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19 1Literacy and the Law in Orthodox New England What pains the town clerks took. Week after week, in books brought specially over the seas, recorders in fledgling New England townships recorded court decisions, land transactions, town votes, earmarks, and the town’s births, marriages, and deaths. Other men, or sometimes the same men, transcribed the laws enacted and the criminal trials conducted in each particular colony. For the conscientious, the keeping of the town and colony books was a heavy burden. In 1654, Francis Newman, faced with yet another annual reelection as the keeper of the New Haven town book, begged to be relieved of the position, because “by reason of much wrighting which he hath had in the place, for allmost seuen yeares past, he finds his eyesight much decayed.” Pressed to continue, he served another three years.1 The earliest clues we have for deciphering reading and writing instruction often come from the town clerks, the men “chosen to keep the town book.” Were it not for these literate men, we would know little about how colonies and townships tried to ensure that their young would become literate themselves in due course. The town and colony records these men kept form the basis of the chapter that follows. We begin with the town of New Haven, not so much because it was typical—although it did have many characteristics in common with other new townships—but because Francis Newman’s records offer exceptionally rich detail on the town’s initial struggles with literacy education in the town school.2 New Haven came into existence in 1639—three years after Harvard College opened in Cambridge, Massachusetts. This “new haven” for the orthodox was founded at the point where the Quinnipiac River meets Long Island Sound, two years after the bloody end of the Pequot War had made the southern New England coast available for English settlement. The two men most influential in the township ’s founding were John Davenport and Theophilus Eaton. During a period when he was converting from Anglicanism to Congregationalism, Davenport resigned as vicar of his London parish, in 1633, and left first England, then the United Netherlands, and finally Massachusetts Bay colony to found a plantation that would adhere to the true principles, as he saw them, of pure Christianity. He would be elected minister of New Haven township; Eaton, his boyhood friend, would serve as the governor of New Haven colony until his death in 1658.3 The plantation was soon transformed from a single township into the leading town of a small colony. The villages of Guilford and Milford joined New Haven township in 1643, and they and a couple of other towns constituted New Haven 20 The Ordinary Road colony until it was absorbed into Connecticut in 1665. The general court of the colony acted as its legislative body, and records were kept of both colony and town rulings.4 Founding the Colony of New Haven The settlement of New Haven on the southern shores of New England had begun, as it did elsewhere in New England, with the purchase of land from native Americans . In late November, 1638, Davenport and Eaton, together with some other Englishmen, had purchased a large tract of land from Momaugin, the Indian sachem of the Quinnipiac Indians. It cost the English a dozen overcoats, along with spoons, hatchets, knives, and scissors. Shaumpishuh, an Indian squaw and Momaugin’s sister, had added her mark to the document. Two weeks later, Mantowese ’s bow and arrow and Sawseunck’s depiction of an ax sealed a second sale of land.5 The Indians, too, respected the authority of the written symbol. Now, on June 4, 1639,6 all the free “planters” (the 70 founders of the township) in Quinnipiac , soon to be renamed New Haven, met together in a general meeting to set up a civil government and nominate those who would lay the foundation for gathering a church there. Robert Newman was “intreated to write in carracters and to read distinctly and audibly in the hearing of all the people whatt was propounded and accorded on,” so that “itt might appeare thatt all consented to matters propounded according to words written by him.” When, a little later, it came time to subscribe to the formally written covenant, New Haven had already increased in size. Now 111 men put their names to the covenant. Of this number, only 13 made marks; all the rest signed their names...

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