An agreement by the inhabitants of the New Town, about paling3 in the neck of land. Imprimis, That every one who hath any part therein shall hereafter keep the same in good and sufficient repair; and if it happen to have any defect, he shall mend the same within three days after notice given, or else pay ten shillings a rod for every rod so repaired for him. Further, It is agreed that the said impaled ground shall be divided according to every man's proportion in said pales. Further, It is agreed, that if any man shall desire to sell his part of impaled ground, he shall first tender the sale thereof to the town inhabitants interested, who shall either give him the charge he hath been at, or else to have liberty to sell it to whom he can.In the list which follows, evidently according to the preceding order, though not immediately succeeding it on the record, I preserve the original orthography, together with the number of rods, indicating the relative shares in the impaled ground.
This text is part of:
[10]
Six months later, there was a considerable accession of inhabitants, by order of the General Court.
The order does not appear on the records of the Court; but Winthrop says, under date of Aug. 14, 1632, “The Braintree1 Company (which had begun to sit down at Mount Wollaston), by order of court, removed to Newtown.
There were Mr. Hooker's Company.”
2 Before their arrival an order was adopted by the inhabitants, in regard to the paling around the common lands; the contemplated assignment of proportions, however, was not made until several months afterwards, when new inhabitants had arrived and had received grants of the common property.
The date of this order, which is the first recorded in the town records, is March 29, 1632:—
1 Supposed to be so called because they came from Braintree, a town in Essex, about forty miles from London.
2 Savage's Winthrop, i. 87. Mr. Hooker did not arrive until more than a year later; but the members of his flock, who preceded him, in due time again enjoyed his pastoral care.
3 The location of the greater part of this fence, or “pale” is designated with tolerable accuracy by the ancient records of possessions and conveyances. Commencing in the present College yard, near the northwesterly angle of Gore Hall, and extending eastwardly, it passed very near the junction of Ellsworth Avenue with Cambridge Street, to the line between Cambridge and Charlestown (now Somerville), at its angle on Line Street near Cambridge Street, and thence followed that line to the creek, a few rods easterly from the track of the Grand Junction Railroad. Commencing again at the point first mentioned, the fence extended southwardly to the marsh near the junction of Holyoke Place with Mount Auburn Street. The kind of fence then erected is indicated in an order passed Dec. 5, 1636: “That the common pales in all places, to be made after this day, shall be done with sufficient posts and rails, and not with crotches.”
Boston. Houghton and Mifflin. 1877.
Tufts University provided support for entering this text.
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.
An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.