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When the Puritans Banned Mincemeat Pie

On May 11, 1659, the Massachusetts Puritans banned Christmas and ordered anyone caught celebrating to pay a fine of five shillings. That meant no mincemeat pie during what used to be the Yuletide season.

Of all the ways to celebrate Christmas, mincemeat pie held a special place. Myth and superstition had grown up around the holiday treat, and the Puritans would have none of it. They called the mincemeat pie “idolatrie in a crust.”

Plate of freshly baked festive Christmas mince pies

Mincemeat pie also carried political overtones in a time of deep partisan animosity. Eating mincemeat pie during the holidays showed you sided with the monarchy rather than the Puritan recusants. For a time, the mincemeat pie had the same effect on a Puritan that a MAGA hat had on an NPR devotee.

So how did mincemeat pie become so controversial?

The Pagan Roots of Mincemeat Pie

The Puritans, for starters, hated Christmas. Back in the 17^th century the holiday bore little resemblance to the cozy family celebration of modern times. It was more an echo of Saturnalia, when Romans indulged in unrestrained revelry, boozing, gambling and letting their libidos go. They also made sweet meat pies an essential part of Saturnalia.

At Christmastime in England, young men continued the Saturnalia tradition. They roamed the streets, barged into homes and demanded booze, money and figgy pudding. They did it, too, in colonial New England towns.

Increase Mather abandoned New England, for a while

In Boston, Increase Mather denounced Christmas celebrants as “consumed in Compotations, in Interludes, in playing at Cards, in Revellings, in excess of Wine, in Mad Mirth.”

Mincemeat Pie: The Myth and the Lore

Mincemeat is a Middle Eastern method of cooking meat with fruit and spices. The Crusaders may have brought it back from their crusades. At least they brought back the spices.

Crusaders besiege Damascus

Medieval English cooks made mincemeat with meat, any kind of meat: mutton, goose, beef tongue, even lamb testicles. They added suet, apples, citrus and spices. Later, the pies grew sweeter because the the West Indies sugar plantations made sugar cheap and available.

The sugar used in mincemeat had the advantage of preserving the meat. The fruit and spices may also have disguised meat that had gotten a little too old. Because the meat was shredded or minced, the pie was called “mince” or “shred.”

Myth and superstition then grew up around it.

Three spices in the pie – nutmeg, cloves and cinnamon — were said to represent the gifts brought by the three Magi to the Christ Child. Cooks also made the pies with 13 ingredients, to represent Christ and his apostles.

Eventually they began putting a pastry star on top of the mincemeat pies to indicate the Star of Bethlehem followed by the Magi.

Sometimes the pies were as small as tarts, and they came in many shapes. One recipe said they should be oblong, in imitation of the manger that held the baby Jesus. That’s why they’re sometimes called “Crib cakes.” Eventually cooks made the smaller pies in all kinds of shapes.

Stir-up Sunday

Mincemeat pie was such a Christmas favorite that people called it Christmas Pie. Every family made one, “a most learned mixture of neat’s tongues, chicken, eggs, sugar, raisins, &c.,” the 19^th century antiquarian John Timbs observed.

Family cooks often made mincemeat pie on stir-up Sunday, the last Sunday before Advent. They believed they should only stir it clockwise, because stirring it the other way would bring bad luck.

Adoration of the Magi

For good luck, each member of the family stirred the mixture while making a wish. Another superstition held that a mincemeat pie should be eaten every day during the Twelve Days of Christmas for health and happines in the new year.

A variation on the mincemeat pie could be found in Coventry, noted Timbs. Called God-cakes, they were triangular, an inch thick and filled with a kind of mincemeat. The people of Coventry ate them on New Year’s Day.

The poet Robert Herrick wrote that it was once the tradition to guard the Christmas pie – from thievery, not the Puritan authorities.

COME guard this night the Christmas-Pie,
That the thief, though ne’er so sly,
With his flesh-hooks, don’t come nigh
To catch it

From him, who all alone sits there,
Having his eyes still in his ear,
And a deal of nightly fear
To watch it.

Christmas Pie by William Henry Hunt

Oliver Cromwell Takes Over

When the Puritans overthrew King Charles in 1641, they did their best to discourage Christmas celebrations. They viewed it as pagan, popish, a time to pretend “the memory of Christ into an extreame forgetfulness of him, by giving liberty to carnall and sensuall delights.”

In 1647, Parliament made the celebration of Christmas a punishable offence. They tried to force shopkeepers to stay open and banned special religious observances on Christmas, Easter and Whitsun (the seventh Sunday after Easter).

Olier-Cromwell

Town criers went through London shouting, “No Christmas! No Christmas!” Soldiers were ordered to patrol the streets and seize any items, like mincemeat pie, used to celebrate the holiday. One writer mocked the Puritan hatred of mincemeat with the lines, “Treason’s in a December pie, and death within the pot.”

George Thomason collected a ballad lamenting the disappearance of mincemeat, or shred, pie:

Likewise then did die,

Rost beef and shred pie.

Pro-Christmas riots broke out, but they didn’t bring back Christmas. Not until Charles II restored the monarchy in 1660 did Christmas Pie return to the English table.

The Massachusetts Puritans

Like their English counterparts, the Massachusetts Puritans had no truck with Christmas or Christmas Pie. Puritan leader Increase Mather denounced the holiday, saying people celebrated it not because of the birth date of Christ. They did it, he wrote, because the “Heathens Saturnalia was at the time kept in Rome, and they were willing to have those Pagan Holidays metamorphosed into Christian [ones].” He was correct.

The Puritans did their best to stamp out Christmas through social pressure. However, some still observed “such festivals as were superstitously kept in outher countries, to the great dishonour of God and offence of others.”

Public notice declaring Christmas illegal in Boston in 1659.

So in 1659, the year before Christmas returned to England, the Massachusetts General Court banned the holiday.

The court ordered, “that whosoever shall be found observing any such day as Christmas or the like, either by forbearing of labor, feasting, or any other way, upon such accounts as aforesaid, every such person so offending shall pay for every such offence five shillings.”

Feasting, of course, meant mincemeat pie.

And, like their counterparts across the Atlantic, the Massachusetts Puritans had no qualms about seizing items used to celebrate Christmas.

The ban remained until 1681. Christmas didn’t become a legal holiday in Massachusetts until 1856, and children went to school on Christmas Day as late as 1870.

A salver with an arrangement of mincemeat pies, 1710

More About Mincemeat Pie

In 1796, Hartford cookbook writer Amelia Simmons published American Cookery, the first U.S. cookbook. She included a recipe for mincemeat pie:

Four pounds boiled beef, chopped fine, and salted, six pound of raw apple chopped also, one pound beef suet, one quart of Wine or rich sweet cyder, one ounce mace, and cinnamon, a nutmeg, two pounds raisins, bake in past No. 3, three fourths of an hour.

In rural Maine, people still make mincemeat during hunting season if they killed a deer or otherwise get access to venison.

However, in most places mince comes in a jar with a label – without meat.

Images: Mince pie By Beck – originally posted to Flickr as Mince Pies, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=10381760. Plate of mincemeat pies By christmasstockimages.com – http://christmasstockimages.com/free/food-dining/slides/mince_pie_plate.htm, CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=97503821. Adoration of the Magi By Justus van Gent – This file was donated to Wikimedia Commons as part of a project by the Metropolitan Museum of Art. See the Image and Data Resources Open Access Policy, CC0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=57669996. This story updated in 2022.

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Banbury Cake, the Puritans’ Favorite Treat

On Dec. 24, 1706, Judge Samuel Sewall brought a Banbury cake to a sick friend in Boston. Sewall, best known as one of the Salem witch trial judges, served for many years as chief justice of the Massachusetts Superior Court of Judicature. He had a wide circle of friends, and kept a diary for 50 years. In it, he recorded much that happened of significance in Massachusetts during the late 17th and early 18th century. He also included his own inability to get a date.

Samuel Sewall

Sewall’s diary also reveals the workings of a staunch Puritan mind, which brings us to the Banbury cake.

Banbury Cake

The Banbury cake originated in a Puritan stronghold, the town of Banbury in Oxfordshire, England. It’s a pastry stuffed with spiced currants or other dried fruit. Banbury bakers have made them since the 16th century.

The first recipe appeared in Gervase Markham’s The English Huswife in 1615. It starts with four pounds of currants to make “a very good” (and very large) Banbury cake. Then one takes flower (flour), barm (leaven or yeast), butter, cream and sugar and “works it together for an hour.” The pastry surrounds the currants, and the whole thing is baked “according to bigness.”

Banbury cake, illustration by Leslie Landrigan

The characteristic Banbury cake has an oval shape with three slashes across the top. It got famous over the centuries. In 1869, Robert Chambers wrote, in his Book of Days, the cakes “are exported to the most distant parts of the world, one baker alone, in 1839, disposing of 139,500 twopenny ones.”

Banbury had a reputation for cheese, cakes and ale, though some have said its fame rested on cheese, cakes and zeal. They referred to the extreme Puritanism that characterized its inhabitants. Banbury’s zealous Puritans prompted the English poet Richard Braithwaite to write in 1638,

To Benbury came I, O profane one!
There I saw a Puritane one,
Hanging of his cat on Monday,
For killing of a mouse on Sunday.

You’ve probably heard a different poem about Banbury:

Ride a cock-horse to Banbury Cross,
To see a fine lady upon a white horse;
Rings on her fingers and bells on her toes,
And she shall have music wherever she goes.

Banbury still has a cross, though not the original. The Banbury Puritans tore it down (too Papist) around the time of the English Civil War.

Statue of Banbury’s Fine Lady and cross (atop steeple)

Saye-and-Sele

One of the staunchest Puritans who lived near Banbury was William Fiennes, 1st Viscount Saye-and-Sele. He supported colonization of North America. In 1632, he got a deed of conveyance for a large tract of land along the Connecticut River and his company appointed John Winthrop the Younger to serve as governor. Saybrook, Conn., bears his name, along with another incorporator, Lord Brooke.

We know of other Puritans from Banbury who came to New England during the Great Migration. The Rev. Samuel Newman, for example, emigrated from Banbury to Dorchester (now a Boston neighborhood), then helped found Rehoboth, Mass. And Samuel Borman emigrated to Ipswich, Mass., from Banbury.

Arthur Wellington Brayley speculated the Massachusetts Puritans especially enjoyed the Banbury cake. Brayley noted how Samuel Sewall brought one to a sick friend in his 1909 book, Bakers and Baking in Massachusetts, Including the Flour, Baking Supply and Kindred Interests, from 1620 to 1909.

“Banbury was also famous for its Puritanism, and this savor may have extended to its cakes,” Brayley wrote.

Mr. Bayley’s Banbury Cake

Samuel Sewall wrote the following about his Christmas Eve visit in his diary:

Visited Mr. Bayley as I came home: he has a very sore Mouth. He tells me he has left off observing the distances of his Fits, is tired and done. I gave him a Banberry cake, of which he eat pretty well, complaining of his Mouth.

As a good Puritan, Sewall noted with approval all the shops opened for business the next day — Christmas.

And, to his credit, he later apologized for his role in the Salem witch trials.

There are plenty of recipes for Banbury cake on the internet. Here’s one we’ve adapted from The English Kitchen.

Ingredients

1 lb. all-butter puff pastry, cold
3/4 cup turbinado sugar
1/4 cup butter
scant cup sultana raisins
scant cup dried currants
1/2 cup finely chopped candied citrus peel
1 teaspoon grated nutmeg
1 teaspoon mixed spice (see recipe below)
1/3 cup granulated sugar

Directions

Preheat the oven to 400*F. Line two baking sheets with parchment.
Measure the fruit, spices, peel and butter into a bowl along with the turbinado sugar. Mix well, using your hands, until the mixture clumps. Shape into nine evenly sized balls.
Roll the chilled puff pastry out on a lightly floured surface to a 15-inch square, no more than 1/8 inch thick. Cut into nine five-inch squares. Place a ball of fruit filling into the middle of each square. Bring four corners up over the filling to meet in the middle and pinch shut. Pinch all four sides shut as well. Flip over and lightly flatten into a circle in the palm of your hand. Using a rolling pin, with the folds on the bottom, gently roll into circles. They should be four inches in diameter and 1/2 inch thick.
Brush the tops lightly with water. Measure the granulated sugar into a bowl and lightly press the wet tops of the cakes into the sugar.
Place onto the baking sheets, leaving plenty of space in between. Using a sharp knife, make three slashes into the top of each.
Bake for 25 minutes. Allow to cool on the baking sheets. Best eaten on the day.

Spice Mix

Combine 1 tablespoon cinnamon, 1-1/2 1 teaspoon nutmeg, 1 teaspoon coriander and nutmeg, 1/2 teaspoon ground ginger, 1/4 teaspoon each of ground cloves and all spice. Mix well and store in an airtight container out of the light for up to six months.

For more about the Banbury cake, click here.

Image: The Fine Lady and Banbury Cross By Jongleur100 – Own work, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=7439313. This story last updated in 2022.

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The Mayflower Love Children: Elinor, Jasper, Richard and Mary More

For centuries, historians thought the four young More children who arrived on the Mayflower were homeless orphans. Not until 1959 did a document surface that revealed the truth. They were the Mayflower love children, landed gentry descended from King Edward III and banished by their cuckolded father.

What kind of person tears four little children from their mother and puts them in the hands of strangers? Then sends them on a difficult, dangerous 3,000-mile voyage, to a likely death in a forbidding wilderness? That person even had them indentured as servants – including little four-year-old Mary.

The Mayflower

The short answer is an angry, bitter, self-righteous and well-connected Puritan. Samuel More, after banishing his children, would later cause the deaths of others in his charge.

The Mayflower Love Children

The story begins with Katherine More, the daughter of Jasper More, a Shropshire bailiff who built Larden Hall with his own hands.

Jane Small, Katherine More’s grandmother

Larden Hall sat on 1,000 acres of land, but Jasper More had no male heirs to inherit his property. His sons had died, and English law prohibited women from inheriting property. Jasper’s cousin, Richard More, was a respected parliamentarian who also owned an estate, Linley, in Shropshire, close to the Welsh border. And Richard had an unmarried son.

So Jasper and Richard made an arrangement. Katherine, 25, would marry Richard’s 17-year-old son, Samuel. Richard also paid Jasper 600 pounds for Larden Hall. Thus the estates would remain in More family hands.

But Katharine already had a partner closer to her own age, a yeoman farmer at Larden Hall named Jacob Blakeway. They later claimed they had a betrothal agreement.

Mayflower plaque in St. James Church in Shipton, Shropshire commemorating the More children baptism. courtesy of Phil Revell

But on February 4, 1610 (O.S.), Katherine More married Samuel More. Over the next six years they had four children: Elinor, or Ellen, baptized on May 24, 1612; Jasper, baptized Aug. 8, 1613; Richard, baptized Nov. 13,1614; and Mary, baptized April 16, 1616.

Court Battles

Samuel spent a great deal of time in London as secretary to Lord Edward Zouche, a family friend. Zouche was a diplomat and an investor with the Virginia Company. While Samuel was away, Katherine and Jacob did play—or so Samuel concluded. By 1616, he decided the More children looked a lot more like Jacob Blakeway than they looked like him. He accused Katherine of adultery.

Lord Edward Zouche

Katherine didn’t deny the accusation. She said Jacob Blakeway was her husband. She then tried to get an annulment from Samuel. But unfortunately for Katherine, the witnesses to their betrothal contract had died. Had they survived and testified, the Blakeway family could have lived happily ever after.

Custody Fight

Samuel, with his father’s help, went to court to cut the four children out of his will. Then he hatched a plan to get rid of them.

First, he sent the children to live with a tenant on his estate, out of the reach of their mother. Katherine tried and tried to get them back. She discovered the tenants’ cottage where Samuel had stashed them and went there to see them. According to court documents, she then tried to take them away. “[I]n a hail of murderous oaths, [she] did teare the clothes from their backes,” the record stated. However, she failed.

Between December 1619 and July 8, 1620, Katherine and Samuel took their custody battle to court 12 times. Unfortunately for Katherine, the ultimate decision rested with the Privy Council – and Samuel’s friend and employer, Lord Zouche, served as a privy counselor. And so, unsurprisingly, the Privy Council denied Katherine’s final appeal on July 8, 1620.

Human Trafficking

When Katherine’s appeal failed, Samuel had a cousin take the four little children to London. From there they’d be delivered to the group of Puritans who intended to establish a colony in the New World. Not coincidentally, Zouche had invested £100 in the Virginia Company, which financed the Mayflower’s voyage to North America.

In London, the More children stayed with the disreputable Thomas Weston, a merchant who dealt with the Pilgrims. Someone described him as “eager to reap quick profits from the New World, and not very scrupulous about the means.”

Weston took the children to Philemon Powell, later convicted as a smuggler. Powell delivered them to the Pilgrims’ agents in London. They were then parceled out as indentured servants. Elinor, the oldest at eight, went to Edward Weston. Jasper, seven, belonged to John Carver, the first governor of Plymouth. Richard, six, and Mary, four, went to the household of William Brewster, the Pilgrims’ spiritual leader.

Pilgrims John Carver, William Bradford and Miles Standish at prayer during their voyage to North America. 1844 painting by Robert Walter Weir.

Unbeknownst to their mother, the Mayflower love children set sail on Sept. 16, 1620. To some, it seemed like a death sentence.

To Samuel, it seemed the right thing to do to what he called “a spurious brood.” He justified his cruelty by claiming “great blotts and blemishes may fall upon them” at home.

Death Sentence

The voyage to the New World took a miserable nine-and-a-half weeks. The Mayflower, about 80 feet long, was grossly overcrowded with 102 passengers and 30 crew, along with pigs and chickens. The passengers subsisted on hardtack, salt pork, pickles, dried meat, oatmeal and beer—even the children.

On good days, the passengers could leave the cramped, fetid cabins below to get fresh air on deck. But October brought few good days, as North Atlantic storms tossed the little ship. Seasickness plagued the passengers, and the stench of vomit joined the stinking slop buckets below deck.

Cabin of the Mayflower II.

The Mayflower anchored in Provincetown Harbor on Nov. 11, 1620. All the passengers had survived, except for William Butten, a servant who died three days before the Pilgrims sighted land.

But then others began to perish. It’s unclear exactly when the Mayflower love children began to succumb. Seven-year-old Jasper More probably died on Dec. 16 in Provincetown Harbor. Three others died during the weeks that the Mayflower lay anchored off Cape Cod.

Then in the terrible winter that followed, half the Mayflower voyagers perished. Scurvy had weakened many of them. That and other diseases carried them off, according to William Bradford.

Jasper’s older sister Elinor died in February. Mary, the youngest, died that winter as well, sometime before her fifth birthday.

Richard was the only one of the Mayflower love children to survive. He lived to a ripe old age, and his colorful life story is told in another post.

Why Those Two Girls?

Martyn Whittock, in Mayflower Lives, points out that 75 percent of the women, 36 percent of the boys and half the men died in Plymouth that winter. He notes that only two girls perished: Elinor and Mary, love children.

“That seems just too coincidental,” Whittock wrote. “One has a feeling that maybe, just maybe, one of the main reasons why Ellen and Mary More died was that they were not loved.”

Their mother in far-away England did love them. In 1622, Katherine More went to court again to find out what happened to her children. There she found out the terrible truth. Or at least part of it. She had no way of knowing that three of her children had died.

Of little Mary More, Whittock wrote,

[I]n the terrible upheavals and suffering that first disrupted, and then ended, the life of such a little girl we can see something of how a little innocent could get crushed between the turning iron wheels of legal and historical events; the determined actions of adults; and the cold ambitions of others.

Aftermath

In 1625, Samuel More married again. The next year, though, he had to get a royal pardon because, technically, he still had a living wife—Katherine.

The keep at Hopton Castle.

After that, Katherine More and Jacob Blakeway disappear from the historical record.

Samuel More, however, reappears again causing the death of others. During the English Civil War, Samuel More held Hopton Castle for the Parliamentarians. A Royalist force 500 strong stormed the castle, held by only 30 men. The Royalists offered to let the garrison surrender, but More refused. The Royalists massacred the Parliamentarians—all except Samuel More.

Anthony Wagner

In 1959, Jasper More went looking in his attic for old documents. His friend, genealogist Anthony Wagner, had suggested the search. More was a descendent of Richard More, the only Mayflower love child to survive to adulthood. More found the document of the 1622 court proceedings that tells the tragic tale of the Mayflower love children. Historians had their answer.

Need some new ideas for your Thanksgiving feast? How about trying something old — and authentic — from the New England Historical Society’s latest ebook. Available from Amazon (click here).

With thanks to Mayflower Lives: Pilgrims in a New World and the Early American Experience by Martyn Whittock.

Images: Mayflower cabin By Kenneth C. Zirkel – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=57283684. Hopton Castle By Ostrich, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=4360823. Mayflower plaque By Phil Revel, Shipton, Shropshire – https://www.flickr.com/photos/[email protected]/6809987125, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=18269228. This story was updated in 2022.

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Samuel Maverick Writes A Guide to the Wonders of New England – in 1660

Samuel Maverick, as his name suggests, didn’t like to go along with the crowd. The Puritan crowd, that is.

He came to Boston sometime in the 1620s, before the Puritans arrived, and lived on Noddles Island in Boston Harbor. Noddles Island is now East Boston, which has a Maverick Square and a Maverick T stop.

Samuel Maverick, a firm Anglican and staunch royalist, saw amazing changes in New England during the first 30-some years of his residence. When he arrived, several hundred Europeans were scattered over 150 square miles of wilderness. By 1660, Maverick saw 86 towns that fielded militia, vast herds of livestock, an abundance of English fruit, and harbors bustling with many dozens of ships, some as large as 300 tons.

Other changes he didn’t like so much. He chafed under the Puritans’ rigid laws and suffered from their religious intolerance. Another Samuel Maverick – who may have been a descendant – shared his independent spirit in 19^th century Texas. The Maverick name would brand movies and cars and sports teams into the 21^st century.

East Boston, 1841. The large building in the center is the Maverick Hotel.

Samuel Maverick

He was born in England around 1602, the son of the Rev. John Maverick, who later followed him to the New World.

Samuel arrived in Massachusetts when in his twenties. With another colonist named David Thompson he built a house on Noddles Island and fortified it with guns. Thompson died, and Maverick married Thompson’s widow, Amias. They had three children in addition to her son by David Thompson.

When Maverick started out in Massachusetts, fewer than 300 Europeans lived within a radius of 150 miles. Then in 1630, John Winthrop and his band of Puritans arrived and started running the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Things would change dramatically in a few decades.

Maverick Guide to New England

In 1660, Samuel Maverick returned to England with a guide he wrote about New England. He intended to present it to King Charles II, along with his complaints about how the Puritans treated him.

He called the guide A Briefe Discription of New England and the Severall Townes Therein, Together with the Present Government Thereof. In it, he described 86 towns from Damariscotta, Maine, to Greenwich, Conn. Maverick described how New England had once had only a sparse population of scattered colonists. By 1660, however, almost all of those towns could field a militia (“a full Company of Foote and some Horse”).

Changes in the Boston shoreline from 1630-1675

When he first arrived in New England, he wrote, he found nothing but shacks save for three or four decent houses in Plymouth. Boston, which wasn’t even Boston then, was “a swamp and pound.” It grew into a “great Towne” with “two churches, a Gallant Statehouse & more to make it compleate, then can be expected in a place so late a wilderness.”

“Now to behold the handsome Houses & Churches in so many Townes as I have named is a wonder,” wrote Maverick.

Wonders

Farming and husbandry had flourished in every town he mentioned.

In 1626 New England had not a single head of cattle, nor horse, nor sheep, and very few goats or hogs. But less than 40 years later, New Englanders exported livestock to the Caribbean, consumed much of it themselves and provisioned the ships that called at New England ports.

Along with the livestock, “the great abundance of English Fruite, as Apples, Pears, Apricots, Plumbs, Cherries Musk-Mellons, Water-Mellons &c. is not to be beleeved but by those that have seene it,” wrote Maverick.

Massachusetts also had harbors filled with “great Shipps of Burthen” and “many Vessels…of all sorts and seizes,” he wrote. “And I am confident there hath not in any place out of so small a number of People been raised so many able Seamen and Commanders as there hath been.”

In southern New England, he wrote, “it is incredible what hath been done.”

The Puritan by August Saint-Gaudens. Samuel Maverick chafed under their intolerance

Majority Rule

As colonists carved towns out of the wilderness, the Puritans gained power at the expense of the minority Anglicans. They took over Maine, then largely Anglican, and they persecuted Thomas Morton, a free-thinking Anglican in Braintree. They cast out nonconformists, who often ended up in free-thinking Rhode Island.

The Puritans also created and enforced a set of laws that reserved privileges for members of the Puritan church, or freemen. Samuel Maverick was not one of them. As such, he couldn’t hold government office, but he had to pay taxes. He also couldn’t take communion and he couldn’t have his children baptized.

Nevertheless, Samuel Maverick prospered and contributed to the community’s defense. Contemporaries described him as a “whole-souled, generous, hospitable man, of warm impulses and courteous behavior.” He was “a royalist and Episcopalian, living in a strongly fortified residence on Noddle’s Island,” according to A History of East Boston: With Biographical Sketches of Its Early Proprietors, and an Appendix, by William Hylsop Sumner.

Intolerance

Ironically, Maverick owned three slaves. His treatment of them is another story. Suffice it to say he felt he was the one denied civil and religious liberties.

By 1647, Maverick and others began to resent the colony’s rigid laws. He joined several others in a petition to end taxation without representation and to gain basic civil and religious rights.

They complained the colony did not base its laws on the fundamental laws of England. The government also denied them the same civic and religious privileges as the church members, or freemen. They protested they were entitled to those privileges as “freeborn Englishmen of sober lives and conversation.”

Maverick and the other petitioners threatened to take their complaints to England if the Puritans didn’t cave in to their demands.

And so the Puritans sent him to jail for conspiracy and perjury and slapped him with a steep fine. After 12 days he paid the fine and went free.

Successful Complaint, Failed Commission

Maverick wasn’t going to get any satisfaction in England while the English Civil War raged. Nor would he while Oliver Cromwell ruled the country. But when Charles II restored the Crown in 1660, Samuel Maverick headed straight for England to air his complaints about the Puritans to the King.

He brought with him the little book he’d written, outlining the lay of the land. A Briefe Discription of New England and the Severall Townes Therein, Together with the Present Government Thereof received the King’s attention. For centuries it rested in private hands, its existence unknown to but a few. Then in 1875 its owner put the book up for auction and the British Museum bought it.

King Charles II

His little book convinced the king he needed to rein in his independent colonies. Maverick returned to New England in a position of authority as one of four commissioners. The King charged the commissioners with enforcing liberty of conscience and oaths of allegiance as well as forcing local militias to follow the King’s orders.

The commissioners couldn’t exercise their power, though, and Samuel Maverick moved to New York. He is believed to have died sometime around 1670.

Maverick’s Brief Description

Here are excerpts from his descriptions of 20 towns from Maine to Connecticut. (To see all 86, click here.)

Note his disapproval with how the Massachusetts Puritans took over Maine towns, originally settled by Anglicans like himself. And he makes clear his disdain for the poor, weak and Dutch-friendly Plymouth Colony.

Map of New England, 1677

Maine

Pem˜a—Westward from Penobscott (which is the Southermost Fort in Nova Scotia) … is Pem˜aquid…many Families are now settled there… by vertue of [a patent granted by King James I] they hold the Islands of Monahegan and Damerells Coue, and other small ones adjacent Commodious for fishing.
Casco Bay.— In this Casco Bay are many scattering Families settled…[Col.] Alexander Rigby…[held the patent] and under this Goverment the People lived some yeares, till of late the Government of the Massachusits hath made bold to stretch its Jurisdiction to the midle of this Bay, and as lyeing in their way have taken in a dozen of Goverments more.

New Hampshire

Strawberry Bank. The Great House & Isle of Shooles.—Within 2 Myles of the Mouth is Strawberry Banke where are many Families, and a Minister & a Meeting House …This Strawberry Banke is part of 6000 acres granted by Patent about y^eyeare 1620 or 1621, to M^r David Thompson, who with… assistance … went over with a Considerable Company of Servants and built a Strong and Large House, enclosed it with a large and high Palizado and mounted Gunns, and being stored extraordinarly with shot and Ammunition was a Terror to the Indians, who at that time were insulting over the poor weake and unfurnished Planters of Plymouth… all is at this day in the power and at the disposall of the Massachusitts. Two Leagues of lyes the Isle of Shooles one of the best places for ffishing in the land, they have built a Church here and maintaine a Minister.

Massachusetts

Newbury—… the Houses stand at a good distance each from other a feild and Garden between each house, and so on both sides the street for 4 Miles…
Salem—… very commodious for fishing, and many Vessells have been built there and (excep^tBoston) it hath as much Trade as any place in New England.
Marblehead or Foy.—… the greatest Towne for ffishing in New England.
Lynne—… within the bounds of it are the greatest Iron works…
Cambridge—[In] Cambridge … is a Colledge a Master and some Number of Students belonging to it…
The Old State House in Boston
Boston—the Metrapolis of New England lying pleasantly on a plaine and the ascending of a High Mount which lyes about the midle of y^eplaine, …It hath two handsome Churches in it, a handsome market place, and in the midest of it a Statehouse. In the Towne are fouer full companys of ffoote and a Troope of horse…The Towne is full of good shopps well furnished with all kind of Merchandize
Braintree—once called Mount Wolaston, … It subsists by raiseing provisions, and furnishing Boston with wood.
New Plymouth.—… This place was seated about y^eyeare 1620 or 1621 by a company of Brownists, …[They] found this place and there settled liveing extream hardy for some yeares and in great danger of the Indians, and could not Long have subsisted, had not Plymouth Merchants …at Monhegon and Pascattaway … supplyed them…It is a poor small Towne now, The People being removed into Farmes in the Country.
Sandwich—a good Towne … which affords good store of Provisions, and some yeares a quantity of Whalebone made of Whales which drive up dead in that Bay.

Rhode Island

Rhode Island.— It is full of people haveing been a receptacle for people of severall Sorts and Opinions.
Warwick Providence.— I think they still keepe a seeming forme of Goverment but to litle purpose, none submitting to Supream Authority but as they please.

Connecticut

(Pequot Plantation, now Mystic and Stonington—Haveing gone through New Plymouth Goverment we come next to Connecticot Goverment. The first that was under this Goverment was Pequate
Hartford—From Withersfield to Hartford the Metropolis of the Goverment, it is about 3 Miles, it is a gallant Towne, and many rich men in it.
Springfield— This is the Massachusetts bounds. And above Springfeild 8 Miles is another Towne at first Intended but for a tradeing house with the Indians, but the gallant Land about it hath invited men to make it a Toune. This Connecticott River is a great River before y^eTowne[which] is also in the Massachusetts bounds and under its Goverment although 8 Miles from it.
Woodcut of New Haven, 1786
Newhaven—This Towne is the Metropolis of that Goverment, and the Goverment tooke its Name from this Towne; … was the first built in those parts, many stately and costly houses were erected the Streete layd out in a Gallant forme, a very stately Church; but y^eHarbour proveing not Comodious, the land very barren, the Merchants either dead or come away, the rest gotten to their Farmes, The Towne is not so glorious as once it was.
Milford—From Newhaven to Milford it is about 10 Miles, This Towne is gotten into some way of Tradeing to Newfoundland, Barbados, Virginia, So also hath some other Townes in this Goverment.
Greenwich—From Stamford to Greenwich…these two last Townes are under Newhaven Goverment, and there was another place begun and much done in it, but the Dutch came and tooke it by force, and since the people of this Towne call it New Chester…

The Rest of the Story

New England had no shortage of Mavericks, and it’s hard to tell who was the ancestor of the famous Maverick who moved to Texas as a baby. That Maverick, also Samuel, signed the Texas Declaration of Independence, served as mayor of San Antonio, owned huge tracts of land and practiced law. He also had a few cows. He didn’t brand his cattle, and, according to lore, those who strayed into another rancher’s herd were called mavericks.

His grandson Maury Maverick coined the term ‘gobbledygook.’

This story was updated in 2022. Image of map of New England: By http://maps.bpl.org – A map of New England, being the first that ever was here cut … places, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=27807459.

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In 1640, More Puritans Left New England Than Arrived

The year 1620 is well known as the date the Pilgrims arrived in Plymouth, but 1640 is less well-known as the year they left New England for old England.

Some couldn’t stand the harsh winters. Some saw more opportunity in England – perhaps an inheritance waiting for them or a job that opened up after Oliver Cromwell took power. And some were just homesick.

Edward Winslow, arrived in Plymouth Colony in 1620 and eventually returned to England.

Edward Winslow, the Pilgrim who wrote the history of the first Thanksgiving, returned to England and never came back to his home in Marshfield, Mass. During the 1640s, in fact, more Puritans left New England than arrived.

In 1689, the Puritan minister Increase Mather observed the phenomenon. ‘More people have gone from New England than have come hither,’ he wrote.

Great Migration

The Landing of the Pilgrims, by Henry A. Bacon, 1877.

When most Puritans arrived during the Great Migration of 1620-40, they left behind an England they viewed as increasingly hostile to their beliefs. King James I, who died in 1625, took a fairly tolerant approach to the Puritans, but his son, Charles I, did not.

Charles married a Catholic princess and sent dissident Puritans to prison. Some even had their ears cut off. Charles also ordered the Archbishop of Canterbury, William Laud, to suspend Puritan ministers who defied him. Then Charles suspended Parliament.

Unsurprisingly, Puritan migration to New England peaked during Charles I’s reign. Up until 1640, an average of 2,000 English immigrants arrived in New England every year.

Then the Great Migration suddenly stopped and the Great-ish Return began. Puritan immigrants who sought a safe haven in the New World left New England as soon as things got better for them back home.

An Increase and a Return

In 1639, the Puritan minister Richard Mather of Dorchester in Massachusetts named his son ‘Increase’ as a symbol of the increase with which God favored New England. Two years later, in a sign of the changing times, he baptized an infant ‘Return.’ Ironically, Increase temporarily left New England for old England, while Return stayed in his native land.

Increase Mather left New England, for a while

What changed? In a word, news from England. The Long Parliament in 1640 impeached Charles’ hated archbishop, William Laud. Laud had suspended many of the Puritan ministers, including Mather, who ended up in New England.

Then the English Civil War broke out in 1642. Some Puritans left New England to join Oliver Cromwell’s forces to fight the king. Some of those, like John Winthrop’s nephew George Downing, stayed in England when the war ended. (Downing Street is named after him.)

Close to half of all Harvard graduates left New England for England. So did a third of the Puritan ministers. The Rev. John Davenport, a co-founder of New Haven colony, wanted to go back, he said, because he feared the New England winters would kill him. (He stayed.)

Others couldn’t take the harsh cold and rocky soil. The poem New England’s Annoyances, circulated in the 1640s, complained of bitter winters, failed crops and an endless diet of pumpkin. It also recognized people who left New England threatened the colonies’ survival: “Now while some are going let others be coming.”

At the same time the English Civil War encouraged emigration from New England, it all but halted immigration to New England. Only a few hundred Scots-Irish arrived to settle the frontiers in the 1640s.

Then the war ended in 1646, with Cromwell and his Puritans victorious. “A great surge of settlers, earlier deterred by the hostilities back home, now set off for England,” wrote Susan Hardman Moore in Pilgrims: New World settlers and the call of home.

After They Left New England

Elihu Yale left New England at age 3.

Thomas Bell, a merchant from Roxbury in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, had arrived during the Great Migration. He imported from England such items as shovels, bellows, lead shot, shoes, rugs, soap, canvas and cotton. He had to return to England several times on business. When the English Civil War ended, he left New England, taking his wife and children back to London for good.

David Yale, another merchant, left Boston for England in 1652. He brought his three-year-old son, Elihu, who never set foot in New England again, but made a fortune in diamonds and endowed a college in New Haven.

Still others who had left the turmoil in England returned to their careers as surgeons, shoemakers and shopkeepers. Some got jobs in Cromwell’s government as accountants, customs commissioners or state-supported ministers. Wives, widows, children, servants and apprentices followed them home.

Olier-Cromwell

Leaving wasn’t always easy. Many Puritans had entered into a covenant to support the town. If too many people left, a town might not survive.

A healthy fear of God’s wrath also kept some of the Puritans from returning to England. They came to the New World to build a shining city on a hill, and feared retribution if they left New England.

Those who did leave sometimes left empty houses to crumble. For those who remained in New England, the value of their homes plummeted.

Puritan leader John Winthrop had no use for the settlers who returned, and he criticized them severely. If those who left encountered pirates or storms, Winthrop viewed the calamity as God’s punishment.

Numbers, Please

The exact number of Puritans who left New England will probably never be known. Estimates range from one in four to one in 12.

According to one estimate, 21,000 English immigrants arrived in New England during the Great Migration, but by 1640 the region’s European population fell to somewhere between 13,500 and 17,600.

By 1650, the total population of New England rebounded to about 22,800, in large part because of a high birthrate. New Englanders married young, and typically had seven to eight children, with six or seven living to adulthood. And despite hardship and bad weather, the Puritan baby boomers tended to live for a long time.

The savage family of Billerica

From then on, depopulation no longer threatened New England’s existence (though King Philip’s War did).

As for Edward Winslow, he intended to return to his home in Marshfield. A portrait of him – the only portrait of a Mayflower Pilgrim – shows him holding a letter from his wife. It reads, “From yr loving wife Susanna.”

But Oliver Cromwell named him a commissioner to the West Indies, where he caught fever and died in 1655, never to return to New England.

This story was updated in 2022.

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How Scottish POWS Were Sold as Slave Labor in New England

As many as 400 Scottish POWS captured in the Battles of Worcester and Dunbar were shipped to New England in the 1650s as temporary slaves to work in iron mills, saw mills and farms.

The Great Migration of Puritans had ended, and the colonists badly needed workers. Across the sea, Oliver Cromwell’s new government had the costly and vexing task of managing thousands of Scottish POWs. One solution: deport them to New England, Virginia and Barbados.

Some of the Scottish POWs sent to New England were sold as a group to work in the Saugus Iron Works or the saw mills of Berwick Maine. Others went to York as servants. Still others were sold individually.

The Puritan minister John Cotton defended the practice. He wrote, “The Scots, whom God delivered into your hands at Dunbarre, and whereof sundry were sent hither, we have been desirous (as we could) to make their yoke easy. Such as were sick of scurvy or other diseases have not wanted physick and chyrurgery. They have not been sold for slaves to perpetual servitude, but for 6 or 7 or 8 yeares, as we do our owne [indentured servants] …”

As one historian noted drily, “Cotton’s sanction deadened the New England conscience.”

Cromwell Captures Scottish POWs

Cromwell and his Puritan followers executed King Charles I in January 1649. The Scottish people had largely sided with Cromwell, but they turned on Cromwell and declared Charles’ son king.

In the summer of 1650, Cromwell and his forces invaded Scotland. The Scottish Parliament, in response, conscripted thousands of young Scottish men between the ages of 19 and 25, though some were as young as 12. They clashed at the short, brutal Battle of Dunbar. Within an hour, 12,000 Parliamentarians defeated 11,000 Scots, killing as many as 2,000 while losing only 20 men.

scottish-pows-cromwell-dunbar-andrew-carrick-gow

Cromwell at Dunbar by Andrew Carrick Dow

Cromwell’s army released thousands of sick and wounded Scotts, but marched the Scottish POWs like cattle to Durham, 100 miles away. Many perished of hunger or disease on the march, though some escaped. Some were executed.

In Durham, the English imprisoned the Scottish POWs in the castle and cathedral. About 1600 died of dysentery, disease or starvation. The English had them buried in mass graves, only recently discovered.

The Unity

Two months after the battle, 150 Scottish POWs boarded the Unity and sailed to London, then to Charlestown, Mass. The shipmaster, Augustine Walker, paid five pounds for each man and sold them for 20 to 30 pounds.

Technically they signed contracts agreeing to ‘indentured servitude,’ but in reality most spoke Gaelic and many couldn’t read or write.

About 50 went to the Saugus Iron Works, the first successful iron works in the colonies. It produced much-needed iron bars for tools, building materials and cooking implements. The Scottish POWs worked 12-hour days at hard, dangerous labor. They worked as woodcutters to supply the wood to make charcoal, or as forge hands, as blacksmiths, as miners and farmhands.

Saugus Iron Works

Another 25 Scottish POWs were taken to the Newichwannock River, now the Salmon Falls River in Berwick, Maine. They went with an Englishman named Richard Leader, who got hold of an abandoned mill. Leader put the Scottish laborers to work sawing Maine white pine trees, needed for the British Navy.

Valentine Hill also bought some of the Scottish POWs from the Battle of Dunbar, and worked them in his sawmills at Durham Falls and the Lamprey River in New Hampshire.

Battle of Worcester

Exactly one year after the Battle of Dunbar, Cromwell’s much larger force defeated 16,000 mostly Scottish army at Worcester, England.

It was the last battle of the English Civil War. Three thousand men died in battle, and 10,000 taken prisoner.

The Battle of Worcester.

According to tradition, the English lined up the Scottish POWs in order to shoot every tenth man. A Highlander named Micum McIntyre saw his number would soon be up, broke rank and ran for his life. A horseman chased after him and wounded him, but spared his life.

The English then drove the Scottish POWs like cattle to London.

A witness described them.

…all of them [were] stript, many of them cutt, some without stockings or shoes and scarce so much left upon them as to cover their nakedness, eating peas and handfuls of straw in their hands which they had pulled upon the fields as they passed.

In London, the English confined them outdoors on artillery fields. Again, many died of disease, starvation and exposure while the government debated what to do with them.

John and Sara

About 275 Scottish POWs were sent to Boston about the John and Sara, where Thomas Kemble, a Charlestown merchant, took them on consignment.

Kemble found a ready market among planters and mill owners for the human cargo, as the news spread about the first shipment of Scottish POWs. So when the second shipment arrived, Kemble easily sold the Scottish POWs in the Massachusetts towns of Boston, Charlestown, Cambridge, Dedham, Concord, Hingham, Ipswich, Reading and Salem.

Kemble sold others in Exeter, N.H., and in Durham, where he partnered with Valentine Hill. So many ended up in York, Maine, that for years the town had the nickname ‘Scotland.’

Servitude

Some of the Scottish POWs were sold individually as servants. Alexander Gordon, for example, ‘agreed’ to seven years of slavery under Samuel Stratton of Watertown. Under his contract, he could never leave his master’s premises without his permission and he couldn’t marry. He had to do everything Stratton told him to do, so long as it was legal.

Gordon complained to the court of ill-treatment and petitioned for his freedom, apparently without success. A sawmill owner in Exeter, N.H., named Nicholas Lissen bought him and six other Scottish POWs. His slavery did end, however, and he married the boss’s daughter, Mary Lissen. Alexander Gordon died in Exeter in 1697, and his children had many descendants.

Daniel Blacke, who came over on the John and Sara, probably got sold to the son of the Rev. Zechariah Symmes, one of Charlestown’s most prominent citizens. In 1654, Blacke assaulted and beat up his master, and a court sent him to prison in 1654. Blacke apparently left prison, married and had children. New York Gov. Frank S. Black traced his ancestry to the Scottish POW.

Freedom for Scottish POWs

The Scottish POWs were all still of marriageable age when freed from bondage, and many did marry. Some married Irish housemaids, also brought to the colonies as slaves. Few ever returned home to Scotland.

The lucky ones married the bosses’ daughters, won land grants and appeared on tax rolls.

Seven of Valentine Hill’s Scottish POWs, for example, were listed as taxpayers in Dover, N.H., after their slavery ended.

David Hume, who came over on the John and Sara, settled in Dedham, Mass., where his name morphed into Holmes. Oliver Wendell Holmes, the poet, was sixth in descent from him.

William Furbish (probably Farrabas, which became Forbes in Massachusetts) bought land in Kittery sometime before 1664, but was punished in 1681 for calling the King’s officials, ‘Divills and hell bound.’ Furbish apparently had not forgiven the English for the Battle of Dunbar. He had seven children and many descendants. Micum McIntyre, the Scottish POW who ran for his life, worked in Cocheco Mills and then got a land grant in Kittery, Maine.

2nd Class Citizens

The less lucky Scottish POWs drifted to Boston when their slavery ended, destitute and without jobs. Bostonians viewed them with scorn and classed them with African-Americans and Indians. On Jan. 6, 1657, several Scottish POWs formed the Scots’ Charitable Society for the relief of Scotsmen, the oldest charity in the Western Hemisphere.

By the 19th century, the Scots’ Charitable Society maintained the Scots Temporary Home in Boston and a burial plot in Mt. Auburn Cemetery.

Scots’ Charitable Society burial plot at Mt. Auburn Cemetery

Some of the Scottish POWs like David Hamilton survived Cromwell’s forces only to die at the hands of Indians. Hamilton came over on the John and Sara and got sold to a saw mill owner in Southern New Hampshire. Then he was moved to York, Maine, where he was killed on Sept. 28, 1691.

In 1656, Thomas Kemble spent two hours in the stocks for kissing his wife on Sunday. His daughter, Fanny Kemble Knight, took a famous horseback ride alone along the Boston Post Road.

End Notes

Note: We deliberately chose the words ‘slave,’ ‘slavery’ and ‘slave labor’ because we view any kind of forced labor as slavery. That includes sex trafficking, forced labor, debt bondage, domestic servitude or unlawful recruitment. There are tens of millions of slaves in the world today. If you want to comment that it’s racist to call white indentured servants slaves, we suggest a better use of your time would be to help one of the many anti-slavery organizations in the world today. A list of them can be found here.

Descendants of the Scottish POWs from the Battles of Dunbar and Worcester have a web site. The Saugus Iron Works is now a national historic site.

Images: Saugus Iron Works By John Phelan – Own work, CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=16192079; Mt. Auburn burial plot, By Bill Ilott from Boston, USA – https://www.flickr.com/photos/bostonphotosphere/4185723469/ Mount Auburn Cemetery, Cambridge, MA, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=10902508. Battle of Worcester By Published by Machell Stace – http://www.learningcurve.gov.uk/civilwar/g5/cs2/s5/, CC BY-SA 2.5, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1943037. This story was updated in 2022.

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