JOURNAL OF A CROSS-LOT WALKER
by John Hanson Mitchell
In November of 1853, Henry Thoreau went for a walk from Concord up to the town of Littleton to pay a visit to Ralph Waldo Emerson's brother Bulkley, who was living with a family near the town center. Since he walked all the way, it is likely that Thoreau resorted to what he termed cross-lot walking, that is, he cut through farms and privately held woodlots without regard to property lines and avoided, as was his custom, roads much traveled by.
Although he does not give us the route, it is likely that he walked up from the center of Concord, crossed through the wild Estabrook Country and then perhaps followed the old Great Road for a mile or so. Just south of Nagog Pond, he probably left the road and circled up through the fields and woodlots on the western slopes of the pond bank, property which in those days, was owned by a fmaily named Tenant.
According to old maps, this area was open land in Henry's time, what the town called mowings, and since this whole territory had been owned outright by private individuals under English and American law since 1736, in order to get to his destination, Henry had to trespass, not an uncommon custom for him, one might even say a regular pastime.
This habit of cross-lot walking is a passion I share with Henry. The area south and west of Nagog Pond, which he passed through back in [date] is all wooded now, except for a small mowing just west of the Nagog Pond. Some years back, I learned that this same tract of land was the probable site of a seventeenth century village of Christianized Indians. These people, probably members of the local Pawtucket tribe, having spotted, as they believed, the arrival of a new and powerful deity in their land, converted to Christianity and as a result were granted some sixteen square miles at a place called Nashobah, about thirty-five miles west of Boston. Under the direction of John Eliot, the so-called Apostle to the Indians, the Christianized Indians set up a village of pole-frame houses and traditional wigwams, planted apple trees, cleared fields for agriculture, cut their hair, ceased dancing, and settled in to live like Englishmen.
According to the legislative powers of the General Court in Boston, the land, known as Nashobah Plantation, was granted to the Indians outright (never mind the deep irony of the fact that it was their land in the first place). Within the boundaries of the tract, the Indians owned their own houses and property and, with permission of the General Court, were permitted to buy or sell plots of land. But twenty-five years later during the King Philip's War, in what amounted to a prelude to the treatment of the Nissei at the outset of World War Two, the inhabitants of Nashobah were rounded up and sent to Deer Island in Boston Harbor, where, over the succeeding winter, many of them succumbed.
After the war, a few of the survivors of this ordeal struggled back to the Nashobah area to live out their time. The last survivor was a powerful woman named Sarah Doublet, who died, feeble and blind, in l736, under the care of two tradesmen from Concord named Ephraim and Elnathan Jones. By way of payment for her care, Sarah Doublet granted the Jones’ the rights to the five hundred acres that she had held, the last remnant of the sixteen square miles Nashobah Plantation.
That transfer marked the end of Indian land tenure in that part of the world and the beginning of the new era in land use history. Sara and her people would have held their land in common and would have made decisions as to its use communally, by consensus --- which, ironically, was a pattern that was not uncommon in England in the seventeenth century. But in the space of little more than fifty years this system of holding land in common would be subsumed by the concept of private property. Within another hundred years, this new system would oversweep the entire American continent and replace the idea of land held in common. It was a uniquely American phenomenon, new even to the conquering English and French.
This Sarah Doublet, the original "owner" of the tract under the English system, had black eyes and a lurid blue image of a bear tattooed on her left cheek. She would have tied her long black hair in a knot, fastened with a band of silver, and she dressed in a decorated moose skin skirt and buskins, with a blue shawl over her shoulders and a beaded blue cloth around her waist. Like all the women of her group, she probably wore thongs of moosehide around her ankles and in winter, and sometimes also summer, she greased her skin with bear fat to the keep the cold or the insects at bay. Periodically she would paint herself in blues and reds and don cloaks made of bird feathers or robes of furred mammal pelts, all hung about with heads and clawed feet, and the striped tails of raccoons and skunks, and the whole arrangement made fast with a belt made from the skin of milk snakes and copperheads. She fixed pendants of swan's down or shells in her pierced ears, placed a bird wing headdress in her hair, and strung herself with shell necklaces and ropes of wampum, and perhaps --- all this is conjecture --- an amulet at her breast, a winged thunderbird, or the carved image of A'pcinic, the horned water monster who lived in the depths of the pond below her village.
After Eliot came, after she accepted Christianity, she would have ceased to wear bangles and sparkles and fanciful animal skins, would have cast aside her bird wing headdress and her swan's down earrings. She would have become modest, would have lowered her eyes, prayed, sung the strange descant chanting hymns that she and her people would sound out during services.
By the l650s, having translated the Bible into Algonquian, John Eliot and his associate, Daniel Gookins, set about establishing a series of villages wherein his converts, his "poor blind Indians" as he called them, could live in peace --- provided of course, they cut their hair and prayed to the proper God. They began in 1654 with a small congregation at Natick, just west of Boston, and by the late 1650s they had secured seven villages of Christian Indians, "praying towns" where Eliot’s "praying" Indians" could live in peace and harmony. One these tracts, a holding of some sixteen square miles was located northwest of present day Concord in a region of fertile uplands, and well-watered intervales. The actual village was located between two ponds wherein lay "manie good fishes and planting grounds".
This English idea of holding private property in fee simple, that is to say as the absolute ownership of a piece of land that can be bought and sold, was actually a fairly recent development in legal history. The term originated in the English feudal system when all land belonged ultimately to the Crown. Those who lived on feudal lands were obliged to perform duties, such as military service or farm work or provide crops or meat to pay for the right to use the land. Land held with the fewest strings attached became known as fee simple. The idea of land as property did not come into full use until the eighteenth century. Before that, in English law at least, what you bought and sold was land held of someone, you bought the right to live there, or the right to use it, you did not actually own the ground. But in the seventeenth century land came to be seen as an object of quantity, something that, in theory at least, could be sold.
By the eighteenth century in Britain, the common rights associated with land, pasturing cattle, for example, or cutting timber or turf, began to give way to a rigid set of regulations based on private, outright ownership of property, and the tradition of the common began to fade. This is the same period as the Acts of Enclosure, when some six million acres of commonly-held lands --- meadows, open fields, and forests --- were transferred into private hands by parliamentary approval and were hedged and fenced for private gain.
In the new England, even though the idea of the commons was still ingrained in the English soul, the concept of the private plot, of each man as lord of his own manor, flourished. The Jones family who took over the Nashobah property after Sarah died would have assumed the property in its entirety in fee simple, and when they died, since they owned it outright, they could pass it along to their heirs.
By contrast, Sarah's people would have viewed the land as a common resource, controlled, but not owned by the Pawtucket people. Territory was defined, and periodically redefined by tribal members. Generally the boundary would have been a natural topographic feature such as a watershed, or in the case of Nashobah, the land between two ponds. The territory would have been under the somewhat loose control of a powerful figure, or sachem, a "king" as the English phrased it or even a "queen" a saunk. Among the Eastern Woodland people the social structure was a complex hierarchy which was not too far removed from the proto feudal system that existed in England before the coming of William the Conqueror. At the head of the group was the sachem and his wife, or wives. This man, the equivalent of the lord or earl in English culture, was in control of a certain territory, a tract of land which was defined by natural boundaries and comprehended by all those tribes and bands in the general area. Periodically, at a great council, the sachem or saunk would divide up his or her territory and assign certain areas to certain families for hunting, or fishing, or for agricultural use. No one owned any of this though, not even the sachem --- he or she merely controlled the rights of use, the usufruct of the region. In return the sachem was given a tribute each year by the people below him, a certain number of bushels of corn, for example.
Within this territory, or "kingdom", small bands, extended family groups, or tribes, had rights of use of a planting field or hunting grounds, fishing weirs, or berry picking areas. But they did not in any sense own the land in these areas, and after some years they would abandon "their" fields anyway and move on to another area. All this was somewhat ill-defined, so that any individual who wanted to collect sedges near someone else's fishing weir could do so. Anyone would wanted to dig groundnuts or collect bark near someone else's berry picking grounds could proceed. Furthermore, at certain times of year, in certain places, the controls were relaxed and people from various tribes would gather with other bands, usually around good fishing sites. For example, in Sarah's time, the falls of the Merrimack at what is now Lowell was under the control of the great sachem Passaconway (who, it is said, lived to be l07 years old and whose father was a bear). During the spring runs of anadromous fish, villages from all over the region would gather at the site to share the bounty. They all acknowledged a mutual right to use the site for a specific purpose, even though the falls were in the territory of Passsaconway.
In England in the years just before the Pilgrims arrived, life centered around the village. The village centered around the church, and the houses were clustered on either side of a central road that led to other villages of similar design. Beyond the cluster of housing lay the agricultural lands and beyond them, in certain areas at least, the greenwood or the wild heath which, by the seventeenth century had been much diminished from earlier times in English history when the dense forests of oak, beech, and ash covered the lands between the villages.
This basic pattern, which varied from county to county and in fact was far more complex than this basic form, had its antecedents in feudalistic society and its step child, the manor house, which developed in the sixteenth century. The feudalistic system in England was refined and perfected (if those are the proper terms) with the arrival of William the Conqueror. In its most basic form, a village (from the Old French term vill) was no more than a collection of houses, barns, and outbuildings surrounded by planting fields within a surround of pasture, and beyond this the wildwood. Under the feudal system the whole of this was under the management of the lord, who was responsible for the safety the underlings who had gathered themselves together under his protection to save themselves the raiding armies of invaders, such as the Vikings or Normans. Small landholders surrendered whatever rights of ownership they may have had to the control of the lord in order to protect their land, their source of livelihood.
By the time of William, the social system was well established. At the bottom of the were the serfs who actually belonged to other individuals and worked the land. Next up the line were the cottars or cottagers, who were responsible for small holdings, then the villeins who farmed as many as fifty acres or more. Above them were the thanes, who drew rents in kind from the villeins and who were in turn responsible to the earls or lords who were in turn responsible to the king.
In a typical feudal holding by the time of William, some two to three hundred acres around the vill would have been cleared from the native forest of beech and ash. Some sixteen to twenty families would live in the village, about six cottars or so, maybe nine villeins, and the thane. All told there would have been about two hundred people in the town. The system worked communally. These families would have owned a number of plows between them, possibly as few as seven or eight, and they would have had teams of oxen, also shared, to pull the plows. They may have had community fish ponds on the local streams, and weirs, and even a water mill. The fields, which began at the forest edge and ran to the edge of the village, was one long, open stretch. The patchwork division of small fields and pastures that you see today, flying over England, would come later in the seventeenth and eighteenth century with the acts of enclosure. This great open field was ploughed in strips which were roughly ten times as long as they were wide. This pattern, known as a furlong --- a standard furrow's length--- came to pass because of the difficulty in turning a team of oxen. The long strips of arable land were planted to grains, barley and peas, and were altered on a three year system of rotation allowing some strips to lie fallow in any given year. Each villein planted and harvested his own crop on a given amount of land, but it might not be the same piece of land each year. Under this system, fields of different quality would be equitably distributed among the farmers over a period of time. Unless you were a serf --- essentially the equivalent of a slave --- you would be guaranteed a certain amount of land and the distribution of these arable lands was decided each year at a meeting known as the annual allotment.
Surrounding the cultivated lands were the pasture lands where each day the herds of cattle, sheep, and goats were driven to graze. These lands were also held in common by the village but were not divided into lots. Beyond the pasture lands was the wildwood, which was held, in effect, by no one. Here the local peasants went to gather nuts and firewood, here they turned out their swine to forage and here also, up until the coming of William, they hunted deer and boar for their larder.
William, as Anglophiles to this day will attest, at once altered this primordial feudal system and refined it to his liking. One of his earliest violations of the traditional Anglo-Saxon system was to declare the forest his private hunting domain. Villeins, serfs, and cottars who were discovered in his greenwood collecting faggots, digging out rabbit warrens, or worst of all, killing deer --- his deer mind you --- were severely punished. Their hands were cut off, their ears cropped, and in some instances, they were put to death. William's ruthless protection of his resources altered the ecological makeup of the forest in those areas where it was heavily used by the peasants. It was customary for them to pollard the trees of the woods and to allow swine to uproot native vegetation in their search for nuts and roots, for example. Removing the peasants from the forest may actually have had a beneficial ecological effect, at least around the villages, but it was not good for the people of the region.
(There is an interesting, albeit tragic, contemporary twist to this in the recently privatized forests of Siberia. Formerly the state would drive out and sometimes even kill individuals attempting to exploit the state-controlled forests. Now it's up for grabs and one of its most important predatory inhabitants, the magnificent Siberian tiger, is on a swift path to extinction.)
Under William the Conqueror's feudalistic system, rents for lands were paid in kind, that is you supplied a certain amount of grain to the earl each year according to the amount of land you were using,. You rendered unto the lord a certain amount of work each year, depending on your land holdings. You applied each year to renew your holding and the terms of your arrangements were set. Rights of use of land formed a great theoretical pyramid, with the king at the top, the serfs or cottars at the bottom, and various tenants and lords in the middle reaches --- from the Crown, all titles flow, as the phrase has it. The system was not just designed to control land of England. It was also a convenient way of raising an army. The lords owed allegiance to the king, and the villagers could pay their rents by military service. When the king called to raise an army, you joined. So did your lord.
All this more or less came to an end about the time that the Pilgrims came to the new world and the old tenure system requiring payment in kind or in personal services faded. The King granted the lands of the Massachusetts Bay Company in what was called common socage, which is to say the rights of use of the land could be paid in rents, rather than knights' service to the King. Common socage was actually not an unknown form of payment for land in Kent and also in East Anglia, where many of the Puritans came from and where the feudal system had less of a footing than in other sections of England.
But even before this time, peasants in England were able to maintain certain rights under what was known as the allodial system, which had been in practice as far back as the Roman period elsewhere in Europe. This held that no matter who was in control, no matter what king sat on the throne, or who was lord, the peasants would continue on their traditional lands. There were no laws stating this, it was simply a reality, but it was such an enduring one that it has been at the root of the private property system even into our time. With advent of feudalism in much of Europe the allodially-held lands were placed under the protection of a powerful lord. But in England, and most especially in Kent, the allodial system was maintained even after William's time. As a result when the seventeenth century Puritans began taking over the Indian lands of New England, they understood perhaps better than any other invading culture of the Americas, the rights of Indian title to those lands which the Indians were cultivating.
Civil Wars, regicides, interregnums and the Puritan exodus to the New World notwithstanding, the seventeenth century was an active period in English history. Not long after the Great Migration to the Americas began, in 1660, Parliament passed a statute switching all existing tenures into common socage so that an annual rent could serve as payment for land and not personal service.
There was more to come though. At the beginning of December in 1664, while Sarah Doublet was living at Nashobah, two men at the upper end of Drury Lane in London were reported dead and two physcians and a surgeon were sent in to determine the cause. There had been rumors abroad that the dreaded plague had returned to Holland and the authorities wanted to make certain that it did not reach England. The physcians inspected the bodies and found "tokens" of the sickness upon the bodies of the dead. The case was dutifully reported to the parish clerk and the weekly bill of mortality printed the news the following week.
Over the next month cases began to appear with more regularity in the different parishes: twelve in St. Giles by the tenth, twelve more by the twenty fourth. Seventeen cases in Saint Andrews between the third and the tenth of January, twenty-three more by the end of the month. Slowly, parish by parish, the number of cases mounted until by the end of June, 1665, as many as a thousand people were dying a month in some sections.
Finally, on September second in l666, a fire began in the crowded warrens of inner London and spread quickly among the small shops, churches, and livery halls. By the end of the day it was still spreading, and by the morning of the second day it had jumped deeper into the city. For four straight days and nights the conflagration raged through the maze of streets and shops, and when it ended, finally, it had destroyed an estimated 13,200 houses, some 87 churches, and 44 livery halls. The whole city lay in ruins, commercial centers and administrative buildings smoldering. But within a few days the plague numbers diminished and by the end of that autumn the disease had died out.
The ashes of the Great Fire had hardly cooled before two architects, Christopher Wren and John Evelyn appeared before King Charles ll with plans to rebuild London on a grand scale, based on contemporary town planning principles. London at the time was a hive of narrow streets and crowded wooden structures. Two of the major thoroughfares, Thames Street and Threadneedle Street were only eleven feet wide. The lanes, alleyways, and walks were lined with a multitude of houses that crowded one upon the other in such profusion that the inhabitants rarely saw the sun and lived ever in an "unwholesome" shadow. In order prevent this dangerous development pattern from reoccurring, after the Great Fire a series of acts were passed that established four house types and sizes, all to be built of brick and laid down with minimum safety requirements about party walls and overhanging jetties.
Anyone living here in the American wilds of Utah who proclaims grandly that his land is his to do with as he would still has to contend with the end result of the Great Fire of London. Like it or not, we live on top of the past, under the English system of common law, and these early English codes, organized to protect the safety of the people, were the prototypes of zoning acts and land use codes and were as much a part of the traditional roots of American land use law as the Fifth Amendment. One could argue that the Fire Building Acts were a curtailment of the rights of private property, (so much as they existed in the England of 1666) and so they may have been. But the end result of the meeting Wren and Evelyn with the King was not only the creation of the London that is so beloved by the international visitors of our time, but the beginning of zoning, which, as many still argue, was the end of freedom.
The meeting of a native American tribal people who lived by hunting and gathering and practiced swidden agriculture, as opposed to a culture such as the English which tended to fix itself in one place for centuries was the source of confusion and eventual conflict between the two groups. The understanding of land, of the universe even, of these two cultures was almost diametrically opposed. Within twenty-five years after the Puritans settled in Boston game began disappearing from those regions where the English dominated. Within thirty five years, there were serious squabbles between the two cultures, many of them over land, and within fifty years, in 1675, there was an outright war. Perhaps it was inevitable.
By the seventeenth century the English were beginning to believe that land could actually be owned as one would own a thing, although even in the freedom of the new world to which they had retreated there was still a strong concept of common land and public use of land. A purchase of Indian land for example did not necessarily mean that the Indians could not hunt or fish on that land, even though it was now "owned" by the English. Conflicts over hunting and fishing rights, over trespass and the like, came later in history, after the English had established agricultural lands. The Indians basically didn't get it. At Nashobah, for example, several of the laws of behavior had to do with protection of private property. Indians could not use, without permission, a Englishman's canoe. They were required to knock before entering a house, and of course, they were strictly forbidden to steal. All of which suggests that there was a lot of stealing and borrowing without asking, and a general lack of regard for boundaries and privacy.
Eliot's original documents granting the lands of Nashobah to the Christian Indians are a mere broad description of the place. But in l686, after the village was supposedly deserted, the General Court hired Samuel Danforth to actually survey the land. Mathematical surveying as we know it had came into use in the l620s when Edmund Gunter invented a chain 66 feet long divided into l00 links, each 7.92 inches long. Surveyors on the ground would lay marks at regular intervals called stations, and at the angles, points or corners. Danforth would have walked over the Nashobah tract with a team, carrying instruments known as rods, or poles, and Gunter's ringed surveyor's chain. Using these tools, he and his partner would have marked off the rough land from point to point, using wherever possible, enduring natural features such as large boulders or bodies of water, although they also used larger trees.
The actual boundary lines of the Indian lands at Nashobah are much discussed in the historical records, mainly because the various English towns began arguing as to which town laid claim to which section of the original tract after the village broke up in l675. The bounds continue to be argued over today among the mappers and boundary watchers who have an interest in this part of the world because it is believed to be part of the vast corridor of sacred Indian lands that run -- more or less --- from the valley of the Concord and Sudbury Rivers out to the singular peak of Mount Wachusetts. Generally, records agree that the Indian lands of Nashobah consisted of a square of four miles to a side, roughly, beginning at a point near the two ponds, and running west northwest for four miles, north for four miles, east, and then south to the original point.
All this, the larger territory of the village, is now developed into two or three towns, depending on whose markers and whose research or whose original deeds you are reading. At various points in history, and still today, Groton, Acton, parts of Ayer, and the nearly the whole town of Littleton laid claims to the original site. But most of the tract, it is now agreed, was in the town of Littleton, which was established in 1714.
By 1736 Sarah's tract was all in private hands and remained so until 1988. Then in l990, through a curious series of events and coincidences, the tract began a slow, legal evolution back into common land. Two elderly women donated some ninety acres of the original village holding to the local land trust, thus opening up one section of the old village site to the public. Then in the mid 90s another section of some 113 acres just to the west came up for development, and inspired a small group of people to rise up to save the land as open space. Then finally, the core of the place, the sacred geography of Sarah Doublet's final five hundred acre tract held by the old curmudgeon, came up for sale.
The fate of this last five hundred acres of Indian land now lies in the fickle hand of American land law. But if the past is in any way prelude, by rights it should go back into common land, as it was in Sarah Doublet's time, before the English came along with their curious ideas of holding land as property.
by John Hanson Mitchell
In November of 1853, Henry Thoreau went for a walk from Concord up to the town of Littleton to pay a visit to Ralph Waldo Emerson's brother Bulkley, who was living with a family near the town center. Since he walked all the way, it is likely that Thoreau resorted to what he termed cross-lot walking, that is, he cut through farms and privately held woodlots without regard to property lines and avoided, as was his custom, roads much traveled by.
Although he does not give us the route, it is likely that he walked up from the center of Concord, crossed through the wild Estabrook Country and then perhaps followed the old Great Road for a mile or so. Just south of Nagog Pond, he probably left the road and circled up through the fields and woodlots on the western slopes of the pond bank, property which in those days, was owned by a fmaily named Tenant.
According to old maps, this area was open land in Henry's time, what the town called mowings, and since this whole territory had been owned outright by private individuals under English and American law since 1736, in order to get to his destination, Henry had to trespass, not an uncommon custom for him, one might even say a regular pastime.
This habit of cross-lot walking is a passion I share with Henry. The area south and west of Nagog Pond, which he passed through back in [date] is all wooded now, except for a small mowing just west of the Nagog Pond. Some years back, I learned that this same tract of land was the probable site of a seventeenth century village of Christianized Indians. These people, probably members of the local Pawtucket tribe, having spotted, as they believed, the arrival of a new and powerful deity in their land, converted to Christianity and as a result were granted some sixteen square miles at a place called Nashobah, about thirty-five miles west of Boston. Under the direction of John Eliot, the so-called Apostle to the Indians, the Christianized Indians set up a village of pole-frame houses and traditional wigwams, planted apple trees, cleared fields for agriculture, cut their hair, ceased dancing, and settled in to live like Englishmen.
According to the legislative powers of the General Court in Boston, the land, known as Nashobah Plantation, was granted to the Indians outright (never mind the deep irony of the fact that it was their land in the first place). Within the boundaries of the tract, the Indians owned their own houses and property and, with permission of the General Court, were permitted to buy or sell plots of land. But twenty-five years later during the King Philip's War, in what amounted to a prelude to the treatment of the Nissei at the outset of World War Two, the inhabitants of Nashobah were rounded up and sent to Deer Island in Boston Harbor, where, over the succeeding winter, many of them succumbed.
After the war, a few of the survivors of this ordeal struggled back to the Nashobah area to live out their time. The last survivor was a powerful woman named Sarah Doublet, who died, feeble and blind, in l736, under the care of two tradesmen from Concord named Ephraim and Elnathan Jones. By way of payment for her care, Sarah Doublet granted the Jones’ the rights to the five hundred acres that she had held, the last remnant of the sixteen square miles Nashobah Plantation.
That transfer marked the end of Indian land tenure in that part of the world and the beginning of the new era in land use history. Sara and her people would have held their land in common and would have made decisions as to its use communally, by consensus --- which, ironically, was a pattern that was not uncommon in England in the seventeenth century. But in the space of little more than fifty years this system of holding land in common would be subsumed by the concept of private property. Within another hundred years, this new system would oversweep the entire American continent and replace the idea of land held in common. It was a uniquely American phenomenon, new even to the conquering English and French.
This Sarah Doublet, the original "owner" of the tract under the English system, had black eyes and a lurid blue image of a bear tattooed on her left cheek. She would have tied her long black hair in a knot, fastened with a band of silver, and she dressed in a decorated moose skin skirt and buskins, with a blue shawl over her shoulders and a beaded blue cloth around her waist. Like all the women of her group, she probably wore thongs of moosehide around her ankles and in winter, and sometimes also summer, she greased her skin with bear fat to the keep the cold or the insects at bay. Periodically she would paint herself in blues and reds and don cloaks made of bird feathers or robes of furred mammal pelts, all hung about with heads and clawed feet, and the striped tails of raccoons and skunks, and the whole arrangement made fast with a belt made from the skin of milk snakes and copperheads. She fixed pendants of swan's down or shells in her pierced ears, placed a bird wing headdress in her hair, and strung herself with shell necklaces and ropes of wampum, and perhaps --- all this is conjecture --- an amulet at her breast, a winged thunderbird, or the carved image of A'pcinic, the horned water monster who lived in the depths of the pond below her village.
After Eliot came, after she accepted Christianity, she would have ceased to wear bangles and sparkles and fanciful animal skins, would have cast aside her bird wing headdress and her swan's down earrings. She would have become modest, would have lowered her eyes, prayed, sung the strange descant chanting hymns that she and her people would sound out during services.
By the l650s, having translated the Bible into Algonquian, John Eliot and his associate, Daniel Gookins, set about establishing a series of villages wherein his converts, his "poor blind Indians" as he called them, could live in peace --- provided of course, they cut their hair and prayed to the proper God. They began in 1654 with a small congregation at Natick, just west of Boston, and by the late 1650s they had secured seven villages of Christian Indians, "praying towns" where Eliot’s "praying" Indians" could live in peace and harmony. One these tracts, a holding of some sixteen square miles was located northwest of present day Concord in a region of fertile uplands, and well-watered intervales. The actual village was located between two ponds wherein lay "manie good fishes and planting grounds".
This English idea of holding private property in fee simple, that is to say as the absolute ownership of a piece of land that can be bought and sold, was actually a fairly recent development in legal history. The term originated in the English feudal system when all land belonged ultimately to the Crown. Those who lived on feudal lands were obliged to perform duties, such as military service or farm work or provide crops or meat to pay for the right to use the land. Land held with the fewest strings attached became known as fee simple. The idea of land as property did not come into full use until the eighteenth century. Before that, in English law at least, what you bought and sold was land held of someone, you bought the right to live there, or the right to use it, you did not actually own the ground. But in the seventeenth century land came to be seen as an object of quantity, something that, in theory at least, could be sold.
By the eighteenth century in Britain, the common rights associated with land, pasturing cattle, for example, or cutting timber or turf, began to give way to a rigid set of regulations based on private, outright ownership of property, and the tradition of the common began to fade. This is the same period as the Acts of Enclosure, when some six million acres of commonly-held lands --- meadows, open fields, and forests --- were transferred into private hands by parliamentary approval and were hedged and fenced for private gain.
In the new England, even though the idea of the commons was still ingrained in the English soul, the concept of the private plot, of each man as lord of his own manor, flourished. The Jones family who took over the Nashobah property after Sarah died would have assumed the property in its entirety in fee simple, and when they died, since they owned it outright, they could pass it along to their heirs.
By contrast, Sarah's people would have viewed the land as a common resource, controlled, but not owned by the Pawtucket people. Territory was defined, and periodically redefined by tribal members. Generally the boundary would have been a natural topographic feature such as a watershed, or in the case of Nashobah, the land between two ponds. The territory would have been under the somewhat loose control of a powerful figure, or sachem, a "king" as the English phrased it or even a "queen" a saunk. Among the Eastern Woodland people the social structure was a complex hierarchy which was not too far removed from the proto feudal system that existed in England before the coming of William the Conqueror. At the head of the group was the sachem and his wife, or wives. This man, the equivalent of the lord or earl in English culture, was in control of a certain territory, a tract of land which was defined by natural boundaries and comprehended by all those tribes and bands in the general area. Periodically, at a great council, the sachem or saunk would divide up his or her territory and assign certain areas to certain families for hunting, or fishing, or for agricultural use. No one owned any of this though, not even the sachem --- he or she merely controlled the rights of use, the usufruct of the region. In return the sachem was given a tribute each year by the people below him, a certain number of bushels of corn, for example.
Within this territory, or "kingdom", small bands, extended family groups, or tribes, had rights of use of a planting field or hunting grounds, fishing weirs, or berry picking areas. But they did not in any sense own the land in these areas, and after some years they would abandon "their" fields anyway and move on to another area. All this was somewhat ill-defined, so that any individual who wanted to collect sedges near someone else's fishing weir could do so. Anyone would wanted to dig groundnuts or collect bark near someone else's berry picking grounds could proceed. Furthermore, at certain times of year, in certain places, the controls were relaxed and people from various tribes would gather with other bands, usually around good fishing sites. For example, in Sarah's time, the falls of the Merrimack at what is now Lowell was under the control of the great sachem Passaconway (who, it is said, lived to be l07 years old and whose father was a bear). During the spring runs of anadromous fish, villages from all over the region would gather at the site to share the bounty. They all acknowledged a mutual right to use the site for a specific purpose, even though the falls were in the territory of Passsaconway.
In England in the years just before the Pilgrims arrived, life centered around the village. The village centered around the church, and the houses were clustered on either side of a central road that led to other villages of similar design. Beyond the cluster of housing lay the agricultural lands and beyond them, in certain areas at least, the greenwood or the wild heath which, by the seventeenth century had been much diminished from earlier times in English history when the dense forests of oak, beech, and ash covered the lands between the villages.
This basic pattern, which varied from county to county and in fact was far more complex than this basic form, had its antecedents in feudalistic society and its step child, the manor house, which developed in the sixteenth century. The feudalistic system in England was refined and perfected (if those are the proper terms) with the arrival of William the Conqueror. In its most basic form, a village (from the Old French term vill) was no more than a collection of houses, barns, and outbuildings surrounded by planting fields within a surround of pasture, and beyond this the wildwood. Under the feudal system the whole of this was under the management of the lord, who was responsible for the safety the underlings who had gathered themselves together under his protection to save themselves the raiding armies of invaders, such as the Vikings or Normans. Small landholders surrendered whatever rights of ownership they may have had to the control of the lord in order to protect their land, their source of livelihood.
By the time of William, the social system was well established. At the bottom of the were the serfs who actually belonged to other individuals and worked the land. Next up the line were the cottars or cottagers, who were responsible for small holdings, then the villeins who farmed as many as fifty acres or more. Above them were the thanes, who drew rents in kind from the villeins and who were in turn responsible to the earls or lords who were in turn responsible to the king.
In a typical feudal holding by the time of William, some two to three hundred acres around the vill would have been cleared from the native forest of beech and ash. Some sixteen to twenty families would live in the village, about six cottars or so, maybe nine villeins, and the thane. All told there would have been about two hundred people in the town. The system worked communally. These families would have owned a number of plows between them, possibly as few as seven or eight, and they would have had teams of oxen, also shared, to pull the plows. They may have had community fish ponds on the local streams, and weirs, and even a water mill. The fields, which began at the forest edge and ran to the edge of the village, was one long, open stretch. The patchwork division of small fields and pastures that you see today, flying over England, would come later in the seventeenth and eighteenth century with the acts of enclosure. This great open field was ploughed in strips which were roughly ten times as long as they were wide. This pattern, known as a furlong --- a standard furrow's length--- came to pass because of the difficulty in turning a team of oxen. The long strips of arable land were planted to grains, barley and peas, and were altered on a three year system of rotation allowing some strips to lie fallow in any given year. Each villein planted and harvested his own crop on a given amount of land, but it might not be the same piece of land each year. Under this system, fields of different quality would be equitably distributed among the farmers over a period of time. Unless you were a serf --- essentially the equivalent of a slave --- you would be guaranteed a certain amount of land and the distribution of these arable lands was decided each year at a meeting known as the annual allotment.
Surrounding the cultivated lands were the pasture lands where each day the herds of cattle, sheep, and goats were driven to graze. These lands were also held in common by the village but were not divided into lots. Beyond the pasture lands was the wildwood, which was held, in effect, by no one. Here the local peasants went to gather nuts and firewood, here they turned out their swine to forage and here also, up until the coming of William, they hunted deer and boar for their larder.
William, as Anglophiles to this day will attest, at once altered this primordial feudal system and refined it to his liking. One of his earliest violations of the traditional Anglo-Saxon system was to declare the forest his private hunting domain. Villeins, serfs, and cottars who were discovered in his greenwood collecting faggots, digging out rabbit warrens, or worst of all, killing deer --- his deer mind you --- were severely punished. Their hands were cut off, their ears cropped, and in some instances, they were put to death. William's ruthless protection of his resources altered the ecological makeup of the forest in those areas where it was heavily used by the peasants. It was customary for them to pollard the trees of the woods and to allow swine to uproot native vegetation in their search for nuts and roots, for example. Removing the peasants from the forest may actually have had a beneficial ecological effect, at least around the villages, but it was not good for the people of the region.
(There is an interesting, albeit tragic, contemporary twist to this in the recently privatized forests of Siberia. Formerly the state would drive out and sometimes even kill individuals attempting to exploit the state-controlled forests. Now it's up for grabs and one of its most important predatory inhabitants, the magnificent Siberian tiger, is on a swift path to extinction.)
Under William the Conqueror's feudalistic system, rents for lands were paid in kind, that is you supplied a certain amount of grain to the earl each year according to the amount of land you were using,. You rendered unto the lord a certain amount of work each year, depending on your land holdings. You applied each year to renew your holding and the terms of your arrangements were set. Rights of use of land formed a great theoretical pyramid, with the king at the top, the serfs or cottars at the bottom, and various tenants and lords in the middle reaches --- from the Crown, all titles flow, as the phrase has it. The system was not just designed to control land of England. It was also a convenient way of raising an army. The lords owed allegiance to the king, and the villagers could pay their rents by military service. When the king called to raise an army, you joined. So did your lord.
All this more or less came to an end about the time that the Pilgrims came to the new world and the old tenure system requiring payment in kind or in personal services faded. The King granted the lands of the Massachusetts Bay Company in what was called common socage, which is to say the rights of use of the land could be paid in rents, rather than knights' service to the King. Common socage was actually not an unknown form of payment for land in Kent and also in East Anglia, where many of the Puritans came from and where the feudal system had less of a footing than in other sections of England.
But even before this time, peasants in England were able to maintain certain rights under what was known as the allodial system, which had been in practice as far back as the Roman period elsewhere in Europe. This held that no matter who was in control, no matter what king sat on the throne, or who was lord, the peasants would continue on their traditional lands. There were no laws stating this, it was simply a reality, but it was such an enduring one that it has been at the root of the private property system even into our time. With advent of feudalism in much of Europe the allodially-held lands were placed under the protection of a powerful lord. But in England, and most especially in Kent, the allodial system was maintained even after William's time. As a result when the seventeenth century Puritans began taking over the Indian lands of New England, they understood perhaps better than any other invading culture of the Americas, the rights of Indian title to those lands which the Indians were cultivating.
Civil Wars, regicides, interregnums and the Puritan exodus to the New World notwithstanding, the seventeenth century was an active period in English history. Not long after the Great Migration to the Americas began, in 1660, Parliament passed a statute switching all existing tenures into common socage so that an annual rent could serve as payment for land and not personal service.
There was more to come though. At the beginning of December in 1664, while Sarah Doublet was living at Nashobah, two men at the upper end of Drury Lane in London were reported dead and two physcians and a surgeon were sent in to determine the cause. There had been rumors abroad that the dreaded plague had returned to Holland and the authorities wanted to make certain that it did not reach England. The physcians inspected the bodies and found "tokens" of the sickness upon the bodies of the dead. The case was dutifully reported to the parish clerk and the weekly bill of mortality printed the news the following week.
Over the next month cases began to appear with more regularity in the different parishes: twelve in St. Giles by the tenth, twelve more by the twenty fourth. Seventeen cases in Saint Andrews between the third and the tenth of January, twenty-three more by the end of the month. Slowly, parish by parish, the number of cases mounted until by the end of June, 1665, as many as a thousand people were dying a month in some sections.
Finally, on September second in l666, a fire began in the crowded warrens of inner London and spread quickly among the small shops, churches, and livery halls. By the end of the day it was still spreading, and by the morning of the second day it had jumped deeper into the city. For four straight days and nights the conflagration raged through the maze of streets and shops, and when it ended, finally, it had destroyed an estimated 13,200 houses, some 87 churches, and 44 livery halls. The whole city lay in ruins, commercial centers and administrative buildings smoldering. But within a few days the plague numbers diminished and by the end of that autumn the disease had died out.
The ashes of the Great Fire had hardly cooled before two architects, Christopher Wren and John Evelyn appeared before King Charles ll with plans to rebuild London on a grand scale, based on contemporary town planning principles. London at the time was a hive of narrow streets and crowded wooden structures. Two of the major thoroughfares, Thames Street and Threadneedle Street were only eleven feet wide. The lanes, alleyways, and walks were lined with a multitude of houses that crowded one upon the other in such profusion that the inhabitants rarely saw the sun and lived ever in an "unwholesome" shadow. In order prevent this dangerous development pattern from reoccurring, after the Great Fire a series of acts were passed that established four house types and sizes, all to be built of brick and laid down with minimum safety requirements about party walls and overhanging jetties.
Anyone living here in the American wilds of Utah who proclaims grandly that his land is his to do with as he would still has to contend with the end result of the Great Fire of London. Like it or not, we live on top of the past, under the English system of common law, and these early English codes, organized to protect the safety of the people, were the prototypes of zoning acts and land use codes and were as much a part of the traditional roots of American land use law as the Fifth Amendment. One could argue that the Fire Building Acts were a curtailment of the rights of private property, (so much as they existed in the England of 1666) and so they may have been. But the end result of the meeting Wren and Evelyn with the King was not only the creation of the London that is so beloved by the international visitors of our time, but the beginning of zoning, which, as many still argue, was the end of freedom.
The meeting of a native American tribal people who lived by hunting and gathering and practiced swidden agriculture, as opposed to a culture such as the English which tended to fix itself in one place for centuries was the source of confusion and eventual conflict between the two groups. The understanding of land, of the universe even, of these two cultures was almost diametrically opposed. Within twenty-five years after the Puritans settled in Boston game began disappearing from those regions where the English dominated. Within thirty five years, there were serious squabbles between the two cultures, many of them over land, and within fifty years, in 1675, there was an outright war. Perhaps it was inevitable.
By the seventeenth century the English were beginning to believe that land could actually be owned as one would own a thing, although even in the freedom of the new world to which they had retreated there was still a strong concept of common land and public use of land. A purchase of Indian land for example did not necessarily mean that the Indians could not hunt or fish on that land, even though it was now "owned" by the English. Conflicts over hunting and fishing rights, over trespass and the like, came later in history, after the English had established agricultural lands. The Indians basically didn't get it. At Nashobah, for example, several of the laws of behavior had to do with protection of private property. Indians could not use, without permission, a Englishman's canoe. They were required to knock before entering a house, and of course, they were strictly forbidden to steal. All of which suggests that there was a lot of stealing and borrowing without asking, and a general lack of regard for boundaries and privacy.
Eliot's original documents granting the lands of Nashobah to the Christian Indians are a mere broad description of the place. But in l686, after the village was supposedly deserted, the General Court hired Samuel Danforth to actually survey the land. Mathematical surveying as we know it had came into use in the l620s when Edmund Gunter invented a chain 66 feet long divided into l00 links, each 7.92 inches long. Surveyors on the ground would lay marks at regular intervals called stations, and at the angles, points or corners. Danforth would have walked over the Nashobah tract with a team, carrying instruments known as rods, or poles, and Gunter's ringed surveyor's chain. Using these tools, he and his partner would have marked off the rough land from point to point, using wherever possible, enduring natural features such as large boulders or bodies of water, although they also used larger trees.
The actual boundary lines of the Indian lands at Nashobah are much discussed in the historical records, mainly because the various English towns began arguing as to which town laid claim to which section of the original tract after the village broke up in l675. The bounds continue to be argued over today among the mappers and boundary watchers who have an interest in this part of the world because it is believed to be part of the vast corridor of sacred Indian lands that run -- more or less --- from the valley of the Concord and Sudbury Rivers out to the singular peak of Mount Wachusetts. Generally, records agree that the Indian lands of Nashobah consisted of a square of four miles to a side, roughly, beginning at a point near the two ponds, and running west northwest for four miles, north for four miles, east, and then south to the original point.
All this, the larger territory of the village, is now developed into two or three towns, depending on whose markers and whose research or whose original deeds you are reading. At various points in history, and still today, Groton, Acton, parts of Ayer, and the nearly the whole town of Littleton laid claims to the original site. But most of the tract, it is now agreed, was in the town of Littleton, which was established in 1714.
By 1736 Sarah's tract was all in private hands and remained so until 1988. Then in l990, through a curious series of events and coincidences, the tract began a slow, legal evolution back into common land. Two elderly women donated some ninety acres of the original village holding to the local land trust, thus opening up one section of the old village site to the public. Then in the mid 90s another section of some 113 acres just to the west came up for development, and inspired a small group of people to rise up to save the land as open space. Then finally, the core of the place, the sacred geography of Sarah Doublet's final five hundred acre tract held by the old curmudgeon, came up for sale.
The fate of this last five hundred acres of Indian land now lies in the fickle hand of American land law. But if the past is in any way prelude, by rights it should go back into common land, as it was in Sarah Doublet's time, before the English came along with their curious ideas of holding land as property.
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