The Ecclesiastical History of the Old Colony, 1670–1775” (Ph.D. thesis, Brown University, 1965), 72–74, 86–94, who suggests that in discipline, as in church government generally, Plymouth tended towards anachronism, importing its institutions from the Bay just as they were going out of fashion there, so that the 18th-century practices were new, not survivals of an earlier era.
449. For the English grand jury in this period, see J. S. Morrill, The Cheshire Grand Jury, 1625–1659: A Social and Administrative Study, Leicester University Department of English Local History, Occasional Papers, 3d Ser., I (Leicester, 1976).
450. Cf. the English oath in ibid., 21–22, with the Bay Colony oath, The Book of the General Lawes and Libertyes Concerning the Inhabitants of the Massachusetts … (Cambridge, Mass., 1648), 58. The Connecticut oath is very similar to that of the Bay, but New Plymouth’s is a pale copy of the English original. J. Hammond Trumbull, ed., The Public Records of the Colony of Connecticut … , I (Hartford, Conn., 1850), 546; Nathaniel B. Shurtleff, ed., Records of the Colony of New Plymouth in New England, XI (Boston, 1861), 85, 169.
451. For the English pattern of repetition and the status of the jurors, see Morrill, The Cheshire Grand Jury, 9–20. The generalizations presented here are derived from an analysis of the Suffolk and Essex County grand juries for the 1670s, taken from Samuel Eliot Morison, ed., Records of the Suffolk County Court, 1671–1680 (Colonial Society of Massachusetts, Publications, XXIX–XXX [Boston, 1933]); George F. Dow and Mary G. Thresher, eds., Records and Files of the Quarterly Courts of Essex County, Massachusetts, IV–IX (Salem and Worcester, 1914–1975). The observation applies, however, with equal if not greater force to the Connecticut county courts after their creation in 1666 and to other small jurisdictions, such as York and Norfolk counties, because the number of jury positions, grand and petit, was so large, and the size of the eligible population so limited, that even with frequent repetition and (in the case of Connecticut and York County) annual terms, a sizable chunk of the adult male inhabitants had to be recruited as jurors just to keep the courts in operation. (The split jurisdictions in Essex and Norfolk counties had a similar effect.) Plymouth, as ever, did things differently, failing to establish county government until 1685, the year before the colony was absorbed into the Dominion of New England. See George D. Langdon, Jr., Pilgrim Colony: A History of New Plymouth, 1620–1691 (New Haven, Conn., 1966), 204–206.
452. Family-Religion Excited and Assisted, 4th impression (Boston, 1720), 9. For the bibliography of this piece, see Thomas James Holmes, Cotton Mather, A Bibliography of His Works (Cambridge, Mass., 1940), I, 368–375.
453. An Order of Household Instruction … , Sig. A8v. Cf. Dudley Fenner, The Artes of Logicke and Rhetorike ([Middleburgh], 1584), Sig. A4r. (2nd set of signatures). For Nichols, see Peter Clarke, “Josias Nichols and Religious Radicalism, 1553–1639,” Journal of Ecclesiastical History, XXVIII (1977), 133–150.
454. For the second and third generations of the New England clergy, see Hall, The Faithful Shepherd, 176–278.
455. See footnote 6, p. 267, below; George Lincoln Burr, ed., Narratives of the Witchcraft Cases (New York, 1914), 175; Increase Mather, Remarkable Providences, illustrative of the earlier days of American colonisation (London, 1856), 101, cited hereafter as Essay; “The Diaries of John Hull,” American Antiquarian Society, Transactions and Collections, III (1897), 218; Cotton Mather, Magnalia Christi Americana, 2 vols. (Hartford, Conn., 1853–1854), I, 84; “The Diary of Noahdiah Russell,” New England Historical and Genealogical Register, VII (1853), 53–54; Nathaniel Morton, New-Englands Memoriall (Cambridge, Mass., 1670), 52; The Diary of Samuel Sewall, M. Halsey Thomas, ed., 2 vols., (New York, 1973), I, 281.
456. Edward Johnson, The Wonder-Working Providence of Sions Saviour, ed. J. Franklin Jameson, Original Narratives of Early American History (New York, 1910); John Sherman, “To the Reader,” in Cotton Mather, Wonders of the Invisible World (Boston, 1692).
457. Kitty Scoular, Natural Magic: Studies in the Presentation of Nature in English Poetry from Spenser to Marvell (Oxford, 1965), 5; Increase Mather, The Latter Sign Discoursed of, bound with Kometographia (Boston, 1682), second pagination, 7–11; Michael McKeon, Politics and Poetry in Restoration England: The Case of Dryden's Annus Mirabilis (Cambridge, Mass., 1975), 155–161.
458. Johnson, Wonder-Working Providence, ed. Jameson, 185.
459. Letter-Book of Samuel Sewall, 2 vols., Massachusetts Historical Society, Collections, 6th Ser., I–II (1886–1888), II, 229; Diary of Samuel Sewall, Thomas, ed., I, 369; II, 796.
460. Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic (London, 1971). This complex, subtle book depicts seventeenth-century Protestants, and especially the more radical of the Puritans, as hostile to “magic”; and argues that the rural poor preferred the older beliefs that Puritans were opposing. But Thomas also provides much evidence of beliefs, e.g., astrology, that were not limited to the rural poor, and he is quite aware that Protestantism remained in touch with prophecy, exorcism, and even certain folk beliefs. My argument inevitably runs counter to the main emphasis of his book, but much of what I have to say is also present in his pages, and I am deeply indebted to the references he provides to sixteenth- and seventeenth-century sources.
461. Hyder Rollins, ed., The Pack of Autolycus or Strange and Terrible News of Ghosts, Apparitions … as told in Broadside Ballads of the Years 1624–1693 (Cambridge, Mass., 1927), 36, 114, 162, and passim; Joseph Frank, The Beginnings of the English Newspaper 1620–1660 (Cambridge, Mass., 1961), 17; Bernard Capp, English Almanacs 1500–1800 (Ithaca, N.Y., 1979), chap. 6; Strange and wonderful News from Chippingnorton … Of certain dreadful Apparitions [London, 1679].
462. Rollins, ed., Pack of Autolycus, 37, 62, 139, 82, 23; A miracle, of miracles [London, n.d.], 5; John Gadbury, Natura Prodigiorum or, A discourse touching the nature of Prodigies (London, 1660).
463. The Theatre of Gods Judgements (London, 1648), 409; Stephen Batman, The Doome warning all men to the Iudgemente (London, 1581), 317, 379, 390, 397.
464. Beard, Theatre of Gods Judgements, 37, 48, 195; Batman, Doome warning all men to the Iudgemente, 403; [Nathaniel Crouch], Admirable Curiosities, Rarities, & Wonders in England (London, 1682), passim; Rollins, ed., Pack of Autolycus, 219. Here as elsewhere in this essay, the references could run into the hundreds in imitation of the dense texture of the great collections.
465. Samuel Clarke, A Mirrour or Looking-Glasse both For Saints, and Sinners, 2nd. ed., (London, 1654), 92–93; Beard, Theatre of Gods Judgements, Bk I, chapter 30; Rollins, ed., Pack of Autolycus, 75.
466. Rollins, ed., Pack of Autolycus, 62.
467. Miriam Chrisman, Lay Culture, Learned Culture: Books and Social Change in Strasbourg 1480–1599 (New Haven, Conn., 1982), 257, 3698; R. W. Scribner, For the Sake of Simple Folk: Popular Propaganda for the German Reformation (Cambridge, 1981), 125–127, 131, 184.
468. Rollins, ed., Pack of Autolycus, 81.
469. Simon Goulart, Admirable and Memorable Histories containing the wonders of our time (London, 1607). The original French edition appeared in 1547. Batman’s Doome was largely a translation of Lycosthenes’ De prodigiis liber.
470. The best guides (in English) to the lore of wonders are the literary historians whom I came to refer to as “the Shakespeareans,” the men and women who have patrolled the sweep of English literary culture from Chaucer to Shakespeare and Milton, and who were very conscious of Shakespeare’s roots in medieval and classical culture. A book of great practical utility, as my citations from it indicate, is S. K. Heninger, Jr., A Handbook of Renaissance Meteorology (Durham, N.C., 1960), which opens with an important survey of the encyclopedias that codified and transmitted so much of the wonder lore. No less important is Kester Svendsen, Milton and Science (New York, 1969), with its superb discussion in Chapter 1 of “The Compendious Method of Natural Philosophy: Milton and the Encyclopedic Tradition.” The notes and cross references in Hyder Rollins’s Pack of Autolycus remain the best guide to the print culture I describe briefly. Other studies of importance include: Don Cameron Allen, The Star-Crossed Renaissance: The Quarrel about Astrology and Its Influence in England (New York, 1966); Willard Farnham, The Medieval Heritage of Elizabethan Tragedy (Berkeley, 1936); J. S. P. Tatlock, The Scene of the Franklin's Tale Revisited (London, 1914), and his The Legendary History of Britain (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1950); Robert W. Harming, The Vision of History in Early Britain from Cildas to Geoffrey of Monmouth (New York, 1966); Paul H. Kocher, Science and Religion in Elizabethan England (New York, 1969); George Lyman Kittredge, The Old Farmer and His Almanac (Boston, 1904); and Henry A. Kelly, Divine Providence in the England of Shakespeare's Histories (Cambridge, Mass., 1970). An exhaustive survey is Lynn Thorndike, A History of Magic and Experimental Science, 8 vols. (New York, 1923–1958), esp. vols. IV–VII.
471. Heninger, Handbook of Renaissance Meteorology, 12, and chaps. 2–3.
472. Ibid., 30–32; Allen, Star-Crossed Renaissance, chap. 5; Capp, English Almanacs, chap. 5.
473. Eusebius, The Ancient ecclesiastical histories (London, 1619), 64, 80; Bede's Ecclesiastical History of the English People, Bertram Colgrave and R. A. B. Mynors, eds. (Oxford, 1969), 141, 361–363; G. R. Owst, Literature and Pulpit in Medieval England (Cambridge, 1937), 129–130.
474. Tatlock, Legendary History of Britain, chap. 17; Rupert Taylor, The Political Prophecy in England (New York, 1911); Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic, chap. 13.
475. Scribner, For the Sake of Simple Folk, 116–117, 140–147, 184; Katharine R. Firth, The Apocalyptic Tradition in Reformation Britain, 1530–1645 (Oxford, 1979); Joseph Mede, The Key of the Revelation, searched and demonstrated out of the Naturall and proper characters of the Visions (London, 1643), Pt. 1, 88, 94.
476. Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales, trans. Nevill Coghill (Baltimore, 1952), 70; Peter Lake, Moderate Puritans and the Elizabethan Church (Cambridge, 1982), 119–120; Beard, Theatre of Gods Judgements, 88; Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic, chap. 4.
477. As Kocher proves at length in Science and Religion in Elizabethan England. The close ties between science and religion are evident in the letters that Cotton Mather sent to the Royal Society; many of them report events that previously had been described as “wonders” in his father’s Essay for the Recording of Illustrious Providences. Cf. George L. Kittredge, “Cotton Mather’s Scientific Communications to the Royal Society,” American Antiquarian Society, Proceedings, N.S. XXVI (1916), 18–57.
478. Capp, English Almanacs, 165; Hershel Baker, The Race of Time (Toronto, 1967) 57–63; Joseph J. Morgan, Jr., Chaucer and the Theme of Mutability (The Hague, 1961); Victor Harris, All Coherence Gone (Chicago, 1949), chaps. 4–5.
479. Farnham, Medieval Heritage of Elizabethan Tragedy, chap. 7; Scribner, For the Sake of Simple Folk, 117; Beard, Theatre of Gods Judgements, 80.
480. Michael MacDonald, Mystical Bedlam: Madness, Anxiety, and Healing in Seventeenth-Century England (Cambridge, 1981), 175, 202. “There hath ever been from the beginning an inveterate antipathy between Satan and his instruments, and the children of God.” (Clarke, Examples, 35.)
481. Howard R. Patch, The Goddess Fortuna in Medieval Literature (Cambridge, Mass., 1927); J. G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton, 1975), 349–350.
482. E. M. W. Tillyard, The Elizabethan World Picture (New York, n.d.), chap. 7.
483. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. Michael Oakeshott (Oxford, 1957), Pt. IV. Hobbes was almost sui generis; but there was widespread criticism in seventeenth-century England of astrology and apocalypticism, as well as an awareness that portents and prodigies were often manipulated for political benefit. This politicizing is evident in the flood of publications in 1679 and 1680, most of them anti-Catholic, anti-Stuart tracts in disguise, and in books like Mirabilis Annus Secundus; Or, The Second Year of Prodigies. Being A true and impartial Collection of many strange Signes and Apparitions, which have this last Year been seen in the Heavens, and in the Earth, and in the Waters (London, 1662), which, despite its title, is a radical Puritan onslaught against the restored monarchy. We are dealing with a series of contradictions, or better, of paradoxes: belief in portents, joined with skepticism about them; a conviction that some portents were not really significant, and that others were. For examples of this selectivity at work in the late sixteenth century, cf. L. H. Buell, “Elizabethan Portents: Superstition or Doctrine,” in Essays Critical and Historical Dedicated to Lily B. Campbell (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1950), 27–41.
484. Heninger, Handbook of Renaissance Meterology, 87–91; du Bartas, La Sepmaine, quoted on the reverse of the title page of Samuel Danforth, An Astronomical Description of the late Comet or Blazing Star (Cambridge, Mass., 1665).
485. Pliny, Natural History, trans. H. Rackham (Cambridge, Mass., 1949), I, 235 (Bk H.xxiii).
486. Ibid., I, 275 (Bk II.liii); Heninger, Handbook of Renaissance Meteorology, 72–87.
487. The Famous and Memorable Workes of Josephus … Faithfully Translated … by Thomas Lodge (London, 1620), 738; Heninger, Handbook of Renaissance Meteorology, 91–94; Rollins, ed., Pack of Autolycus, 38.
488. Katharine M. Briggs, The Anatomy of Puck: An Examination of Fairy Beliefs among Shakespeare's Contemporaries and Successors (London, 1959); C. Grant Loomis, White Magic: An Introduction to the Folklore of Christian Legend (Cambridge, Mass., 1948); Kittredge, Old Farmer and His Almanac, chap. 6; T. F. Thiselton Dyer, Folk Lore of Shakespeare (London, 1884).
489. As Rollins, ed., Pack of Autolycus, points out repeatedly.
490. Twelve Strange Prophesies, besides Mother Shiptons. With the Predictions of John Saltmarsh (London, 1648).
491. William P. Upham, “Remarks,” Massachusetts Historical Society, Proceedings, 2d Ser., XIII (1899–1900), 126–127.
492. Increase Mather, Wo to Drunkards (Cambridge, Mass., 1673), 28; “The Diary of Increase Mather,” Massachusetts Historical Society, Proceedings, 2d Ser., XIII (1899–1900), 345.
493. Worthington C. Ford, The Boston Book Market, 1679–1700 (Boston, 1917), 149.
494. Mather, Magnalia Christi Americana, I, 205.
495. Kenneth B. Murdock, ed., Handkerchiefs from Paul being Pious and Consolatory Verses of Puritan Massachusetts (Cambridge, Mass., 1927), 109–111.
496. [Samuel Danforth], An Almanack for the Year of Our Lord 1648 (Cambridge, Mass., 1648). Mary Dyer’s monstrous birth was perhaps the first New England wonder to receive international attention. Cf. Newes from New-England of A most strange and prodigious Birth [London, 1642].
497. “My chief design, is to inform and edifie the ordinary sort of Readers. Yet considering that God hath made me a debter to the wise as well as to the weak, I have added some things of the nature, place, motion of Comets, which only such as have some skill in Astronomy can understand” (“To the Reader,” in Kometographia).
498. Records of the First Church at Dorchester in New England 1636–1734 (Boston, 1891); Roxbury Land and Church Records, Boston Record Commissioners, Reports, VI (Boston, 1881), 187–212.
499. William DeLoss Love, Jr., The Fast and Thanksgiving Days of New England (Boston, 1895).
500. James Kendall Hosmer, ed., Winthrop's Journal “History of New England,” 1630–1649, 2 vols. (New York, 1953 [orig. publ. New York, 1908]), II, 156.
501. A very large number of such journals or brief autobiographical sketches survive, and their authors include artisans and farmers as well as ministers and merchants. Two diaries kept by ordinary people are John Dane, “A Declaration of Remarkable Proudenses in the Corse of My Life,” New England Historical and Genealogical Register, VIII (1854), 147–156; and Charles F. Adams, Jr., “Abstract of [John] Marshall’s Diary,” Massachusetts Historical Society, Proceedings, 2d Ser., I (1884–1885), 148–164, and its continuation, Samuel A. Green, “Remarks,” ibid., 2d. Ser., XIV (1900–1901), 13–34.
502. “The Diaries of John Hull,” 217–218; Diary of Samuel Sewall, Thomas, ed. I, 12. I have analyzed this diary at greater length in “The Mental World of Samuel Sewall,” Massachusetts Historical Society, Proceedings, XCII (1980), 21–44.
503. Diary of Samuel Sewall, Thomas, ed., I, 330–331.
504. Upham, “Remarks,” 127–128. Taylor had access to one of the several versions of Christopher Love’s scaffold speech; e.g., The true andperfect Speech of Mr. Christopher Love (London, 1651).
505. Mather Papers, 282–287.
506. Ibid., 360–362.
507. Ibid., 306–310.
508. Ibid., 466–481. The Marshfield episode, told in a letter from the Rev. Samuel Arnold, was later published by N. B. Shurtleff as Thunder & Lightning; and Deaths at Marshfield in 1658 & 1666 (Boston, 1850).
509. Mather Papers, 58–59. The Mary Dyer story had long since passed into print in several places; cf. note 6, p. 258 above.
510. Danforth, An Astronomical Description, 16–21.
511. Mather, Kometographia, 96. Quoting again the familiar lines from du Bartas, La Sepmaine, Mather also spoke approvingly of apparitions in the air. In keeping with tradition, the colonists were sensitive to the shape and direction of comets; cf. Johnson, Wonder-Working Providence, ed. Jameson, 40; Mather Papers, 312.
512. Mather, Magnalia Christi Americana, II, 363–372; Shurtleff, Thunder & Lightning, 13–15.
513. Johnson, Wonder-Working Providence, ed. Jameson, 243. Cf. “The Diaries of John Hull,” 208; Mather Papers, 349; and for the tradition, Rollins, ed., Pack of Autolycus, 38; Batman, Doome warning to ludgemente, 304.
514. Israel Chauncy, An Almanack of the coelestial motions for … 1663 (Cambridge, Mass., 1663).
515. Noadiah Russell, Cambridge Ephemeris. An Almanac … for … 1684 (Cambridge, Mass., 1684).
516. Holwell's Predictions: of many remarkable things, which may probably come to pass (Cambridge, Mass., [1690]).
517. Morton, New-Englands Memoriall, 52.
518. “The Diary of Noahdiah Russell,” 54. The references to such experiences were many; and I mean to write about them elsewhere, as the discussions of millennium and eschatology in New England Puritanism do not pay adequate (if any) attention to the everyday experience of prophecying. Anne Hutchinson was gifted with prophetic sight and visions; cf. David D. Hall, ed., The Antinomian Controversy, 1636–1638: A Documentary History (Middletown, Conn., 1968), 271–273.
519. Winthrop, Journal, I, 84, 121.
520. Mather, Magnalia Christi Americana, I, 314–316, 544; II, 37–38. As with visionary prophecying, I must pass by many other instances, as well as avoiding the stories provided by Beard, Clarke, and Turner.
521. The folklore of black dogs is summarized in Katharine M. Briggs, British Folk Tales and Legends: A Sampler (London, 1977), 115–120.
522. Paul Boyer and Stephen Nissenbaum, eds., The Salem Witchcraft Papers, 3 vols. (New York, 1977), I, 74, 202–203; III. 742; II, 568.
523. Ibid., I, 166, 246–247.
524. Ibid., II, 578. Cf. Loomis, White Magic, 39.
525. Joseph Glanville, A Blow at Modern Sadducism in some Philosophical Considerations about Witchcraft, 4th ed. (London, 1668); Rollins, ed., Pack of Autolycus, 115.
526. The same generosity is characteristic of Beard and Clarke, and has medieval precedents; Tatlock, Legendary History of Britain, 276–277.
527. Mather, Essay, “Introduction”; H. L. D. Ward, Catalogue of Romances in the Department of Manuscripts in the British Museum, 3 vols. (London, 1883–1910), I, 257, 11, 595
528. Moses Coit Tyler, A History of American Literature during the Colonial Time, rev. ed., 2 vols. (New York, 1897), II, 73; Kenneth B. Murdock, Increase Mather: The Foremost American Puritan (Cambridge, Mass., 1925), 170–174; Perry Miller, The New England Mind: From Colony to Province (Cambridge, Mass., 1953), 143; but for apparent approval of Murdock’s arguments, cf. 180.
529. Svendsen, Milton and Science, 5, 44, 84.
530. In trying to account for attitudes toward the Negro in early America, Winthrop Jordan was driven to speaking of “deeper” attitudes that somehow formed and were perpetuated in Elizabethan culture: Jordan, White over Black: American Attitudes Toward the Negro, 1550–1812 (Baltimore, 1969), viii–ix, and chap. 1. My problem is akin to his, in that the popular culture I am describing was remarkably tenacious and encompassing, even though its exact sources and lines of influence cannot readily be specified. Robert St. George’s essay in this volume deals with similar attitudes in terms of their deeprootedness.
531. Beard, Theatre of Gods Judgements, 2.
532. Increase Mather, The Doctrine of Divine Providence Opened and Applyed (Boston, 1684), 43, 30–32, 34, 81, 133; and for the figure of the wheel and the rise and fall of kings, cf. pp. 9, 16–17. The image of the wheel derives from Ezekiel 1:15–16, et seq.
533. As is suggested by Jon Butler, “Magic, Astrology, and the Early American Religious Heritage, 1600–1760,” American Historical Review, LXXXIV (1979), 317–346, an essay that seems almost perverse in its refusal to acknowledge the syncreticism of seventeenth-century religion and the common interest of both clergy and laity in such “superstitions.” The most important description of intellectual tolerance and syncreticism in seventeenth-century England is MacDonald, Mystical Bedlam, which in this regard serves to correct the impression that arises from Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic, of a clear line between the two. Anthropologists struggle to define the difference between magic and religion; literary and cultural historians by and large agree in de-emphasizing the distinction. “Our hard and fast distinction between the natural and the supernatural was unknown in the middle ages; there was no line between jugglery … and magic, most people not knowing how either was performed; indeed any remarkable performance with a secular background … might be called a miracle.” Tatlock, Legendary History, 362–363. “It is of course notoriously difficult … to say where religion becomes magic: the genuine Middle English charms (like many of their predecessors in Old English) use much religious imagery.” Douglas Gray, Themes and Images in the Medieval English Religious Lyric (London, 1972), 34. See also Jean-Claude Schmitt, “Les Traditions Folkloriques dans la Culture Médiévale,” Archives de Sciences Sociales des Religions, LII (1981), 5–20, a reference I owe to Keith Thomas.
534. Jean Delumeau, Catholicism between Luther and Voltaire: A New View of the Counter-Reformation (London, 1977), 63.
535. [Thomas Robie], A Letter to a Certain Gentleman, &c. (Boston, 1719), 8; J. F. C. Harrison, The Second Coming: Popular Millenarianism, 1780–1850 (London, 1979), chap. 3.
536. George Web, The Araignment of an unruly Tongue (London, 1619), 72. I am indebted to David Grayson Allen and David D. Hall for reading an earlier draft of this essay, and to John Murrin, Stephen Foster, John Demos, Susan Amussen, and John Brooke for their comments when the paper was presented. I am also grateful to the American Antiquarian Society for supporting me while researching this paper with an Albert Boni Fellowship.
537. See, for example, David D. Hall, “The World of Print and Collective Mentality in Seventeenth-Century New England,” in John Higham and Paul Conkin, eds., New Directions in American Intellectual History (Baltimore, 1979), 166–180; Hall, “Literacy, Religion, and the Plain Style,” in Jonathan L. Fairbanks and Robert F. Trent, eds., New England Begins: The Seventeenth Century, 3 vols. (Boston, 1982), II, 102–112; Kenneth A. Lockridge, Literacy in Colonial New England (New York, 1974), 43–71; Egil Johansson, “The History of Literacy in Sweden,” in Harvey J. Graff, ed., Literacy and Social Development in the West (Cambridge, 1981), 151–182; Graff, The Literacy Myth: Literacy and Social Structure in the Nineteenth-Century City (New York, 1979); and Margaret Spufford, “First Steps in Literacy: The Reading and Writing Experiences of the Humblest Seventeenth-Century Spiritual Autobiographers,” Social History IV (1979), 407–435.
538. See the sections on literacy in Everett M. Rogers and Lynne Svenning, Modernization Among Peasants: The Impact of Communication (New York, 1963), 51–95, esp. 94: “most important was a general motivation for modernization, perhaps typified by one peasant who said he enrolled ‘to come from darkness into light’”; Alex Inkeles and David H. Smith, Becoming Modern (Cambridge, Mass., 1974); and Charles Tilly, “Talking Modern,” Peasant Studies VI (1977), 66–68.
539. Historians should read: Michael Srubbs, Language and Literacy: The Sociolinguistics of Reading and Writing (London, 1980); John Oxenham, Literacy: Writing, Reading and Social Organization (London, 1980); David Silverman and Brian Torode, The Material Word: Some Theories of Language and its Limits (London, 1980); John F. Szwed, “The Ethnography of Literacy,” in Marcia Farr Whiteman, ed., Writing: Functional and Linguistic-Cultural Differences (New York, 1982), I, 13–23; Dell Hymes, Foundations in Sociolinguistics: An Ethnographic Approach (Philadelphia, 1974), 1–66, 125–142; and Keith Basso, “The Ethnography of Writing,” in Richard Bauman and Joel Sherzer, eds., Explorations in the Ethnography of Speaking (Cambridge, 1974), 425–432. Two excellent works by historians draw upon this literature: Richard Bauman, “Speaking in the Light: The Role of the Quaker Minister,” in Bauman and Sherzer, eds., Explorations in the Ethnography of Speaking, 144–162; and Peter Burke, “Language and Anti-Language in Early Modern Italy,” History Workshop, XI (1981), 24–32. Hall, “The World of Print and Collective Mentality in Seventeenth-Century New England” envisions the historian’s task as describing the totalizing nature of communication in the past; he urges systematic investigation “to describe the formulas, the assumptions, that comprise collective mentality in seventeenth-century New England” (p. 176). The political implications of describing any really collective mentality in colonial America have yet to be discussed fully; see the comments in Carlo Ginzburg, The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller, trans. John Tedeschi and Anne Tedeschi (New York, 1982), xiii–xxvi.
540. Records and files of the Quarterly Courts of Essex County, Massachusetts, typescript copy made by Archie N. Frost, 1930–1934, on deposit at the Essex Institute, Salem, Massachusetts. VII, 40, dated 13 November 1661. See also George Francis Dow, ed., Records and Files of the Quarterly Courts of Essex County, Massachusetts, 8 vols. (Salem, 1911–1921), II, 340.
541. Web, The Araignment of an unruly Tongue, 2–3, paraphrasing liberally from Proverbs 18:21.
542. Web, The Araignment of an unruly Tongue, 87.
543. See The Book of the General Lawes and Libertyes Concerning the Inhabitants of the Massachusetts, ed. Thomas G. Barnes (San Marino, Cal., 1975 [orig. publ. Cambridge, Mass., 1648]), 1, 5, 6, 35–36, 45; Web, The Araignment of an unruly Tongue, 28.
544. William Perkins, A Direction for the government of the Tonge according to Gods word (London, 1615), sig. A2. Emphasis added.
545. Web, The Araignment of an unruly Tongue, 144–145.
546. These metaphors are drawn from: Web, The Araignment of an unruly Tongue; William Ward, Gods Arrowes, or, Two Sermons, concerning the visitation of God by the Pestilence (London, 1607); and from Robert Boyle, A free discourse against Customary Swearing (London, 1695).
547. On aggression in seventeenth-century New England life, see John Demos, A Little Commonwealth: Family Life in the Plymouth Colony (New York, 1970), 49, 135–138.
548. Nicholas Coeffeteau, A table of humane passions (London, 1621), 2–3.
549. Essex County Court Records, VII, 381. The relationship between anger and aggressive speech is also discussed in The Testaments of the twelve Patriarchs, the Sonnes of Jacob, trans. Robert Grosthead (London, 1601), sig. Gvi, in “The Testamente of Dan … concerning anger & lying”: “Wherefore consider the power of wrath how vaine it is, For he is bitter in speech, and walketh at sathans right hande, that his deedes may be wrought in untrustinesse and lying, so sathan dooeth first of all sting him by speech.”
550. Ynez Violé O’Neill, Speech and Speech Disorders in Western Thought Before 1600 (Westport, Conn., 1980), 59–60, 109–110.
551. Perkins, A Directionfor the government of the Tonge, sig. A3v; Ward, Gods Arrowes, 6. See also Thomas Adams, “The Taming of the Tongue” in The Works of Thomas Adams, ed. Joseph Angus, 3 vols. (Edinburgh, 1861–1862), III, 20: “Swearers, railers, scoldes have hell-fire in their tongues.”
552. Essex County Court Records, I, 133; II, 166, 248.
553. Thomas Beard, The Theatre of Gods Judgments (London, 1631), 179. I am indebted to David D. Hall for this reference.
554. Quoted in John Webster Spargo, Juridical Folklore in England, Illustrated by the Cucking-Stool (Durham, N.C., 1944), 106. I am indebted to David D. Hall for this reference. See also the ballad quoted on p. 312, n. 8.
555. Essex County Court Records, TV, 49. Perkins, A Direction for the government of the Tonge, sig. A2, adds that it would make “a mans heart to bleed to heare and consider how Swearing, Blaspheming, Cursed speaking, Railing, Slandering, chiding, Quarreling, Contending, Iesting, Mocking, Flattering, Lying, Dissembling, [and] Vaine and Idle talking overflow in al places.”
556. Essex County Court Records, III, 33.
557. Quoted in Demos, “Demography and Psychology in the Historical Study of Family Life: A Personal Report,” in Peter Laslett and Richard Wall, eds., Household and Family in Past Time (Cambridge, 1972), 568.
558. On seventeenth-century orality, see Demos, “Underlying Themes in the Witchcraft of Seventeenth-Century New England,” American Historical Review, LXXV (1970), 1323–1324. The literacy level of Essex County is estimated on the basis of signatures in Lockridge, Literacy in Colonial New England, 20, 47–48. Literacy remained at 60% until circa 1715 and then increased dramatically to near universal literacy; see also pp. 316–317, below.
559. Michael Dalton, The Countrey Justice (New York, 1972 [orig. publ. London, 1622]), 7.
560. Essex County Court Records, VIII, 59; see also O’Neill, Speech and Speech Disorders, 62. Other causes of aphonia cited in Essex County records included fear and apparitions of supernatural creatures (Essex County Court Records, VII, 421; II, 159; V, 221, 266). For additional thoughts on the cultural function of silence—an understudied topic—see Keith Basso, “To Give Up on Words: Silence in the Western Apache Culture,” Southwestern Journal of Anthropology, XXVI (1970), 213–230, and Susan U. Phillips, “Participant Structures and Communication Competence: Warm Springs Children in Community and Classroom,” in Courtney B. Cazden, Vera P. John, and Dell Hymes, eds., Functions of Language in the Classroom (New York, 1972), 370–394.
561. Beard, Theatre of Gods Iudgments, 178. Compare this to the story of Thomas Arundel in Web, The Araignment of an unruly Tongue, 122, “who having abused his Toung to an uniust sentence against the Lord Cobham, was stricken with soe sore a paine and swelling in his Tongue, that he could neither swallow nor speake.” O’Neill, Speech and Speech Disorders, 182, cites another story about an Italian nobleman who lost both his memory and speech after being hit on the head. The seventeenth-century belief that memory and speech were controlled by the same part of the brain underlies their preference to read and write aloud.
562. On the role of blasphemy in reformed Protestant culture, see Leonard W. Levy, Treason Against God: A History of the Offense of Blasphemy (New York, 1981), 122–330. Blasphemy was a capital offense in Massachusetts Bay; see Lawes and Libertyes, ed. Barnes, 5, and the Old Testament text upon which the colonial law was based, Leviticus 24:15–16.
563. Quoted in William S. Hollingsworth, A History of English Law, 12 vols. (Boston, 1908–1938), VIII, 347. “Scandal” is related etymologically to “slander” (O.E.D.). The movement of defamation cases from ecclesiastical to common law courts is outlined in Ronald A. Marchant, The Church Under the Law: Justice, Administration and Discipline in The Diocese of York 1560–1640 (Cambridge, 1969), 12–85; I am indebted to Stephen Foster for this reference.
564. Quoted in Hollingsworth, A History of English Law, VIII, 352, n. 6.
565. Web, The Araignment of an unruly Tongue, 23–24; Demos, Entertaining Satan: Witchcraft and the Culture of Early New England (New York, 1982), 79.
566. Essex County Court Records, I, 285; III, 376.
567. On rising population density in the late seventeenth-century, see the summary offered in David Grayson Allen, “‘Vacuum Domicilium’: The Social and Cultural Landscape of Seventeenth-Century New England,” in Fairbanks and Trent, eds., New England Begins, I, 7; data for specific towns appear in Susan L. Norton, "Population Growth in Colonial America: A Study of Ipswich, Massachusetts," Population Studies, XXV (1972), 433–452; and Lockridge, "The Population of Dedham, Massachusetts, 1636–1736," Economic History Review, 2nd Ser. XIX (1966), 319–344.
568. John Bunyan, Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners, ed. Roger Sharrock (Oxford, 1962), 33.
569. Edmund Leach, “Language and Anthropology,” in Noel Minnis, ed., Linguistics at Large (New York, 1971), 153–154. See also the discussion of animals and abomination in Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concept of Pollution and Taboo (London, 1966), 41–57.
570. Essex County Court Records, VII, 355–359. See the insightful analysis of the Morse witchcraft case in Demos, Entertaining Satan, 132–152.
571. Beard, Theatre of Gods Iudgments, 442.
572. Thomas Harman, A Caveat for Commen Cursetors (London, 1567), sig. Ci.
573. Dalton, The Countrey Justice, 109–110.
574. On the importance of physical strength to men’s reputations, see the case in Marblehead in 1670 when William Hollingswood tried to draw Hezekiah Dutch into hand-to-hand combat by saying “if he would not fight him he would proclaim him a coward throughout the town”; Essex County Court Records, VII, 253.
575. Beard, Theatre of Gods Iudgments, 357.
576. Quoted in Roger Thompson, Women in Stuart England and America: A Comparative Study (Boston, 1974), 244.
577. Beard, Theatre of Gods Iudgments, 107, defines hypocrites as individuals who “have nothing in them but a vaine shew of coyned religion, and so by that meanes breake the first commandement; thinking to bleare Gods eyes with their outward shewes and ceremonies, as if he were like men, to see nothing but that which is without, and offereth it selfe to the view.” For definitions of other seventeenth-century pejoratives, see: Joseph T. Shipley, Dictionary of Early English (New York, 1955); Walter W. Skeat, A Glossary of Tudor and Stuart Words, ed. A. L. Mayhew (Oxford, 1914); and James Orchard Halliwell-Phillips, A Dictionary of Archaic and Provincial Words … ,2 vols. (London, 1865). See also Roger Thompson, Unfit For Modest Ears: A Study of Pornographic, Obscene, and Bawdy Works Written or Published in England in the Second Half of the Seventeenth Century (London, 1979); and G. R. Quaife, Wanton Wenches and Wayward Wives: Peasants and Illicit Sex in Early Seventeenth-Century England (New Brunswick, N.J., 1979), 124–185.
578. “Deacon John Paine’s Journal,” The Mayflower Descendant IX, (1908–1909), 99. On the ambivalent and often conflicting views toward old age in seventeenth-century New England, see Demos, “Old Age in Early New England,” in Demos and Sarane Spence Boocock, eds., Turning Points: Historical and Sociological Essays on the Family, supplement to the American Journal of Sociology, LXXXIV (1978), S248–287; and Gene W. Boyett, “Aging in Seventeenth-Century New England,” New England Historical and Genealogical Register, CXXXIV (1980), 181–193.
579. Henry Swinburne, A Treatise of Wills and Testaments (London, 1635), I, 73, book 2.
580. On the relationship of aging and witchcraft in women, see Demos, Entertaining Satan, 64–70.
581. Essex County Court Records, IV, 92 (1672). Similar slurs against French newcomers to both Newport and East Greenwich, Rhode Island, in the early 1670’s are recorded: Henry Palmer of Newport called Stephen Sabeere of East Greenwich a “French dog,” and “French rogue,” in 1672; John Osborne Austin, The Genealogical Dictionary of Rhode Island (Baltimore, 1978 [orig. publ. Providence, 1887]), 143. On the conflicts between Channel Islanders and Englishmen in Essex County, see David Thomas Konig, Law and Society in Puritan Massachusetts: Essex County, 1629–1602 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1979), 70–74; and Konig, “A New Look at the Essex ‘French’: Ethnic Friction and Community Tensions in Seventeenth-Century Essex County, Massachusetts,” Essex Institute, Historical Collections, CX (1974), 167–180.
582. Essex County Court Records, II, 50, 250.
583. Essex County Court Records, IV, 105.
584. Compare the functions of insults and accusation in West Africa in Marc Augé, “Sorciers Noirs et Diables Blancs: La Notion de personne, les croyances a la sorcellerie et leur évolution dans les sociétés lagunaires de basse Côte-d’Ivoire,” in La Notion de Personne en Afrique Noir, Colloques Internationaux du C.N.R.S., no. 544 (Paris, 1973), 518–527, with those of seventeenth-century witchcraft in Demos, Entertaining Satan, 67–69. See also Robert M. Adams, Bad Mouth: Fugitive Papers on the Dark Side (Berkeley, Calif, 1977), 21–42.
585. Web, The Araignment of an unruly Tongue, 161–163. Elsewhere (pp. 158–160), Web details the rationale behind divine punishment for slanderers: “whether … a Talebearer or a Tale-receiver be more dangerous and damnable, it is hard to iudge: for the Talebearer hath the Divell in his tongue, and the Tale-receiver hath the Divel in his eare … It is injurious to our own soules, to give any credite or countenance to an evill tongue: for he whose eare is open to loosetongu’d creatures, becommeth accessary to their sin, and guilty of the same offense with them.” Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic (New York, 1971), 502–511.
586. Beard, Theatre of Gods Iudgments, 71–72. Emphasis added.
587. George Lee Haskins, Law and Authority in Early Massachusetts: A Study in Tradition and Design (New York, 1960), 210. Haskins adds that “A reputation for godliness was, of course, a principal criterion for the visible sainthood so prized by serious Puritans.”
588. Essex County Court Records, I, 286.
589. Essex County Court Records, V, 239–240. In Salem in 1649, Ralph Fogg had to “stand at the whipping post half an hour after lecture with a paper in his hat spelling out his crime” (Essex County Court Records, I, 185–186).
590. Essex County Court Records, I, 15; VI, 386.
591. Essex County Court Records, I, 361–362, 380.
592. Essex County Court Records, I, 185.
593. Essex County Court Records, I, 152.
594. Essex County Court Records, I, 20. Whipping was singled out by some Essex County residents as cruel and unfair punishment; see the 1656 complaint of William Young of Andover who wished “them all hanged who instituted whipping, and … thought they must have been a company of rude deboyst fellows” (Essex County Court Records, I, 424).
595. Lawes and Libertyes, ed. Barnes, 35: Lying “shall be fined for the first offence ten shillings, or if the partie be unable to pay the same then to be set in the stocks … not exceeding two hours. For the second offense in that kinde whereof any shall be legally convicted the sum of twenty shillings, or be whipped upon the naked body not exceeding ten stripes. And for the third offense that way forty shillings, or if the partie be unable to pay, then to be whipped with more stripes, not exceeding fifteen.” For an extreme case of imprisonment, see the discussion of John Porter, Jr., of Salem in Konig, Law and Society in Puritan Massachusetts, 175–176.
596. This percentage is higher than that which prevailed for female defendants as reported in Peter Moogk, “‘Thieving Buggers’ and ‘Stupid Sluts’: Insults and Popular Culture in New France,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3d Ser., XXXVI (1979), 533, and suggests that seventeenth-century New England culture tolerated greater female participation, i.e., greater accusation of women, than did the culture of New France. The participation of men was the same in both places—72%. The difference came in New England cases in which a man and his wife acted as joint plaintiffs and defendants; see also Thompson, Women in Stuart England and America, 165.
597. Moogk, “‘Thieving Buggers’ and ‘Stupid Sluts,’” 534, indicates that in New France 28% of plaintiffs were women and in La Rochelle, France, 20% were women. In seventeenth-century Essex County, the figure was only 16%.
598. Essex County Court Records, II, 286.
599. Aggressive speech acts involving men almost never occurred inside the house. Instead, they took place: outside a house in Marblehead (1680); “while ditching in the marsh” near Hampton (1669); while bringing “a cart through his meadow” in Salem (1669); at “William Nik’s stage while talking” in Marblehead (1666); “at the smith’s shop in Rowly” (1663); “in the stable or cowhouse” in Newbury (1662); “at his own door,” but not inside a house at Marblehead (1680); and “at the warehouse of Capt. Whit[e],” in Ipswich (1674); see Essex County Court Records, VII, 420; IV, 184, 187; III, 343, 80, 54; VII, 425; V, 411. This behavior is consistent with that observed in other writings. Speaking of the evil tongue, Web (The Araignment of an unruly Tongue, 50–51) said “the most proper places of his residence, are Ale-houses, Tavernes, Playhouses, Bake-houses, Wooll-lofts, and Gossip meetings.” For the rationale behind the house as both female domain and a sign of rationality, see Robert Blair St. George, “‘Set Thine House in Order’: The Domestication of the Yeomanry in Seventeenth-Century New England,” in Fairbanks and Trent, eds., New England Begins, II, 165–170.
600. Cotton Mather, Ornaments for the Daughters of Zion (Delmar, N.Y., 1978 [orig. publ. Boston, 1741]), 34–36.
601. Ibid., 54. Thomas Adams, “The Taming of the Tongue,” 17, adds: “Woman, for the most part, hath the glibbest tongue … She calls her tongue her defensive weapon … a firebrand in a frantic hand doth less mischief. The proverb came not from nothing, when we say of a brawling man, He hath a woman’s tongue in his hand.”
602. Mather, Ornaments for the Daughters of Zion, 54.
603. The Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs, ed. Grosthead, cii.
604. Mather, Ornaments for the Daughters of Zion, 55. Mather also warned his female readers (p. 56) “O let there be no Dross in your whole Communication. The Dross of your own Wrath, vented in scolding, fury, vile Names; the Dross of your own Worth, vented in boasting, bragging, self-ostentation; the Dross of all flthieness, vented in baudy Talk about the Things which ’tis a Shame to speak; Let all this Dross be purged out of all your Speech.”
605. Essex County Court Records, II, 63. See also Demos, A Little Commonwealth, 165, where the mother of John Gorham of Yarmouth, Massachusetts, begged her son to remain at home, saying “if you would beleive a woman beleive mee that your father saith that you shall never be Molested.”
606. Quoted in Spargo, Juridical Folklore in England, 114, n. 6. Susan Harding, “Women and Words in a Spanish Village,” in Rayna Reiter, ed., Toward an Anthropology of Women (New York, 1975), 302n, cites one woman in the northeastern Spanish village of Oreol who believed that women by nature have “wicked tongues.” Women, the poor, and the diseased relied on the power of speech in the absence of other resources for affective critique. As Ward, Gods Arrowes, 6, observed, “the poore man sweareth for necessity,” and women were no different (see note 3, p. 311 above). Konig, Law and Society in Puritan Massachusetts, 149, is liberal in believing that the poor and women used cursing and magic to better themselves; I think they relied on it more often to deconstruct actively existing social relations. For the interrelationships of economic status and women, see Carol Frances Karlsen, “The Devil in the Shape of a Woman: The Witch in Seventeenth-Century New England” (Ph.D. diss., Yale University, 1980), 104–169. In England, poor men and women alike cursed landlords who were enclosing their lands, hoping their words would cause the death of the landlord and his heirs (Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic, 505).
607. William Gouge, Of Domesticall Duties (London, 1622), 371–372.
608. Gouge, Of Domesticall Duties, 355.
609. Susan Harding, “Women and Words in a Spanish Village,” presents a speech community organized much like that of early New England. Especially suggestive is her summary (pp. 292–293) of how wives found out about their husbands’ private lives: “To penetrate the privacy of their husbands, wives become skilled at asking them questions, tiny and discreet questions, about their actions and activities. A woman seems to assume that she cannot ask a straight question of her husband on some matters and expect a straight answer. So she breaks the question up into piecemeal questions with the aim that together their answers will unobtrusively answer, or give her grounds for inferring the answer, to the question she could not openly ask. Women also may learn to fragment their demands into tiny pieces—first ask for one piece, get it, then another, and so on, until the pieces add up to the whole demand. Another tactic is to make the whole demand at once, but not as such, not by directly or explicity asking for anything; instead, by talking about what is at issue, focusing on it in fine tuning, going on about details, and so avoid a wholesale, final, negative response. Husbands come to think of their wives as verbally cunning and manipulative, and collectively men imagine that these are the natural characteristics of women. But skills of verbal finesse and subterfuge are a function of, and an adaption to, women’s subordinate and dependent position with regard to control over resources.”
610. Essex County Court Records, V, 52–54. Two years later a woman, trying to help her brother avoid becoming the subject of a rumor that he had been cuckolded, asked her sister-in-law to keep the third party from frequenting her house, “if it were not to stop the mouthes of people, for their mouths were open.” Her sister-in-law replied: “let them shut them againe, for here he should come in spite of your teeth or any body els.” Ibid., V, 401–402 (1679).
611. Among many examples, see the following: In 1652 in Salem a women was presented “for reproachful and unbecoming speeches” against Mr. Perkins, a church deacon, for saying “if it were not for the law, shee would never com to the meetings, the teacher was soe dead, and accordingly shee did seldom com and withall p[e]rsuaded goodwife Vincett to com to her house, on the Saboth day, and reade goode bookes, affirmmge that the teacher was fitter to be a ladyes Chambermaid, then to be in the pulpitt” (Essex County Court Records, I, 275); and in 1654 Elizabeth Legg of Marblehead was presented for “Speaking Slitely and scornful [ly] of Mr. Walton,” the town’s unordained minister. She said “I could have a boy from the Colledg [Harvard] that would preach better than Mr. Walton for half ye wages” (Ibid., I, 378). Men’s protests against magistrates include John Goit’s 1641 pronouncement that “its better to goe to hell gate for mercy than to Mr. Endecott for instice” (Ibid., I, 35); John Burston’s 1661 statement that the magistrates in Salem “were robbers and destroyers of the widows and the fatherless” (Ibid., II, 337); and Thomas Baker’s 1679 admission that “he did not care for all the laws in the country.” When Baker learned his case would be heard by Major John Hathorne in Salem, he replied that he “would not be tried by that white-hat, limping rogue” (Ibid., VII, 331).
612. On the relationship between oral memory and formulaic textual rules, see Albert B. Lord, The Singer of Tales (New York, 1978), 30–67, 124–140.
613. Stubbs, Language and Literacy, 29–31; I.J. Gelb, A Study of Writing: The Foundation of Grammatology (Chicago, 1952), 223–228.
614. Ivan Illich, Gender (New York, 1982), 3–22. Mich, pp. 132–139, also discusses and cites relevant bibliography for divisions in male and female speech; what we still need are explorations in gender and writing. Illich’s work is controversial and in many ways radically conservative; see Keith Thomas’ review of Gender, “Back to Utopia,” New York Review of Books, 12 May 1983.