“The Old World Peoples,” Anthropological Quarterly, 36 (1963), pp. 75–99.3 3 Compare John Winthrop, Winthrop’s Journal, James Kendall Hosmer, ed. (New York, 1908); and William Bradford, Of Plymouth Plantation, Samuel Eliot Morison, ed. (New York, 1952). (The quotation is on p. 141.) Other quotations are in Everett Emerson, ed., Letters from New England (Amherst, MA, 1976),pp. 110, 225; and William Wood, New England’s Prospect (1634), Alden T. Vaughan, ed. (Amherst, MA, 1977), p. 69. Plymouth had other livestock before it first obtained cattle: in 1623, it possessed 6 goats, 50 swine, and a number of hens. Emmanuel Altham to Sir Edward Altham, September 1623, in Three Visitors to Early Plymouth, Sidney V. James, Jr, ed. (Plimoth Plantation, 1963), p. 24.
4 4 Carl Bridenbaugh, Fat Mutton and Liberty of Conscience (Providence, 1974), pp. 27–60; Percy Wells Bidwell and John I. Falconer, History of Agriculture in the Northern United States (Washington, DC, 1925), pp. 18–32; Howard S. Russell, A Long, Deep Farrow: Three Centuries of Farming in New England (Hanover, NH, 1976), pp. 30–8, 151–69.
5 5 Winthrop, Journal, I, p. 64; J. Hammond Trumbull, ed., The Public Records of the Colony of Connecticut (Hartford, 1850), p. 19; Nathaniel B. Shurtleff, ed., Records of the Governor and Company of the Massachusetts Bay in New England (Boston, 1853), IV, Part 2, pp. 512–13.
6 6 John Winthrop, “Reasons to Be Considered,” Winthrop Papers (Massachusetts Historical Society, 1931), II, p. 141.
7 7 Shurtleff, Massachusetts Records, I, pp. 121, 133; Franklin Bowditch Dexter, ed., New Haven Town Records, I, 1649–1662 (New Haven, CT, 1917), p. 193; Nathaniel B. Shurtleff, ed., Records of the Colony of New Plymouth in New England (Boston, 1855), III, pp. 21, 89, 106, 119, 132, 192; James P. Ronda, “Red and White at the Bench: Indians and the Law in Plymouth Colony, 1620–1691,” Essex Institute Historical Collections, 110 (1974), pp. 208–9.
8 8 Shurtleff, Plymouth Records, III, p. 192; Dexter, New Haven Records, I, p. 193; Shurtleff, Massachusetts Records, I, p. 99.
9 9 I am indebted to Edmund Morgan for the suggestion that colonial wolf populations probably rose after the arrival of English live stock; the anonymous author of the “Essay on the Ordering of Towns” (in the Winthrop Papers, III, p. 185) corroborates this, but for different reasons, with the claim that “I have often hearde (by seemeing credible men) that Wolves are much more increased since our Nation came then when the Indians possessed the same, and a Reason rendred, that they were dilligent in destroying the Yonge.” One can doubt the “Reason rendred” by wondering whether a people who kept no livestock would have troubled themselves so much over predators who lived off the deer herds, but perhaps they did. Colonial wolf populations are impossible to estimate accurately. One gets the feeling that, for colonists, wolves were either “very common, and very noxious,” or were nonexistent. There does not appear to have been any middle ground between these two conditions. Colonists, like many who keep cattle today, surely overestimated the damage done by wolves, and probably attributed to wolves livestock deaths which had nothing to do with the predators. On early responses to wolves, see Shurtleff, Massachusetts Records, III, pp. 10, 17; Winthrop, Journal, I, pp. 53, 67, III; Wood, Prospect, pp. 45–6.
10 10 On wolf bounties, see Shurtleff, Massachusetts Records, I, pp. 81, 102, 156, 218, 252, 304, 319; II, pp. 84–5, 103, 252; III, pp. 10, 17, 134, 319; IV, Part 2, pp. 2, 42; V, p. 453; Shurtleff, Plymouth Records, I, pp. 22, 31; III, pp. 50–1, 85–6; Town Records of Salem (Salem, 1868), pp. 107, 127. Most town records contain a number of entries similar to the ones I cite here.
11 11 John Josselyn, New-England’s Rarities Discovered (1672), Edward Tucker-man, ed., in Transactions and Collections of the American Antiquarian Society, 4 (1860), pp. 150–1; Dexter, New Haven Records, pp. 73–4, 92, 309; Shurtleff, Massachusetts Records, II, pp. 252–3; M. Minor, Diary, pp. 32, 48, 53, 81, 98, 105, 113, 119, 120; Jeremy Belknap, History of New Hampshire (Dover, NH, 1812), III, pp. 108–9; Benjamin Trumbull, A Complete History of Connecticut (Hartford, CT, 1797), p. 26; Herbert B. Adams, “Village Communities of Cape Anne and Salem,” Johns Hopkins University Studies in Historical and Political Science,ser. I, 9–10 (1883), p. 58; “Ordering of Towns,” Winthrop Papers, III, p. 184; Scituate Records, I, p. 48, as quoted by John Robert Stilgoe, Patterns on the Land: The Making of a Colonial Landscape, 1633–1800, PhD Thesis, Harvard University, 1976, p. 159; Timothy Dwight, Travels in New England and New York (1821), Barbara Miller Solomon, ed. (Cambridge, MA, 1969), I, p. 33.
12 12 Shurtleff, Plymouth Records, I, p. 6; Shurtleff, Massachusetts Records, I, pp. 215, 221, 272; II, pp. 14–15.
13 13 Charles J. Hoadly, ed., Records of the Colony of New Haven (Hartford, 1858), p. 579; Dexter, New Haven Records, pp. 65, 132, 234, 281; Shurtleff, Massachusetts Records, I, p. 333; III, p. 319; David Thomas Konig, “Community Custom and the Common Law: Social Change and the Development of Land Law in Seventeenth-Century Massachusetts,” American Journal of Legal History, 18(1974), pp. 137–77. For a fine detailed discussion of how earlier English field practices fed into these colonial systems, see David Grayson Allen, In English Ways (Chapel Hill, 1981).
14 14 Rutman, Husbandmen of Plymouth, p. 49; Shurtleff, Massachusetts Records, I, pp. 106, 150, 157, 182, 219–20, 222, 238–9, 255, 265, 270; IV, Part 2, p. 322. It is quite likely that disputes over swine expressed a disguised class conflict. Because pigs were so cheap and easy to raise, they were favored by poorer colonists as a source of meat; wealthier colonists, who could afford to keep larger numbers of cattle, had less need of them. The evidence cited above in Shurtleff suggests that a number of colonists were decidedly unhappy about the swine laws, and spoke against them so vociferously that the Massachusetts Court felt compelled to mete out stiff fines. No study of this issue has been done for colonial New England, but Steven Hahn’s article on the nineteenth-century South is suggestive: “Hunting, Fishing, and Foraging: Common Rights and Class Relations in the Postbellum South,” Radical History Review, 26 (October 1982), pp. 37–64.
15 15 Shurtleff, Massachusetts Records, I, pp. 188–9; Roger Williams, The Letters of Roger Williams, John Russell Bartlett, ed., Publications of the Narragansett Club, 6 (1874), pp. 71, 78, 104; “Leift Lion Gardener His Relation of the Pequot Warres,” Massachusetts Historical Society Collections, 3rd ser., 3 (1833), p. 154; Roger Williams, A Key into the Language of America (1643), John J. Teunissen and Evelyn J. Hinz, eds. (Detroit, 1973), p. 182; Wood, Prospect, p. 57, Thomas Morton, New English Canaan (1637), Charles F. Adams, ed., Pubs. of the Prince Society, XIV (Boston, 1883), p. 227.
16 16 Salem Records, pp. 130, 137, 143, 152; Dexter, New Haven Records, pp. 19–20; Shurtleff, Massachusetts Records, I, p. 215.
17 17 On these land divisions, see the general list of town studies and histories of New England agriculture in William Cronon, Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England (New York: Hill and Wang, 1983), pp. 228–30.
18 18 On speculation, see ibid., pp. 234–5.
19 19 George Perkins, Marsh, Man, and Nature (1864), David Lowenthal, ed. (Cambridge, MA, 1965), p. 74; Allen, In English Ways, p. 231; Hugh M. Raup and Reynold E. Carlson, “The History of Land Use in the Harvard Forest,” Harvard Forest Bulletin, 20 (1941), p. 25.
20 20 Richard Bushman, From Puritan to Yankee (Cambridge, MA, 1967), pp. 31–2; Bridenbaugh, Fat Mutton, pp. 27–60; Bidwell and Falconer, Northern Agriculture, pp. 26–32, 40–8; Darrett B. Rutman, “Governor Winthrop’s Garden Crop: The Significance of Agriculture in the Early Commerce of Massachusetts Bay,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 20 (1963), pp. 396–415; Samuel Maverick, “A Brief Description of New England,” Massachusetts Historical Society Proceedings, 2nd ser., I (1884–85), p. 247; Joseph Hadfield, An Englishman in America, 1785, Douglas S. Robertson, ed. (Toronto, 1933), p. 198.
21 21 M. Minor, Diary, pp. 31, 42, 49, 50, 56, 57, 74, etc.; Carl Bridenbaugh, “Yankee Use and Abuse of the Forest in the
