At present we must note that, as a measure of self-protection, this
decree was intended to keep out of the new community all emissaries of
Strafford and Laud, as well as such persons as Morton and Gardiner and
other agents of Sir Ferdinando Gorges.
By the year 1634 the scheme of the Massachusetts Company had so far
prospered that nearly 4000 Englishmen had come over, and some twenty
villages on or near the shores of the bay had been founded. The building
of permanent houses, roads, fences, and bridges had begun to go on quite
briskly; farms were beginning to yield a return for the labour of the
husbandman; lumber, furs, and salted fish were beginning to be sent to
England in exchange for manufactured articles; 4000 goats and 1500 head
of cattle grazed in the pastures, and swine innumerable rooted in the
clearings and helped to make ready the land for the ploughman. Political
meetings were held, justice was administered by magistrates after old
English precedents, and church services were performed by a score of
clergymen, nearly all graduates of Cambridge, though one or two had
their degrees from Oxford, and nearly all of whom had held livings in
the Church of England. The most distinguished of these clergymen, John
Cotton, in his younger days a Fellow and Tutor of Emmanuel College, had
for more than twenty years been rector of St.
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