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^Watertown on the Qharles W HEN the Goodnows, the Noyeses,and the Rices landed in Watertown about 1637-1638, they found, indeed, a "select society," and a vigorous spirit of dissent. There were many yeomen and artisans but no archdeacons or bishops and, most important, no landlords. Everyone hoped that there would be no poor, and Watertown had made special provisions to exclude them. Noyes must have been one of the first to sense that he was surrounded by East Anglians. Or, at least, he knew that these were the men who were quickly obtaining large grants of land in the new town. A rough survey of those granted meadow in Watertown in June, 1637, shows that 60 per cent of the total number of grantees had come from Essex, Suffolk, and Norfolk.1 Even more important, all the first selectmen of Watertown but two had emigrated from East Anglia.2 As might be expected, these men were establishing the land habits they were familiar with. The 4625 acres which had been granted to 120 men in 1636 were to be rectangular sections, laid out "successively one after another," in four "great dividends."3 Although the town law gave the alternative, "for them to enclose or feed in common," it was obvious what these East Anglians hoped to do. (See map, Figure 5. Two dividends have been drawn in.) Each man was obtaining from twenty-five to fifty acres of uncleared land, • by a freehold grant, to be made into arable, hay ground, and pasture. Houses had been constructed around a village common, to be sure, and a few "plowlands " were being tilled in common for the first years, but each farmer was CHAPTER V WATERTOWN ON THE CHARLES 75 shifting to individual management asquickly ashe could.4 (See map of Watertown Center, Figure 6.) This posed a serious dilemma for West Country men like the Goodnows, the Haineses, and others. They were not able or willing to change farming habits which went back "till the memory of man runneth not to the contrary." Few of them had brought over enough equipment to run a whole farm. Just as serious was the fact that the Watertown men were not granting any more lots after 1634-1635. The center wascrowded, and Watertown wasconsidered one of the most populous settlements in the Bay Colony. Any newcomer was ordered to obtain his land by purchase, and no one could settle in the town without the express permission of the Watertown freemen.5 Peter Noyes was fortunate. Although he had arrived after the cessation of the free allotments, he either bought, or wheedled, twelve acres of plowland, twelve acres of meadow, eighteen acres of upland, and lot number nineteen in the first dividend, a seventy acre piece of land.6 But it was all distant from the town center —the plowland and the upland were on "thefurther plaine"; the pasture was in "theremote meadow"; and his grant lot was about five miles from the central cluster of houses in Watertown itself. His fellow open-field men in Watertown in 1638 were in a difficult position . Unable to get free allotments, perhaps unwilling to buy land and to settle among the East Anglians, they were faced with tax assessments and the threat that anyone who "may prove chargeable to the town" could be ordered to leave.7 The leaders of Watertown wanted to avoid the excessive charges for the poor which everyone of them had known in their English parishes. Is it any wonder that the open-field folk banded together and looked to Noyes, who had become a citizen of Watertown, to help them? They certainly did not want to become tenants, or worse still, landless laborers, in a settlement in which everyone else, if he had arrived early enough, was becoming a landlord.* But these unhappy residents in Watertown had learned a key political fact — that the will of the people was respected, however begrudgingly, by the Massachusetts government. They learned swiftly that it had been the citizens of Watertown who, in opposition to a colony tax levied by the assistants alone a few years previously, had helped establish that basic English principle, no taxation without representation.8 Laws were also in process to give legal sanctity to the privilege of raising one's voice in a town meeting. One did not have * There were, however, at least five or six men from the open-field country who were granted meadow lots in...

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