In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

QUAKERS IN MASSACHUSETTS, 16639 now has its own constitution and discipline (in the Spanish language ) in printed form. The members are learning to refer to its pages for guidance. The sending of two delegates to the Five Years Meeting, Ramon Morrei and Miguel Tamayo, directors of the Friends' schools of Holguin and Banes, respectively, marked an epoch in Cuba Yearly Meeting. Their hearty reception by Friends and reports in returning home stimulated an interest and a feeling of fellowship with the world family of yearly meetings. Three Friends from Cuba are planning to attend the World Conference next September.* One of the delegates, Cesar Ortiz, is a member of the faculty of Holguin Friends School, a lawyer and sometime judge of the municipal court; another is Ramiro Diaz, at present a student at Earlham College; the third, Juan Sierra, student of the School of Engineering, of the University of Havana, and pastor at Gibara, Cuba. They will come prepared by their own vital experiences in Christian living as Friends in Cuba to make a real contribution to the common treasury of Friendly truth. Cuba Yearly Meeting will be officially initiated, as it were, into the world family of Friends at the World Conference . May she receive a hearty welcome! QUAKERS AND THEIR ABETTORS MIDDLESEX COUNTY, MASSACHUSETTS, 1663 By Henry J. Cadbury A LTHOUGH the Quaker persecutions in colonial Massachu- /"\ setts were fully recorded by the Quakers themselves, their opponents kept no comparable narratives and the official documents have survived only sporadically, even the court minutes in many cases being now lost. For that reason it may be instructive to print in full a collection of papers surviving from the Middlesex County Court, all pertaining to Quaker cases that belong to the sitting of October 6, 1663. With the exceptions noted below they appear never to have been published. The Cambridge Historical Society has lately secured a typewritten *This article was written before the Friends' World Conference of 1937 had occurred. 10 BULLETIN OF FRIENDS' HISTORICAL ASSOCIATION copy of the earliest minute book (1649-1663). It has also supervised and encouraged a project of the Works Progress Administration by which the thousands of miscellaneous papers belonging to the court long have been examined, numbered, and arranged. Through the kindness of my colleague, Professor J. H. Beale of the Harvard Law School, I have been able to use the typewritten transcript of the minutes. I have also verified them by the originals and have examined the loose papers at the Court House in Cambridge through the courtesy of Mr. Frederic L. Putnam, Clerk of Courts, and his assistants. The minor papers—of which a sample is reproduced in facsimile —make a very interesting exhibit which it would be hard to match elsewhere. For most trials of Friends even in English courts a less full account is available, or at least less full accounts have been published. In this instance in addition to the papers given it would have been possible to supply from the originals the summonses sent in advance to the constables of the towns of Maiden (No. 2232), Watertown (2233), Charlestown (2236), Concord (2237), Cambridge (2250), Sudbury (2255), and Marlboro (2262), informing them of the duty of the freemen to elect members for the jury of trials, of their duty to warn certain persons to appear, etc., with the constable's report on the back. In the period under consideration the court sat four times a year, alternating between Cambridge (April and October) and Charlestown (June and December). The recorder in whose hand the minutes are written was Thomas Danforth, who also appears on the papers, once as "T. D. R." Beside the magistrates on the bench there was regularly a Jury of Trials and a Grand Jury. Of the accused persons Elizabeth Hooton (here spelled Howton , and in non-Quaker histories mostly Horton, following Hutchinson's error) is well known as the first woman preacher among Friends. Her own manuscript record of her experiences, first printed in 1915 in Emily Manners's biography of her, was the basis of the account in George Bishop's New England Judged, Second Part, 1666, which in turn was used by Sewel and...

pdf

Share