PURITAN FARMERS OR FARMING PURITANS: PHYSICAL GEOGRAPHY AND AGRICULTURAL PRACTICES IN NEW ENGLAND COMMUNITY FORMATION by Donald E. Maroc B.A., Indiana University, 1968 A THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF MASTER OF ARTS in the Department of History We accept this thesis as conforming to the required standard: THE UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA April, 1970 In presenting this thesis in partial fulfilment of the requirements for an advanced degree at the University of British Columbia, I agree that the Library shal1 make it freely available for reference and study. I further agree tha permission for extensive copying of this thesis for scholarly purposes may be granted by the Head of my Department or by his representatives. It is understood that copying or publication of this thesis for financial gain shall not be allowed without my written permission. Department of H > 5TQ/-<-| The University of British Columbia Vancouver 8, Canada Date C ABSTRACT A large number of Englishmen, predominantly from the West Country and East Anglia, began the settlement of New England in 1630. In the sparsely populated North American wilderness they established a new society. The foundation for their New England community lay in the English experience which they brought to the New World. When a group of men consciously agree to form a new community it is essential that they share certain aspirations, needs and experiences. The form of this new society results from an effort to fulfill and satisfy their common characteristics. An agricultural occu• pation was the experience shared by the Englishmen who settled the town of Dorchester, Massachusetts, in 1630. Their common needs included finding an environment in which the physical geography fit their accus• tomed agricultural practices. A large majority of the settlers of Dorchester came from the three West Country counties of Somerset, Dorset, and Devon. The Somerset and Dorset emigrants were from regions known for their dairy products since the Middle Ages. The Devonshiremen, in contrast, had lived in that county's grain and fruit producing sections. At the time the Dorchester settlers left their English homes economic conditions in the West Country pressed hard on individual farming families. Increased demand for agricultural products in emerging urban areas caused rents and the cost of good land to multiply rapidly. Price increases outran incomes and many people, in trying to escape the rural hard times, found themselves among the urban unemployed in cities such as Dorchester, in Dorset, and Exeter, in Devon. In an effort to understand the motivation for both the impulse to emigrate from England and the formation of a new community at Dorchester in Massachusetts Bay, a crisis situation was selected for study. Buring 1635 and 1636 one-third of Dorchester's population moved to the Connect• icut River Valley. As with all of New England's history this event has been interpreted on the basis of either its religious or political significance. The people of Dorchester have been portrayed as fleeing from an increasingly rigid and narrow religious orthodoxy in the Bay Colony, or as democractically inclined frontiersmen escaping the oppressive, feudal oligarchy of the Massachusetts leaders. The people of Dorchester who established Windsor, Connecticut in 1636 did not fit either of these categories. They were dairy farmers and cattle raisers from Somerset and Dorset, together with a few east county men, whose Dorchester lands were not compatible with their agricultural practices. The Connecticut Valley, particularly at Windsor where they settled, provided the meadowlands and pasturage absolutely necessary to the successful maintenance of their cattle. The native grasses in the river-bottom meadows and higher pastures grew in red sandstone-based loams, reminiscent of the best soils in Somerset and Dorset. It is concluded that it was cattle, not religious doctrine or politics, which split the Dorchester community and resulted in the foundation of Windsor, Connecticut. It is suggested that while religion and politics were important to seventeenth-century New England husbandmen, as social determinants these were decidedly subordinate to the soil and the agricultural use of that soil. TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION 1 Chapter I. THE GREAT MIGRATION 7 II. • WESTCOUNTRYMEN IN THE GREAT MIGRATION 12 1. Dorsetshire Dairymen 2.. Somerset Emigrants 3. Devonshire Husbandmen 4. Conclusion III. SETTLEMENT OF DORCHESTER,, MASSACHUSETTS 29 1. Church Members and Freemen 2. The Ordering of Town Affairs 3. The Tenor of Religious Affairs 4. Conclusion IV. SETTLEMENT OF WINDSOR,, CONNECTICUT 69 1. Minor Distortions for Major Theses 2. The Windsor Migration Dissected 3. The Impulse to Migrate 4. -'An Agricultural Bias 5. Red Sandstone Meadows 6. Conclusions APPENDIX 104 BIBLIOGRAPHY 142 Migration and Labour are expressions of one of the basic instincts of all living creatures, the instinct for survival. ^ - J.M. Mackenzie INTRODUCTION The hypothesis that the most decisive element in the foundation of colonial New England's society was a brand of Chris Han organization known as non-separating congregational Puritanism is false. Data, collected in support of this widely accepted theory; fell into a heap of impossible conclusions because the assumption rested upon an over- intellectualized analysis of a rather restricted body of evidence. Further, its acceptance required the near neglect of the recorded experiences and pre-occupations of the early Massachusetts Bay Settlers. The debris yielded another idea, the idea that behind the decisions of most New England colonists lay something far more basic to human existence than theological abstractions. Nearly all the early settlers at Massachusetts Bay engaged in some form of farming. The New England town, from its inception,was an agricul• tural community. The needs of an agricultural society provided a framework for its institutions. The New England town was not a religious community John MacDonald Mackenzie, "African Labour in South Central Africa, 1890-1914, and Nineteenth Century Colonial Labour Theory," (unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, The University of British Columbia, 1969), 1. • which only incidentally cultivated the earth but an agrarian society with healthy regard for the Diety who controlled the weather and the crops, as well as each man's individual destiny. Historians established religion as the essence of New England life largely on the basis of literary evidence. Eighteenth and Nineteenth- century historians depended to some extent on tracts by leading Puritan divines published in New England, but even more on journals and histories written by John Winthrop, William Bradford, Nathaniel Morton and William Hubbard, together with manuscript records of the Colony courts. As time went on others added records of town meetings, land appropriations, deeds, wills, etc., and a few diaries and letters. Much of this material was originally incorporated into local studies of New England towns. These data, in the hands of historians such as James Truslow Adams, came to support a much less complimentary.view of seventeenth-centuryfNew Englanders than that previously held. The attitude associated with Adams prevailed until the 1930's, when Perry Miller, Charles M. Andrews, Samuel E. Morison, Ola E. Winslow, Edmund S. Morgan and others, decided to make New England history into Puritan history of an American Whig strain. Using all previously exploited sources very selectively, these academicians immersed themselves in sermon literature and religious tracts written by English divines in England, Holland, and America. ' They determined that more than 90 percent of the English emigrants to New England in the 1630's were literate and, therefore, participants in the theological-ecclesiastical logic chopping 3 contained in the voluminous publications of the ministers and religiously oriented Colony leaders.-*- The New Englanders suddenly became less austere and much more human, but also achieved an unbelievably high intellectual level. Whether they found seventeenth-century New England narrow and distasteful or earthy and wholesome, American historians used non- separating congregational Puritanism as their frame of reference. Without serious objection the religious base has been accepted as the New Englanders raison d'etre, as fundamental to their institutional organization and decision formation. Roy H. Akagi, in 1924, made the only real effort at dissent from this position, before Sumner Chilton Powell's study of Sudbury, Massachusetts, in 1963. According to Akagi the New England town, was at first nothing but a simple land community for the sole purpose of settlement. [The] original settlers or grantees became the proprietors of the land which was granted to them and they formed a simple agrarian community bound by the common ownership of land. The first town meeting held was the meeting of these proprietors for the better ordering of their land and its divisions.^ Akagi decided the "simple land community" gave way to a separate political community — which he quietly surrendered to the historians of Puritanism. Akagi's limitation was his political-institutional approach to history. The proprietors were merely a lower order of political organization which evolved ^Samuel Eliot Morison, The Puritan Pronaos: Studies in the Intellectual Life of New England in the Seventeenth Century (New York: New York University Press, 1936), 79-82. 9 Roy Hidemichi