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with all sorts of cattle, which in a few years so increased that the inhabitants were not only provided with enough for themselves, but were able also to supply others.
One of the earliest causes of dispute concerning boundaries of Towns arose from the people being cramped for room1 for the pasturage of their cattle.
In 1634 Wood says of the people of New-towne:—‘The inhabitants most of them are very rich, and well stored with Cattell of all sorts; having many hundred Acres of ground paled in with one generall fence, which is about a mile and a half long, which secures all their weaker Cattell from the wilde beasts;’ what was true of New-towne was doubtless equally true of Watertowne, ‘a place nothing inferior for land, wood, medow, and water’ to the former, and the wealthier of the two at this time.
From 1632 to 1635 ‘near twenty confiderable ships’ came each year, and with the increase in numbers of settlers there arose a scarcity of laborers and consequent demand for excessive wages.
To check this, the General Court ordered in November, 1633, that carpenters and masons should not receive above 2s. per diem, and laborers not above 18d,2 and that merchants should not advance above 4d. in the shilling on what their goods cost in England. But this first attempt to regulate prices met with no better success than later ones, and Hubbard [1680] complains that these ‘good orders did expire with the first and golden age in this new world; things being raised since to treble the value well nigh of what at first they were.’
On the 6th of July, 1631, a small ship of sixty tons, called the Plough, came into Nantasket with ten passengers from London, having a patent to Sagadahock; afterwards called the Ligonia or Plough Patent.
Not liking the place, they came to Boston and went up to Watertown, ‘a plantation for husbandmen principally,’ but as their vessel drew ten feet, she ran aground twice by the way and ‘they laid her bones there.’
This company was called the Hus-
1 The government having at first permitted no man to live more than half a mile from the meeting-house in his town. Watertown people, being farmers chiefly, were soon widely scattered.
2 At the court held September 28, 1630, the wages of common laborers were fixed at 6d. a day, and those of mechanics who were employed in building, at 16d., in addition to ‘meat and drink.’ The following March this order was rescinded.
Thomas Lewis, Landscape Photographs, 1879.
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