Sumner Chilton Powell. Puritan Village: The Formation of a New England Town. Wesleyan U P, 1963.
Puritan Village is a close analysis of the early settlement of a Massachusetts town. It shows the problems and challenges as well as the vision of its early settlers. The book itself challenges a few stereotypes, and we begin to see that these were real people who did their best to get along with each other and live out lives that were much freer than what any of them experienced in England.
Sudbury, Massachusetts (modern Wayland and Sudbury), was settled in 1638 by people who had come across a few years earlier. Some had settled in Watertown, but all were looking for opportunities. Some were fairly wealthy, others were young men just starting out. Perhaps what is most interesting is that they came from a variety of places in England that had different local governments.
Some came from towns that had “open fields”; that is, the farmers and craftsmen could buy and sell land within the manor system. There were frequent transfers of land as people bought and sold. Much of the local government was involved with such property transfers. The earliest town leader of Sudbury, Peter Noyes, had come from Weyhill, Hampshire, and had served in various courts there. (By courts, we do not necessarily mean judicial positions but agencies or bureaus.) When he moved to North America, he was apparently used to and looking for opportunities to lead.
In the case of Weyhill, the actual lord of the land was a “near fiction.” He lived some distance and never did much except collect rents. The land belonged to the rulers, but people could buy and sell the shares of the land they worked or inhabited.
The second kind of town that the settlers came from was a manor type system where the lord was present and involved in the administration of the town. There again were a set of government workers, many part time or volunteers, to keep things running smoothly. The places where people could live and the land they could work was prescribed. The fields were not “open.” To work someone else’s allotted property was more unusual. The settlement’s namesake of Sudbury, Suffolk, in England was like that.
In some towns, much of the government was done by the church. Each village would have had its Anglican parish, and the Anglican Church was the state church. In some places the church not only gathered tithes and perhaps fined people for lack of attendance, but the church oversaw other more secular things such as the constables and maintenance of roads and bridges. A few settlers had come from Framlingham, Suffolk, which was organized this way. Sudbury’s neighboring city of Framingham, Massachusetts, was named for that English town. Apparently, even back in the 1600s, the l in Framlingham was silent.
Those who came from cities like London, of course, had a very different system with aldermen and a mayor and usually more specific laws.
One interesting detail mentioned in Puritan Village was that towns and cities that had ports were expected in time of war to provide vessels to help the navy. If they could not do that, they paid a ship money tax. Now King James I thought of levying the tax even though there was no war because the law said the king could do that without Parliament’s approval. That did not go over well, many towns ignored it, and eventually King James just let it slide.
However, James’s successor, Charles I, would try the same thing. He attempted to enforce it, and many places resisted it because England was not at war. One sees that the concept of taxation without representation was not merely an American idea. Their English forebears had already dealt with the issue. When Charles was eventually tried for treason, one of the counts against him was the illegal imposition of the ship money tax.
Puritan Village also mentions the King’s Book of Sports (a.k.a. the Declaration of Sports).This was originally published by King James I to delineate what type of sports and games would be permitted on Sunday. Charles I re-published this in 1633 and ordered that it be read in all churches. Puritan ministers especially opposed doing this because it was not related to church issues and because many of them believed all kinds of leisure activities were questionable on the Lord’s Day and they did not want to sanction such things. This would have implications for both freedom of religion and religious establishment.
If anyone has read John Bunyan’s autobiography Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners, we learn that Bunyan was not especially religious growing up. He joined the Puritan army during the revolution for political reasons. When he eventually converted to Christianity, he tells us, the sin that put him under conviction was not drinking or gambling or one of the stories we often hear from those who converted as adults—it was playing sports on Sunday.
Much of Puritan Village describes the establishment of government in the town of Sudbury. It appears that for the first fifteen years, things were pretty harmonious. Most towns in Massachusetts were pretty much independent of the colonial government, so they could run things as they saw fit. There were elections and town meetings. All the citizens were much freer than they had been in England. There were no traditions or laws to which people appealed because of long tradition or “time out of mind.”
Despite all that has been written by historians damning early Massachusetts leaders for attempting to establish a “rule by Saints,” not enough attention has been paid to the essential fact that both the Bay government and the town government were accomplishing a virtual social revolution in the systems of social and economic status in each community. For the first time in their lives, the inhabitants of an English town were assuming that each adult male would be granted some land free and clear. Noyes, for example, was shifting from a village in which half the adult males were landless tenants paying yearly rents and feudal fees, to a Massachusetts town in which he had the power to grant lands to all inhabitants, according to “estates and persons.” (83)
We note that while land was allotted to adult males, widows could also receive land, and some did. The book also notes, as was typical of New England Puritans, that they did purchase land from the Indians who lived in the area. Part of the early taxes went to pay local Indians for the land.
Powell also notes that the town of Sudbury, like many town governments in New England, took care of things that churches in England often took care of. For example, weddings and births were recorded in the towns, not the churches. Those who have read Bradford’s On Plymouth Plantation note that this was a big issue. People who did not belong to the state church or did not believe in its teaching could not get married in many places in England because only the church did marriages. The secularization of such activities would also contribute to the principles of religious freedom observed by many Americans since.
A chapter titled “‘We Shall Be Judged by Men of Our Own Choosing’” notes that the churches in New England were largely Congregational. This was not just a reaction to hierarchies like the Church of England or the Catholic Church. It also was a reaction to reformers in England and Scotland who were adopting a Presbyterian system, where pastors in a region would oversee church polity and pastoral assignments. This concept was not applied just to church organization, but government as well. Yes, we can read of this in the Mayflower Compact, but it became a standard in local governments throughout New England and in many ways is the root of the representative republic Americans have today.
The issue of both religious freedom and representative government would come to a head in Sudbury around 1650. The pastor and founder of the Sudbury church, Rev. Edmund Brown, seemed to more sympathetic to the Presbyterian side. After all, shouldn’t trained and ordained ministers decide was is biblically best for the churches? By then, most of the inhabitants of Sudbury saw the Congregational model as the way to go. Since church membership also was a factor in handing out new parcels of land, this became a town issue for about five years. While the Congregational model won out, the vote at one town meeting often overturned the vote of the one before it depending on which faction could get more voters to attend. Plus ça change…
Some distrust among a few citizens developed. Powell shows that much had to do with not only the church government question, but whether people had come from an open field village or a closed field village in England. Eventually, a group of fifteen Sudbury men applied to the Massachusetts Bay Colony government to establish a new town. That was granted, and they moved a few miles to the west and began the town of Marlborough, which today is a small city.
One practice which was a holdover from English towns and villages was that any enrolled or voting citizen was expected to carry out certain duties if asked or elected to do so. These included such duties as the hay warden and the fence viewer. Powell notes fines people had to pay for not keeping up their fences and letting animals destroy other people’s fields—in both Old England and New England.
Sudbury, Massachusetts, used to have a weekly newspaper called The Fence Viewer. I had assumed that it simply referred to neighbors talking to each other over fences, but it actually referred to this old town position. Since the fence viewer would have to travel the extent of the town to inspect fences, he would be a source of news.
This also adds another dimension to Thoreau’s observation in Walden:
For many years I was self-appointed inspector of snow storms and rain storms, and did my duty faithfully; surveyor, if not of highways, then of forest paths and all across-lot routes, keeping them open, and ravines bridged and passable at all seasons, where the public heel had testified to their utility.
Towns often had such road inspectors along with fence inspectors. Thoreau’s “position,” then, not just demonstrates his interest in nature but would have had additional significance and a touch of humor to New England town dwellers even in his day.
Powell has done a thorough job of research for this book. He notes as best he can the history of each family that first settled and tries to discuss the significance of the things they did. It is a fascinating detailed study of the settlement of New England and an analysis of some of the roots of American freedoms.
For anyone reading this book, there are references to British coins or currencies that are not familiar to many people today. While most people understand that before 1971 4 farthings equal a penny, twelve pence equal a shilling, and twenty shillings equal a pound, there are a number of terms in this book I had to look up. These are what some of the terms would have likely meant in the seventeenth century, though a few varied over time.
A mark is two thirds of a pound or thirteen shillings four pence.
A noble is eight shillings four pence.
A florin is two shillings.
A crown is five shillings.