Puritan Village: The Formation of a New England Town

VII. "All Liberties As Other Towns Have"

ff ^f/l Liberties *As Other Towns ZHave" W HEN Peter Noyes and his fellow petitioners were granted "all liberties asother towns have," by the General Court in 1638, the Bay government was referring to the seventeen other Massachusetts towns which had already been established.1 But neither Noyes nor his leading citizens had lived in any New England town except Watertown, and they had never been elected or appointed to a governing council. They brought with them years of experience in English communities, and it is only natural that they relied on this training, in addition to whatever reports they heard about Boston, Salem, Charlestown, Cambridge, and other early Bay settlements. To Noyes the phrase, "liberties of a town," undoubtedly stimulated memories of the power and government of the borough of Andover , Hants, where his relatives served as members of the borough council.2 Since Andover isadjacent to Weyhill and was the market town, Noyes knew it well. Edmund Goodnow and his brothers, cited in the Wiltshire church courts for going to hear sermons in the borough of Shaftesbury, must have known the liberties of "Shaston," particularly since Thomas Goodnow lived in the city. Edmund Rice and Robert Darvell certainly knew the powers granted their borough of Berkhamsted. Hugh Griffin, elected town clerk of Sudbury, Massachusetts, had previously lived in London, as Brian Pendleton had also. The knowledge of the functions of borough administration, which these men brought to Sudbury, could not have been easilyforgotten. chapter vii FIGURE 13 Edmund Rice's House and Barn, Sudbury FIGURE 14 Sudbury Land Grants and Population Growth, 1640-1655 FIGURE 15 Sud bury Taxes, 1640-1655 FIGURE l6 Sudbury Bridge, 1643 FIGURE 17 First Sudbury Meetinghouse, 1643 "ALL LIBERTIES AS OTHER TOWNS HAVE" 93 Noyes, Rice, and Goodnow were trying to weld together an independent synthesis of local laws, responsibilities, and rights, an amalgam of English institutional influences, as well as new solutions to new problems. Noyes, Haines, and Goodnow insisted on open-field agricultural co-operation and the tradition of passing agricultural bylaws by the farmers concerned. Perhaps Rice contributed the tax systemof Berkhamsted, with changes, a system which Noyes, at least, had not used in his village. Perhaps Griffin gave sanction to the increasing number of town officers, paid from the town's treasury. To all of their English experience, fresh ideas were added each year. Quite possibly Rice, Haines, and Noyes, traveling to Boston to speak for Sudbury in theGeneral Court sessions, took heart in the realization that other towns were being allowed to experiment, much in the same way.3 The leading men of Sudbury, however, did not act like an English borough council, nor assume the exclusive powers of freemen as decreed by the Body of Liberties.Every major issue was discussed in open town meetings, and over 132 meetings wr ere held in the first fifteen years. More than 650 orders, "agreed by the town," were passed in this period, a staggering number contrasted with the legislative activities of the Suffolk borough. Two charts well illustrate the amount of time and thought which the citizens of Sudbury were contributing to their new political entity. (Figure 11.) In terms of numbers of orders devoted to particular topics, the citizensof early Sudbury called meetings and passed laws on the following items: land (45 per cent of the total number of orders, 1639-1656), town government (35 per cent), economic regulations and taxes (9 per cent), church affairs (6 per cent), personal quarrels in the town (2 per cent), relations with neighboring towns (i per cent), relations with the Indians (i per cent), and relations with the colony government (i per cent). Land Problems Once the committee had drawn up the basic "proportion" of all male citizens in 1639-1640, and individual grants of meadow and upland had been made on this basic ranking system, the rest of the 19,200 acres was declared to be "the commons," a sort of town bank account in land. It was considered good soil but very difficult to farm. Edward Johnson, in his brief survey of New England made in the 1650*8 said of Sudbury, "It is very well watered, and hath a score of plowlands, but by reason of the oaken roots, they have little [land] broken up, considering the many acres the place affords; but this kind of land requires great strength to break up, yet brings...