FREEDOM IN NEW PLYMOUTH—AS in the rest of the transatlantic English world—was a complex and contested matter. Since the decline of slavery in Norman England, Englishmen had been “free” if they were not bound in service and if they were not villeins, peasants tied to a particular lord or manor. More particularly, though, a “freeman” had the liberty to live and practice a trade in a given town. Depending on local circumstances, a freeman might have the privilege or even the obligation to participate in a community’s civic and political life. A man could possess this sort of freedom by birth or obtain it through marriage, an apprenticeship, or a particular honor. For instance, Robert Cushman had become a freeman in Canterbury after his apprenticeship as a grocer. He paid a fee and swore an oath to obey Canterbury’s mayor, do his part in taxes and watches, and inform the authorities if he knew of any seditious activity in the city.1
It was not a given that servants and apprentices would achieve this status. Moreover, there was still a massive gulf between the liberties of a landless “freeman” such as Cushman and those of the aristocrats and landed gentry. For instance, Magna Carta and the 1628 Petition of Right were about making sure the king did not impinge on the rights of the landed elites. What about the liberties of less exalted Englishmen? By the mid- to late 1640s, more radical voices made themselves heard. The Levellers, political reformers whose ideas gained both support and notoriety during the English Civil War, began speaking about the rights of all Englishmen. They supported broad religious freedom, favored near-universal adult male suffrage, and opposed economic monopolies benefiting men of great means.2
The Pilgrims were not Levellers. Plymouth’s leaders intended to establish a godly society according to the dictates of scripture and English traditions. They wanted each town to have one Congregational church and no other religious meetings. They had no objection to monopoly, at least not if the privilege was theirs. Pilgrim leaders expected to govern with minimal interference. At the same time, a high percentage of adult men could vote in elections and give or withhold their consent to proposed laws. Individuals accused of serious crimes received jury trials. In several important respects, then, Plymouth’s settlers enacted political reforms and safeguards against arbitrary rule that remained scarcely imaginable in England.3
In October 1636, Plymouth’s General Court voted to review, revise, and compile the colony’s laws, a task accomplished by a committee over the span of several weeks. The freemen met again the next month. They listened to the Mayflower Compact and declared that “as freeborn subjects of the state of England we hither came endowed with all … singular privileges belonging to such.” Those privileges included the necessity of their consent for laws and taxes. Building on the principles of the Mayflower Compact, they insisted that “no imposition, law, or ordinance be made or imposed upon us … but such as shall be made [or] imposed by consent according to the free liberties [of the] state and kingdom of England.” In England, such humble and common people had no such liberties.4
The revised laws maintained the simple, participatory government that the Pilgrims had established through the Mayflower Compact and their first years at Plymouth. The colony’s freemen attended an annual court of election at which they chose a governor and six or seven assistants. Participation was mandatory for freemen, who faced fines if they skipped sessions of the General Court, and those elected to office were fined if they declined to serve. While the General Court typically convened several other times each year, the elected magistrates also held what were known as courts of assistants, acting as an executive and judiciary but without the authority to enact any statutes or levy taxes.
In neighboring Massachusetts Bay, early settlers endured a series of contests over the relative authority of freemen and elected magistrates. Before he left England, John Winthrop had observed that other plantations had failed in part because “they used unfit instruments, viz., a multitude of rude and misgoverned persons, the very scum of the land … they did not establish a right form of government.” Winthrop wanted the elected magistrates to govern. At the very least, Winthrop contended that elected magistrates should wield a veto against laws enacted by the freemen or their deputies. Otherwise, he warned, “our government would be a mere democracy.” Other men, and the governments of several towns, pushed back against Winthrop’s understanding of governance. By the mid-1640s, political decisions in Massachusetts Bay required the consent of both magistrates and deputies.5
By Winthrop’s standards, New Plymouth was a “mere democracy,” in which only a unicameral legislature—the General Court—could pass laws or raise taxes. Plymouth’s 1636 framework of government left all statutory authority in the hands of the colony’s freemen, who comprised the General Court. That same framework gave the governor a “double voice,” meaningful in courts of the assistants but of no great consequence at meetings of the General Court. Plymouth’s magistrates and governors did not have the authority to veto decisions made by the colony’s freemen. The power of the Undertakers over the colony’s trade and grants of land was an anomaly within this system, but in 1639 the General Court bought out the Undertakers and returned “all the residue of the lands” to “the whole body of the freemen.” The decision cut against the idea of an aristocratic or magisterial elite.6
Plymouth’s declarations about liberty and self-governance did not apply to all of the colony’s male settlers, however. Under the terms negotiated between the Adventurers and the Pilgrims, only shareholders of the resulting joint-stock company participated in its government. Those shareholders included the free male passengers on the Mayflower and other early arrivals who accepted the arrangement with the Adventurers. Those men who came on their own “particular” had no right to vote. The dissolution of the company and the modest growth in the colony’s population made new arrangements necessary. In 1636, the court clarified that only “the freemen of the corporation and no other” could make laws and elect officers. Not all adult men, not even all adult men free from service, were “freemen.” In 1633, the colony’s magistrates made a list of sixty-eight freemen. Francis Billington, whose father was hanged for murder in 1630, was not on the list, nor were several other men present in the colony since the mid-1620s. In all, more than half of adult male taxpayers received freeman status, but that left many adult men without the right to vote.7
Why and how did Plymouth’s magistrates and citizens choose to exclude certain men from the body politic? And what standards of admission did they use? The sparse records provide few clues. In 1631, the magistrates of Massachusetts Bay restricted freeman status to church members and granted that status to around one hundred men. The Bay Colony’s action might have prompted Plymouth’s magistrates to examine the question, but the Pilgrims did not simply follow the example of their neighbors. Probably because the Mayflower Compact had already made the body politic broader than the body of Christ, Plymouth did not create any sort of formal religious test for freeman status until the late 1650s. Nor did the colony codify a property threshold until 1669. It seems that the General Court at first admitted men who had established themselves as heads of household and who had not otherwise disqualified themselves.
The percentage of men who were freemen declined as the years passed and the colony’s population grew. By the early 1640s, only around a quarter of adult men were freemen. Some of those who did not have the colony-wide franchise at that time became freemen at a later point in their lives, but growing numbers of men never attained this status. It is likely that most men did not ask to become freemen, in part to avoid the expense and inconvenience of traveling to the town of Plymouth, or perhaps because they sensed that the General Court would not admit them. Coupled with the fact that there was no corresponding category of freewoman, only a small percentage of adult settlers elected the colony’s leaders and gave their consent to laws and taxes. In some respects, New Plymouth functioned as an oligarchy, as men like William Bradford, Edward Winslow, Myles Standish, and Thomas Prence filled key offices year after year.
Despite these limitations, political participation in New Plymouth remained unusually broad by English standards. Even for those who were not freemen, there were other forms of political engagement. After the dispersal of settlers into a number of towns, settlers elected deputies who attended sessions of the General Court as their representatives. Also, a larger percentage of adult men participated in town affairs. For example, until 1650 all male householders could attend the town of Plymouth’s meetings and vote on proposed laws. Thereafter, Plymouth’s householders elected seven selectmen each year who handled most town business on their behalf. At both the colony-wide and local levels, political liberties were much less constrained by property and rank than they were in England.8
For some individuals, Plymouth’s political order and the availability of land in the colony enabled liberty and prosperity they would have been very unlikely to attain in England. Edward Winslow came from a well-to-do family in Worcestershire, but he would never have acquired the extent of land or political prominence in England that he did in New Plymouth. A number of servants and common laborers also advanced themselves. John Alden, the cooper on the Mayflower, became one of the Undertakers who assumed financial responsibility for the colony’s debts. Alden also became an assistant, annually elected for decades on end, and he acquired substantial land in Duxbury. John Howland, who came as a servant to John Carver, was another Undertaker. While he did not match Alden’s prosperity or prominence, he also accumulated property and was chosen as a deputy to the General Court for many years.
Social and economic advancement was not confined to the initial passengers. When the partnership between the Adventurers and the Pilgrims was dissolved in 1627, each head of household and nonindentured single man received twenty acres of tillable land. These men had the right to subsequent divisions of common land as well. In the early 1630s, moreover, the General Court declared that servants would receive land in Scituate at the end of their indentures.
Not all of the Mayflower servants and wards became pillars of the community.9 Unruly servants were a persistent source of tension in the colony. Edward Doty, who came as a servant to Stephen Hopkins and signed the Mayflower Compact, was constantly in trouble. In June 1621, Doty and his fellow servant Edward Leister were convicted of dueling with sword and dagger. The “whole company” sentenced the pair to be tied together for twenty-four hours by their heads and feet, and without anything to eat or drink. After an hour, Doty and Leister convinced Governor Bradford that the first sixty minutes—and the wounds they had inflicted on each other in the duel—were sufficient punishment.10
Doty soon received his liberty from service and began obtaining property. In 1623, Pilgrim leaders assigned him one acre of land. A few years later, he received a share in the colony’s stock of cattle and goats and another twenty acres of land. In 1635, Doty married fifteen-year-old Faith Clarke, his second marriage. Doty kept adding to his landholdings, and in 1637 he sold several lots for £150.
All the while, Doty was constantly in physical and legal scrapes. He spent a good portion of his time suing and being sued. He appeared regularly before the court, accused of cheating other settlers and allowing his cattle to damage their crops. Doty still liked to brawl, and he got the upper hand more often than not. In 1634, the court convicted Doty and another man of fighting but fined Doty more because he had drawn blood. Twice in 1637, George Clarke—possibly a relation by marriage—sued Doty for damages pertaining to a land transaction. Doty was also fined twenty shillings for having assaulted Clarke. Many other court actions followed, but despite his transgressions, Doty was a freeman. He could vote, and the colony granted him land on several occasions. When he died, he left an estate valued at nearly £140, including considerable land and livestock. The irascible Doty was an upwardly mobile troublemaker.11
Doty’s years in service to Stephen Hopkins did not make him sympathetic toward his own servants. In 1634, Doty was sued by an apprentice named John Smith, who alleged that Doty had failed to provide for him. Doty left his servant poorly clad and fed. Citing Doty’s neglect of his duties, the General Court cut the duration of Smith’s indenture in half and reminded Doty of his obligation to provide his servant with two suits of clothing upon his freedom. The case demonstrates that despite their lack of political privileges, servants could take action against masters who failed to fulfill their legal responsibilities.12
Not all servants were so fortunate, as demonstrated by the short life and brutish death of John Walker. Nothing is known about Walker’s background. His master was Marshfield’s Robert Latham; his mistress was Susanna Winslow Latham, daughter of John Winslow (Edward Winslow’s brother) and Mayflower passenger Mary Chilton. In 1655, at the age of fourteen, Walker died under suspicious circumstances.
The Lathams had neglected and abused their young servant for some time. They did not give John enough food or proper clothing, and they overworked him. They forced him to carry a log “beyond his strength.” It fell on him, and they then whipped him for his weakness. John lived in abject misery. Possibly because of the emotional distress he endured, he wet his bed at night and then lay in clothes that froze about him. Had Walker’s parents been alive and in New England, they probably would have gotten wind of his mistreatment. If neighbors observed the abuse, they did not intervene until it was too late.
After Walker’s death, a grand jury examined the boy’s body. It was full of wounds and bruises. His back was raw from the whippings. His extremities were frozen. There were holes in his buttocks. When his corpse bled at the nose during a second examination, moreover, it was taken as a sign of homicide. Seventeenth-century New England settlers believed that corpses would bleed in the presence of their murderers or at their touch. In one Plymouth Colony instance, a jury asked a mother and several other family members to touch the corpse of a dead girl as a way of assessing their possible guilt.13 In the case of John Walker, a grand jury determined that “of cruelty and hard usage he died.” It indicted Robert Latham for “felonious cruelty” and later expanded the indictment to include Susanna Latham.
Robert Latham was convicted of “manslaughter by chance medley”—unpremeditated homicide. Despite the overwhelming evidence of abuse, the jury may have concluded that there was no evidence that he intended to kill his servant. Alternatively, the jury may have decided to give Latham a way to avoid execution. “Willful murder” was a capital crime in Plymouth, but the colony’s 1636 laws did not offer any guidance on manslaughter. In England, however, there was a well-established mechanism by which individuals guilty of certain felonies could save their lives. Prior to sentencing, a convicted offender would read the first verse of Psalm 51: “Have mercy upon me, O God, according to thy loving-kindness: according to the multitude of thy compassions put away mine iniquities.” Manslaughter, but not murder, was a crime for which one could escape death by reciting the “neck psalm.”14
Robert Latham accordingly saved his neck from the gallows by requesting “the benefit of law [clergy] … a psalm of mercy.” Latham’s case is the only known application of the custom in New England prior to 1686. (After the 1770 Boston Massacre, two British soldiers convicted of manslaughter received benefit of clergy.) The court spared Latham’s life, branded him on the hand, and confiscated his goods. The General Court eventually dropped the case against Susanna Latham because no witnesses came forward to testify against her. In the years after his conviction and punishment, Robert Latham achieved a measure of respectability. He swore the oath of fidelity to the colony, which enabled him to participate in Marshfield’s town affairs. He eventually moved to Bridgewater, where he obtained land.15
There are fewer court records involving female servants in New Plymouth, which suggests it was more difficult for them to take legal action against their masters and mistresses. Masters sometimes placed obstacles in the way of their female servants who wished to marry, as both marriage and pregnancies reduced their productivity as laborers. It was enough of a problem that the General Court passed a law empowering magistrates to resolve cases in which masters denied a motion of marriage “through any sinister end or covetous desire.”16
Dorothy Temple did not have the chance to marry the father of her child. Temple was a servant of Mayflower passenger Stephen Hopkins, and she became pregnant by another servant named Arthur Peach. After living in Massachusetts Bay for several years, Peach had served in the war against the Pequots and then indentured himself to Edward Winslow. No records reveal anything at all about Dorothy Temple’s background.
In the summer of 1638, Peach ran away. He did so because both he and Temple knew that she was pregnant. The consequences for both Peach and Temple would have been a whipping and possibly a marriage. Not wanting to be whipped or married, Peach fled.
Three other servants joined Peach: Thomas Jackson, Richard Stinnings, and Daniel Cross. Presumably they simply wanted to get away.17 Their intended destination was New Netherland, where they could work for themselves. Back in the 1620s, Plymouth’s leaders had grown concerned that Thomas Morton’s Merry Mount outpost would entice servants to cast off their indentures. Especially as English settlements proliferated in the 1630s, masters worried that their servants would run off to places where they would be impossible to retrieve. The flight of the four Plymouth servants suggests that many individuals chafed against the bonds that restricted their freedom.
Few Englishmen without Native guides risked overland travel, and Peach and his fellow runaways quickly became lost in what early Bay Colony settler William Wood described as a “strange labyrinth of unbeaten bushy ways in the woody wilderness.” The Plymouth servants wandered to the north and west, toward Massachusetts Bay and then toward Narragansett Bay. They crossed paths with a Nipmuc man named Penowayanquis, on his way to the Bay Colony with some beaver skins and beads. Like the Plymouth men, Penowayanquis was also a servant. The Nipmucs inhabited what is today central Massachusetts. As of the mid-1630s, their communities were tributaries of their more powerful neighbors, including the Narragansetts, on whose behalf Penowayanquis engaged in trade.18
The next day, the four servants spotted Penowayanquis again. On his way back to Narragansett country, Penowayanquis now had five fathom of wampum and three coats. Peach persuaded his more reluctant companions that they should kill the trader. The wampum and coats might get the servants to New Netherland, and they may have had other motivations as well. According to Bradford’s information, Peach alleged that Penowayanquis “had killed many of them” during the Pequot War.19
Peach called to the trader to come and smoke tobacco with them. As Penowayanquis reached for the pipe, Peach grabbed a rapier and stabbed his victim through the leg and belly. The English attackers could not finish him off, however, and Penowayanquis escaped them, disappearing into the swampy woods. Peach and the others took the coats and the wampum. When he got word of the assault, Roger Williams went to see the wounded man and brought him to Providence, where a physician tried in vain to save his life. It was now murder.20
English settlers on Aquidneck Island, alerted to the crime, apprehended the runaways. The attack was committed at a place called Misquamsqueece, in present-day Seekonk, Massachusetts. No group of English exercised jurisdiction over the area at the time, though both Massachusetts Bay and Plymouth would later claim it. So who should try the men?
The family and friends of Penowayanquis informed Williams that should the murder go unpunished, they intended to kill an Englishman in retaliation. Therefore, Massachusetts Bay governor John Winthrop maintained that despite a lack of clear jurisdiction, Plymouth should judge its own men. If Plymouth took no action, Winthrop advised Williams to hand at least Peach over to the dead man’s friends so that they might avenge his death. In the meantime, Daniel Cross escaped from Aquidneck Island and managed to reach Pascataqua in present-day Maine. The other three men were taken to Plymouth. According to Bradford, “Some of the rude and ignorant sort murmured that any English should be put to death for the Indians.” Thomas Prence—chosen as New Plymouth’s governor the previous March—worried that the men would appeal their case to England, bringing about unwanted scrutiny of New England’s governments.21
After some dithering, the Pilgrim magistrates impaneled a jury. The three men confessed to the assault, but there was some question about whether or not Peach’s thrust had indeed killed Penowayanquis. Upon the testimony of Roger Williams, the physician, and two Indian witnesses, the jury convicted the three men of murder. Peach, Stinnings, and Jackson were immediately taken to the place of execution and hanged in the presence of what was probably a large assembly of English and Native onlookers. As far as Plymouth and Massachusetts leaders were concerned, the executions brought the case to a satisfactory end. The punishment stayed Nipmuc calls for revenge, kept the levers of justice in English hands, and avoided an appeal to England.
Plymouth’s magistrates were not quite done with the consequences of Arthur Peach’s actions, though. After Dorothy Temple gave birth to a son in early 1639, her master Stephen Hopkins refused to provide for his servant and her infant. For many years, Hopkins had been an assistant to Plymouth’s governor. By the late 1630s, however, he had lost the respect of the colony’s other leading citizens. Hopkins kept a shop and tavern in Plymouth, and the court convicted him of encouraging drunkenness and permitting gambling. Hopkins also was repeatedly presented to the court for overcharging customers. Hopkins’s beer was so bad that it was not worth half what he charged, and he overpriced his wine so much that it contributed “to the oppressing and impoverishing of the colony.” In another instance, Hopkins reportedly sold a mirror for sixteen pennies when a similar object cost only nine pennies in the Bay Colony. The churches and courts of puritan New England restrained merchants from extracting from their customers what the market would bear. By their standards, Hopkins cheated his customers, and the magistrates now accused him of cheating his wayward servant and her child.22
Dorothy Temple had two years of service remaining. The court held that Hopkins and Temple were bound to each other. Even if pregnancy and childbirth had interrupted her work, Hopkins had to provide food and clothing for her and the child. If he would not do so, the colony would provide for her and fine Hopkins the amount expended. Hopkins refused. The court imprisoned him for contempt. A few days later, Hopkins paid John Holmes three pounds to support Temple and her child during her last two years of service. At the time, Stephen Hopkins was nearly sixty years of age. He died in 1644, predeceased by his wife, Elizabeth.23
In a colonial society built upon hierarchical relationships, both the Nipmuc friends of Penowayanquis and Dorothy Temple approached English courts from a position of weakness. The Nipmucs at least had the threat of revenging themselves upon an English settler. Dorothy Temple, a female indentured servant who bore a bastard child of a murderer, had no such leverage. Yet the court did not permit Stephen Hopkins to cast her off. Like the other puritan colonies, New Plymouth privileged the welfare and stability of the community. In this case, communal obligations ensured that Temple and her infant would be fed and clothed.
It was justice, though, not mercy. A few months later, about one year after Arthur Peach had abandoned her and run away from Edward Winslow, the court ordered that Temple be whipped twice for her “uncleanness and bringing forth a male bastard.” Most fornication cases involved couples who had conceived a child prior to their marriage. Time in the stocks or a single whipping were the most common punishments. Dorothy Temple received a double penalty. When she fainted during her first whipping, the court remitted the second.24
Most men and women lived out their indentures, obtained their freedom, and married. Webb Adey’s life did not follow these expectations, and his experiences illustrate the precariousness of freedom in New Plymouth. Adey’s parentage and place of English origin are unknown. He might have come to New England as a servant, and he might have stopped in Massachusetts Bay before coming south to New Plymouth. It is also unclear how Adey scratched out a living. Perhaps he hired himself out or attached himself to a family. Robert Charles Anderson terms Adey “the best-recorded antisocial pauper in Plymouth Colony.” Present in the colony since at least the early 1630s, Adey at a certain point in his young adult life stopped fitting into the social order the Pilgrims had established.25
Adey first appears in colonial records on New Year’s Day (March 25) 1633, when he was assessed nine shillings in taxes—the lowest possible amount. Three years later, the magistrates assigned Adey three acres of land, with the stipulation that he and other grantees could not sell the land “from their houses.” In the same allocation of land, most men received six acres. Adey received only three, probably because he was single rather than the head of a household.26
Shortly afterward, Webb Adey began to get into trouble. That October, Adey and four other men were presented to the court “for disorderly living” and required to “give an account how they live.” The next year, Adey was cited on successive weeks for working in his garden on the Sabbath. One of his two accusers was Ralph Smith, now Plymouth’s former minister. The court convicted Adey of “disorderly living in idleness and nastiness.” Apparently Adey made a point of working on Sunday but was indolent the rest of the week. In June 1638, the court ordered Adey to sell or rent his property so that he could properly clothe himself and to find a master who would take him into service.27
The punishment was severe. Those who broke the Sabbath, even repeatedly, usually faced fines or, at worst, whippings. Adey lost his property and his freedom. What was the nature of his disorderly living? Had Adey been prone to drunkenness, the court would have fined or whipped him for that infraction. A few scholars have suggested that Adey’s “disorderly living” might have included sexual relations with other men, especially because same-sex attraction would explain why he apparently did not marry. Given the frequency of his legal troubles, however, he would have been charged with sodomy if that were the case. In August 1637, Plymouth’s magistrates convicted John Alexander and Thomas Roberts of “lewd behavior and unclean carriage one with another, by often spending their seed one upon another.” Sodomy was a capital crime according to the colony’s 1636 laws, but New Plymouth never executed anyone for the offense. The court punished Alexander severely for being a repeat offender and for “seeking to allure others.” He was whipped, branded on the shoulder with a hot iron, and banished forever. Roberts was whipped and banned from obtaining land unless he reformed his behavior. Adey’s first presentment for disorderly living came only two months after the convictions of Alexander and Roberts. If someone had accused him of the same crime, the court surely would have taken it very seriously.28
What, then, was the nature of Adey’s “disorderly living”? The limited record suggests that the root of the problem was Adey’s decision to live by himself or in the company of other men. The entire structure of New England towns rested upon a set of hierarchical and interlocking relationships, those of parents and children, husbands and wives, masters and servants, magistrates and citizens. While the relationships were unequal, they bound individuals and families together in a web of mutual obligations. The religious thought of the Pilgrims, like that of other puritans, emphasized the sacred nature of those bonds. Robert Cushman had urged the settlers to be “jointed together and knit by flesh and sinews,” not to live in isolation.
Thus, when men and women reached adulthood, they were expected to marry. If they did not do so, they faced pressure to attach themselves to other households as servants or laborers. When single men came to Plymouth in the early 1620s, for instance, the Pilgrims assigned them to existing households.
In both New Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay, magistrates fretted about “extravagant” men who moved between the two colonies. In this context, an “extravagant” man was a vagrant, someone who wandered or roamed and often settled in a community without permission. According to Bradford, Plymouth’s leaders warned settlers not to receive any “servants, or other dwellers,” in part to make certain that individuals were not fleeing indentures. If vagrants were not already bound in service elsewhere, courts sometimes assigned them to masters. In 1634, Plymouth’s General Court bound Thomas Higgens—who had “lived an extravagant life”—as an apprentice to John Jenny for eight years. It was a long indenture, but at its conclusion Jenny would give Higgens two sets of apparel, twelve bushels of corn, and twenty acres of land.29
Plymouth had no law against a man choosing to live alone, but doing so was aberrant and attracted scrutiny and suspicion. And Webb Adey did more than simply live by himself. Given the reference to apparel, perhaps he did not clothe himself properly. At least for stretches of his life, he did not attend church. In certain parts of Europe, these sorts of antisocial behaviors made individuals—especially women—vulnerable to charges of witchcraft. Plymouth made witchcraft a capital crime in 1636. Only one individual was indicted for witchcraft in the colony’s seven-decade history, Mary Ingham of Scituate, who was cleared by a jury. In Webb Adey, the magistrates saw not witchcraft but dissipation, the sort of social disorder and moral rot they perceived at Wessagusset and Merry Mount.30
In July 1638, the court arranged for Adey to become the servant of Thomas Prence, governor in one of the rare years in which Plymouth’s citizens elected someone other than William Bradford. Prence was wary of Adey. The court stated that if Prence “shall dislike him [Adey] upon trial,” the governor could cast him off and the court would find him another master. On the court’s order, Adey sold his land and house for seventeen pounds.31
A stint of service did not change Webb Adey’s ways. By 1642, he was a free man again, but that year the court convicted him of “licentious and disorderly” living and ordered him imprisoned. Eventually, despite his poverty and social isolation, Adey became a landowner again. He bought six acres of land in 1645, later sold a house for four pounds, and owned an extremely modest home at the time of his 1652 death. Perhaps even more surprisingly, at the end of his life Adey had an attachment to Plymouth’s church, for he bequeathed thirty shillings—a fifth of his meager estate—to its then minister John Reyner.32
Webb Adey occupied a nebulous place between freedom and servitude. The colony never admitted him as a freeman. He probably did not ask it to do so, as it is hard to imagine Adey choosing to attend general courts. Thus, a body politic in which Adey did not participate reduced him to servitude and stripped him of his property. In New England’s puritan colonies, as in old England, liberty did not mean license to live where or how one saw fit. Instead, liberty was always circumscribed by law and social conventions. Landownership did not release Adey from these expectations. Webb Adey was an unusual case, but Plymouth had its share of malcontents, social misfits, and cultural rebels, men and women who would not reform their ways.