The Ecologue
by John Hanson Mitchell
Time and the Tides
Throughout the autumn this year the great tide of the stock market receded and rose and fell back again to record lows. Whole fortunes were lost, banks failed, investors fled for safe ground and found nothing, stocks and bonds ebbed again and slipped seaward, and even the safe islands of money markets eroded away. But in mid October I went out one morning and saw a great river of gabbling blackbirds flowing over the fields of Scratch Flat where I live, just as they have every year at this time for the past two or three thousand years.
Frost came late this year, the roses bloomed in the garden in early October; everywhere in thickets and field edges little flitting bands of Savannah sparrows appeared and disappeared, and as I often do, I hauled a chair over to a sunny corner along the western wall of my property and fell asleep in the warm light, the sound of wind, of the last meadow crickets, and the cries of jays and crows all around me in the air.
The next day, the market fell again to record lows.
I planted tulips and daffodils and put in two new inkberries in the back garden near a sunny bench. I smelled fox and nannyberry that day, and over on the north side of the property, from a little hollow in an oak tree, I heard the singular, bird-like chirp of a grey tree frog – the last frog call of summer. There was a green frog in my fish pond again, a new one that replaced the old bull frog that spent the summer there and then left one rainy night back in September. Spring peepers had been calling earlier that week. They’ll sound off almost any month of the year. One year I heard them in mid winter, during the January thaw.
Suddenly the market flooded upward. Buyers rushed in and it rose higher. Then the Treasury Secretary, Henry Paulson, said something the people didn’t want to hear. The tide fell.
Later that week I saw the last monarch butterfly, one of the few migrating insects. The little red meadowhawks, a species of dragonfly that shows up each year in autumn, were everywhere over the garden, alighting on the withering tomato plants, sunning themselves on the remnant flower stakes where late the last cosmos bloomed. One of the dragonflies landed on my hand while I sat dully in the garden in my place beside the wall, half dreaming of Michoacan, and the Oyamel fir forests of northern Mexico where the eastern populations of monarch butterflies over-winter.
I noticed the next day that the euro began to fall. Federal treasury bonds fell too, not a bad sign if you happen to have T bonds I was told. The euro fell again the following day, and then again the day after that. It occurred to me that if things continued in this way I might be able to afford to get back to the gardens at Villa Lante in Italy, a place I had been thinking about for some time now. Then I met a financial adviser at a wedding party. He told me that it is not necessarily a good thing that the dollar falls against the euro. I’ve forgotten just why.
Down by Beaver Brook one day in mid month I saw an otter. I thought at first it was a log drifting downstream but it dove, then rose again in front me. Otters are intelligent and curious, so I squeaked and whistled and it stopped and looked over at me, treading water as it drifted with the flow. I squeaked again, and it chattered back at me, and suddenly dove, leaving a series of expanding concentric rings in the black waters.
The market fell.
Robins were everywhere on the north side of Scratch Flat. Every morning, I walk there and see the flocks. They chatter and cluck and cross from one wooded patch to another. Somewhere in the density of the wooded thickets there must be stands of old crab apples, or Russian olive maybe.
On a warm sunny Saturday in mid month I saw green darner dragonflies passing over the gardens, right on schedule. They’re migratory, like the monarchs, and move through with clocklike regularity. Green darners on the 12th of October. Monarchs around the 5th. The blackbird flocks anywhere between the 10th and the 20th. The last of the meadow crickets around the end of the month. You could almost tell the dates by these little comings and goings.
On October 23rd. the same day that the juncos arrived, I noticed that the golden hope of hedge funds went into a steep rushing water fall. All the fast money that defined the recent gilded age of high finance ebbed offshore into the indifferent sea. Stocks followed suit and plunged again.
The next night it rained, that warm autumnal rain that brings out the morning smell of old leaves, and moldering earth. A spring peeper called around dawn, and later that afternoon high above, I heard and then saw, a huge barking flock of snow geese headed south for the Chesapeake.
They’ll be back on April 12th.
Where the market will be on that date is less predictable.
Wednesday, October 29, 2008
Friday, January 11, 2008
scratch flat
Location:
The place is a square mile of anomalous land, characterized in the main by farmlands and woodlots and a long snake-like, slow moving stream that winds lazily through wide cattail marshes. Sometime in the early nineteenth century, for reasons that are recorded only in local folklore, the tract came to be known as Scratch Flat, although in our time, if you ask anyone about its location you will draw blank stares.
Scratch Flat lies thirty-five miles west of Boston, Massachusetts and is set down in a vast region of low, rolling hills east of the Appalachians known to geologists as the Nashoba Terrane. If you care to look it up you can also find it on the US Department of the Interior Geological Survey map of 1966 in the Westford Quadrangle for Massachusetts, Middlesex County, 7.5 series. Or you can experience the place in person by following the state highway known locally as the Great Road, which runs northwest from Concord, Massachusetts through the Nashobah valley and thence northwest to southern New Hampshire and the rising ground known as Monadnock. You can also see it, or part of it at least, if you are driving north or south along the great ring road that circles Boston known as Route 495. Look west after you pass the exit for Groton and you will see there a low hill, very like a whale. That hill lies more or less on the eastern edge of the square mile.
Superficially, at least, from a driver’s point of view, the landscape here is generally pleasing. If you follow the Great Road west and you will cross over the winding cattail marshes of Beaver Brook. West of the brook you will pass over the low rise of a wooded drumlin and drop down into a flat of cultivated lands. There were six working farms in this section thirty years ago, but now only two remain, although lined up one after the other, like the fast food joints of less fortunate communities, you will see three farmstands selling --- in season --- local produce. North of the Great Road the land rolls up to a wooded ridge where the last bear in this region was killed in a hemlock grove in 1811. Northwest of this woods, behind a working dairy farm is a lake that was the site of one of the best Indian fishing weirs in the region for as many as ten thousand years and which now demarcates, roughly speaking, the northern end of the tract. The western end is marked by a stand of larch trees, the south, by a ring of low hills, and the east is bounded by the winding marshes of Beaver Brook.
Until l995, Beaver Brook was a wild country of reed canary grass, cattails, and unhoused, wooded banks. Development has now invaded the uplands along some sections, but if you the canoe the interior of the marshes in mid June when the grass are high, you can still get a sense of the wilderness that characterized Scratch Flat over its fifteen thousand year history. Somewhere along Beaver Brook the old Pawtucket man known as Tom Doublet maintained a fish weir. He inherited the weir from his father, who, according to the local histories, was killed at the spot by a party raiding Mohawks sometime around 1632. Tom Doublet was a major player in the King Philips War in 1675, but after the war, as a result of an insult from the General Court, he reportedly cursed the land just east of the brook. The farms in that section, and plans for three major economic ventures, two of them backed by international funding, have failed at the site. The farms of Scratch Flat, by contrast, survived well into the 20th century. Some have been continuously cultivated since agriculture first moved to the region.
I came into this country in 1974 and began walking the square mile tract the day I moved in. It was all farms and fields then, and woodlots where you could find ironic beds of daffodils, old peonies, foundations, stone walls, cairns, and the skeletons of model T Fords. The hay fields were ill-tended, the woods were littered with the remnants of time and it was clear that this was a country that had once been lived in, had once been cultivated, perhaps loved, or more likely, simply used, first to grow food for the Puritan families who settled here in 1676, then to grow food to sell to those Puritan families who had settled so densely that they no longer had land to grow their own food. In fact, the land had already been cultivated, as I learned, for some three or four thousand years before the Puritans arrived. The original natives of the place had developed a primitive form of agriculture that required only that trees be felled on a given plot of suitable land. The brush and trunks were burned or used for wickiups, and the land between the stumps was broken with clamshell hoes, planted to corn, beans, and squash and then and watched over by women and children posted to keep the crows and raccoons away.
I learned too that this area had once been the site of a village of Indians who, under the tutelage and protection of one John Eliot, the so-called prophet of the Indians, had converted to Christianity. They cut their hair, stopped sending their women out to menstrual huts each month, began to wear shoes and learned to sing hymns in Algonquian. In exchange, they were granted – outright – a tract of land some sixteen miles square, the northwest portion of which included the aforesaid Scratch Flat. The grant, as with so many later treaties, was temporary. In 1675, with the advent of the uprising of King Philip, the Puritans went to war, and the presence of Indians, even Christian Indians, was unnerving. One morning, the peaceable Indians, believing themselves under the protection of Christ and his vested associate, John Eliot, were rounded up, roped by the neck and taken to a stockade in Concord. After that they were deported to Deer Island in Boston Harbor for the duration of the war. It was February, they were ill-supplied with food and eked out their days digging clams and plucking mussels from the rocky shores. Very few of them returned to Scratch Flat after the war save for a powerful woman named Sarah Doublet, the purported Saunk, or female chief, of her remnant people. Sarah lived to a very old age and died in 1735, whereupon she turned the land over to a pair of cousins form Concord, thus ending the eight to ten thousand year sojourn of Asian people in that section of the northeastern coast of the land now known of as North America.
Following Sarah’s death, even before actually, Puritan families from nearby Concord, Groton, and the coastal town of Ipswich began to settle in the area west of the Beaver Brook. The glacier had left behind a deep layer of alluvial soil in that section of the community, and in time the place acquired the sobriquet, Scratch Flat. There are two theories on the origin of the name. One is that the soils and the farming was good and the settlers there were forever scratching the soils with the plow. The second is that for a few years in the eighteenth century a strange cutaneous itch affected those living on the flat and they would appear in the town, constantly scratching themselves. I dug all this out from a popular history of the town written in the late nineteenth century. In my time, I only met one old farmer who even remembered the name: “They don’t call it that no more” he said .
By the turn of the nineteenth century, there were some six working farms on Scratch Flat plus a working poor farm, an early version of a town supported social program that cared for wanderers and homeless. The farmers were Yankees of English origin, most of them having come over from Kent in the early seventeenth century, and having some familiarity with fruit cultivation, established apple orchards in the region. By the turn of the 20th century, immigrant farmers from Greece and Italy began buy up some of the farms. By the turn of the twenty-first century there were only two of these farms left, one run by one of the oldest Yankee families in the town and the other held by a hard working Greek family. The last in the Greek line was a ninety –two year old man from Sparta named Tasso who ran the place with his grandniece. In general, by the late twentieth century, the fields had languished, had grown up to birch and red osier dogwood and alder and eventually, one by one, lot by lot, had been sold off for housing. Now some of the thousand year old farms support immense palazzos with faux Palladian windows and two to three floors of rooms, most of them empty, most of the time. Scratch Flat for all intents and purposes had disappeared.
But who cares, really? Why bother to spend twenty five years digging for the deep and singular history of this otherwise unremarkable stretch of farmland and woods?
I came up to New England out of family that had very deep roots on the Eastern Shore of Maryland. I spent summers there, dragged “down home” as my exiled parents referred to the region even after thirty years absence. My strongest memories of that section of the world were of summer nights on old front porches, the hooting of owls, and the slow, languorous conversation of the family and friends who would gather every evening, to rock and smoke and chat. Stories would begin like a small stream and then head for the sea, gathering many tributaries and asides and counter stories until they came to the shores. When the tale was told there would be a silence, except for the creak of the rocking chairs, followed, after decent interval, by the beginning of another story. All this was tedious business for a restless ten year old, but it had its effect. Looking back I realize now that there was not one story recounted on those summer nights whose action was played out independent of land. Nothing was free from the bonds of setting. Stories would take place in a given section of named territory, an intimate, known part of their world, which, having been named, carried with it a full burden of associations, of history, of other stories and events. Nothing that lived, neither dog, nor horse, nor human existed independent of place.
By the time I got to the town in which Scratch Flat is located, the vicissitudes of the mid twentieth century had wreaked havoc. A major highway Route 495, had sliced through the town; small tracts of housing had been built in the forested lands, good fields had been lost, the orchards, which were once the mainstay of the economic life of the community, had been plowed under. Only on Scratch Flat was there any active agriculture. In town, at a small shopping plazas wherein lay a grocery store selling produce from Florida and California, the local people were not certain where Beaver Brook was, were not aware of the fact that there were still otters there, let alone sora rails, let alone the deep Indian heritage that was at the foundation of the town. No one sat on front porches in the evening --- there were no front porches. No one told stories. No one had stories to tell save, perhaps of accounts of places they had come from, The older farm families whom I later met, did have some tales. But to find out about them I had to make phone calls, go to their houses and, at an appointed hour, sit in an enclosed living rooms --- sometimes with the counter stories of the omnipresent television competing. I had to work to draw out their tales. They still farmed, still had perhaps a love for the land, but the were in effect a displaced people --- not displaced by war, as with the Indians, or the immigrant families who were moving in. They had been displaced by their own culture, by our own culture. American mobility got the better of their psyches, and they felt, they were living as aftereffects.
I was too, of course. So were my parents. Faced with the economic realities of the Depression and the opportunity of work, my father sold his family farm and fled to New Jersey and spoke of “down home” for the rest of his life. I was set free after a certain amount of requisite education and began wandering – in the American style --- living abroad, living in the cauldron of New York City, living in the remnants of wilderness in the 1960s, and then finally in the 1970s, living on Scratch Flat.
Ultimately, Scratch Flat was an invention. A creation, or recreation of my own version of the mythic center. In time this singular tract of land, with its deep historical shadows, its farms, and its resident wildlife became for me a metaphorical hunting ground. One book was not enough to explore the hollows and empty quarters and people that seemed to characterize the place. I spent two years living in an unheated cottage sans electricity to get closer to the story of the land. I wrote a book about the natural history of my own back yard while I was living there. I used to the old Christian Indian village that was located on Scratch Flat to explore the question of the meaning, origin, and uses of the curious Western concept of private property. I used Scratch Flat as the jumping off point for a pilgrimage to Concord in which I undertook an exploration of the whole idea of place, of whether who we are has anything to do with where we are, or where we are from. I even explored the curious interconnection between the Renaissance Italian gardens and the invention of the American wilderness by constructing a pseudo Italian garden, complete with hedge maze, on land, which, according to twenty-first century American law I am told that I actually “own” (whatever that means).
In short, I became a traveler on my own land and I never got very far beyond my own square mile myth. But at least I found a place.
The place is a square mile of anomalous land, characterized in the main by farmlands and woodlots and a long snake-like, slow moving stream that winds lazily through wide cattail marshes. Sometime in the early nineteenth century, for reasons that are recorded only in local folklore, the tract came to be known as Scratch Flat, although in our time, if you ask anyone about its location you will draw blank stares.
Scratch Flat lies thirty-five miles west of Boston, Massachusetts and is set down in a vast region of low, rolling hills east of the Appalachians known to geologists as the Nashoba Terrane. If you care to look it up you can also find it on the US Department of the Interior Geological Survey map of 1966 in the Westford Quadrangle for Massachusetts, Middlesex County, 7.5 series. Or you can experience the place in person by following the state highway known locally as the Great Road, which runs northwest from Concord, Massachusetts through the Nashobah valley and thence northwest to southern New Hampshire and the rising ground known as Monadnock. You can also see it, or part of it at least, if you are driving north or south along the great ring road that circles Boston known as Route 495. Look west after you pass the exit for Groton and you will see there a low hill, very like a whale. That hill lies more or less on the eastern edge of the square mile.
Superficially, at least, from a driver’s point of view, the landscape here is generally pleasing. If you follow the Great Road west and you will cross over the winding cattail marshes of Beaver Brook. West of the brook you will pass over the low rise of a wooded drumlin and drop down into a flat of cultivated lands. There were six working farms in this section thirty years ago, but now only two remain, although lined up one after the other, like the fast food joints of less fortunate communities, you will see three farmstands selling --- in season --- local produce. North of the Great Road the land rolls up to a wooded ridge where the last bear in this region was killed in a hemlock grove in 1811. Northwest of this woods, behind a working dairy farm is a lake that was the site of one of the best Indian fishing weirs in the region for as many as ten thousand years and which now demarcates, roughly speaking, the northern end of the tract. The western end is marked by a stand of larch trees, the south, by a ring of low hills, and the east is bounded by the winding marshes of Beaver Brook.
Until l995, Beaver Brook was a wild country of reed canary grass, cattails, and unhoused, wooded banks. Development has now invaded the uplands along some sections, but if you the canoe the interior of the marshes in mid June when the grass are high, you can still get a sense of the wilderness that characterized Scratch Flat over its fifteen thousand year history. Somewhere along Beaver Brook the old Pawtucket man known as Tom Doublet maintained a fish weir. He inherited the weir from his father, who, according to the local histories, was killed at the spot by a party raiding Mohawks sometime around 1632. Tom Doublet was a major player in the King Philips War in 1675, but after the war, as a result of an insult from the General Court, he reportedly cursed the land just east of the brook. The farms in that section, and plans for three major economic ventures, two of them backed by international funding, have failed at the site. The farms of Scratch Flat, by contrast, survived well into the 20th century. Some have been continuously cultivated since agriculture first moved to the region.
I came into this country in 1974 and began walking the square mile tract the day I moved in. It was all farms and fields then, and woodlots where you could find ironic beds of daffodils, old peonies, foundations, stone walls, cairns, and the skeletons of model T Fords. The hay fields were ill-tended, the woods were littered with the remnants of time and it was clear that this was a country that had once been lived in, had once been cultivated, perhaps loved, or more likely, simply used, first to grow food for the Puritan families who settled here in 1676, then to grow food to sell to those Puritan families who had settled so densely that they no longer had land to grow their own food. In fact, the land had already been cultivated, as I learned, for some three or four thousand years before the Puritans arrived. The original natives of the place had developed a primitive form of agriculture that required only that trees be felled on a given plot of suitable land. The brush and trunks were burned or used for wickiups, and the land between the stumps was broken with clamshell hoes, planted to corn, beans, and squash and then and watched over by women and children posted to keep the crows and raccoons away.
I learned too that this area had once been the site of a village of Indians who, under the tutelage and protection of one John Eliot, the so-called prophet of the Indians, had converted to Christianity. They cut their hair, stopped sending their women out to menstrual huts each month, began to wear shoes and learned to sing hymns in Algonquian. In exchange, they were granted – outright – a tract of land some sixteen miles square, the northwest portion of which included the aforesaid Scratch Flat. The grant, as with so many later treaties, was temporary. In 1675, with the advent of the uprising of King Philip, the Puritans went to war, and the presence of Indians, even Christian Indians, was unnerving. One morning, the peaceable Indians, believing themselves under the protection of Christ and his vested associate, John Eliot, were rounded up, roped by the neck and taken to a stockade in Concord. After that they were deported to Deer Island in Boston Harbor for the duration of the war. It was February, they were ill-supplied with food and eked out their days digging clams and plucking mussels from the rocky shores. Very few of them returned to Scratch Flat after the war save for a powerful woman named Sarah Doublet, the purported Saunk, or female chief, of her remnant people. Sarah lived to a very old age and died in 1735, whereupon she turned the land over to a pair of cousins form Concord, thus ending the eight to ten thousand year sojourn of Asian people in that section of the northeastern coast of the land now known of as North America.
Following Sarah’s death, even before actually, Puritan families from nearby Concord, Groton, and the coastal town of Ipswich began to settle in the area west of the Beaver Brook. The glacier had left behind a deep layer of alluvial soil in that section of the community, and in time the place acquired the sobriquet, Scratch Flat. There are two theories on the origin of the name. One is that the soils and the farming was good and the settlers there were forever scratching the soils with the plow. The second is that for a few years in the eighteenth century a strange cutaneous itch affected those living on the flat and they would appear in the town, constantly scratching themselves. I dug all this out from a popular history of the town written in the late nineteenth century. In my time, I only met one old farmer who even remembered the name: “They don’t call it that no more” he said .
By the turn of the nineteenth century, there were some six working farms on Scratch Flat plus a working poor farm, an early version of a town supported social program that cared for wanderers and homeless. The farmers were Yankees of English origin, most of them having come over from Kent in the early seventeenth century, and having some familiarity with fruit cultivation, established apple orchards in the region. By the turn of the 20th century, immigrant farmers from Greece and Italy began buy up some of the farms. By the turn of the twenty-first century there were only two of these farms left, one run by one of the oldest Yankee families in the town and the other held by a hard working Greek family. The last in the Greek line was a ninety –two year old man from Sparta named Tasso who ran the place with his grandniece. In general, by the late twentieth century, the fields had languished, had grown up to birch and red osier dogwood and alder and eventually, one by one, lot by lot, had been sold off for housing. Now some of the thousand year old farms support immense palazzos with faux Palladian windows and two to three floors of rooms, most of them empty, most of the time. Scratch Flat for all intents and purposes had disappeared.
But who cares, really? Why bother to spend twenty five years digging for the deep and singular history of this otherwise unremarkable stretch of farmland and woods?
I came up to New England out of family that had very deep roots on the Eastern Shore of Maryland. I spent summers there, dragged “down home” as my exiled parents referred to the region even after thirty years absence. My strongest memories of that section of the world were of summer nights on old front porches, the hooting of owls, and the slow, languorous conversation of the family and friends who would gather every evening, to rock and smoke and chat. Stories would begin like a small stream and then head for the sea, gathering many tributaries and asides and counter stories until they came to the shores. When the tale was told there would be a silence, except for the creak of the rocking chairs, followed, after decent interval, by the beginning of another story. All this was tedious business for a restless ten year old, but it had its effect. Looking back I realize now that there was not one story recounted on those summer nights whose action was played out independent of land. Nothing was free from the bonds of setting. Stories would take place in a given section of named territory, an intimate, known part of their world, which, having been named, carried with it a full burden of associations, of history, of other stories and events. Nothing that lived, neither dog, nor horse, nor human existed independent of place.
By the time I got to the town in which Scratch Flat is located, the vicissitudes of the mid twentieth century had wreaked havoc. A major highway Route 495, had sliced through the town; small tracts of housing had been built in the forested lands, good fields had been lost, the orchards, which were once the mainstay of the economic life of the community, had been plowed under. Only on Scratch Flat was there any active agriculture. In town, at a small shopping plazas wherein lay a grocery store selling produce from Florida and California, the local people were not certain where Beaver Brook was, were not aware of the fact that there were still otters there, let alone sora rails, let alone the deep Indian heritage that was at the foundation of the town. No one sat on front porches in the evening --- there were no front porches. No one told stories. No one had stories to tell save, perhaps of accounts of places they had come from, The older farm families whom I later met, did have some tales. But to find out about them I had to make phone calls, go to their houses and, at an appointed hour, sit in an enclosed living rooms --- sometimes with the counter stories of the omnipresent television competing. I had to work to draw out their tales. They still farmed, still had perhaps a love for the land, but the were in effect a displaced people --- not displaced by war, as with the Indians, or the immigrant families who were moving in. They had been displaced by their own culture, by our own culture. American mobility got the better of their psyches, and they felt, they were living as aftereffects.
I was too, of course. So were my parents. Faced with the economic realities of the Depression and the opportunity of work, my father sold his family farm and fled to New Jersey and spoke of “down home” for the rest of his life. I was set free after a certain amount of requisite education and began wandering – in the American style --- living abroad, living in the cauldron of New York City, living in the remnants of wilderness in the 1960s, and then finally in the 1970s, living on Scratch Flat.
Ultimately, Scratch Flat was an invention. A creation, or recreation of my own version of the mythic center. In time this singular tract of land, with its deep historical shadows, its farms, and its resident wildlife became for me a metaphorical hunting ground. One book was not enough to explore the hollows and empty quarters and people that seemed to characterize the place. I spent two years living in an unheated cottage sans electricity to get closer to the story of the land. I wrote a book about the natural history of my own back yard while I was living there. I used to the old Christian Indian village that was located on Scratch Flat to explore the question of the meaning, origin, and uses of the curious Western concept of private property. I used Scratch Flat as the jumping off point for a pilgrimage to Concord in which I undertook an exploration of the whole idea of place, of whether who we are has anything to do with where we are, or where we are from. I even explored the curious interconnection between the Renaissance Italian gardens and the invention of the American wilderness by constructing a pseudo Italian garden, complete with hedge maze, on land, which, according to twenty-first century American law I am told that I actually “own” (whatever that means).
In short, I became a traveler on my own land and I never got very far beyond my own square mile myth. But at least I found a place.
Friday, January 4, 2008
Indian Summer
An excerpt from Indian Summer, a novel in progress.
The characters in this story live outside of the constraints of linear time. In this scene, Mary Louise Dudley, an accused witch who lived in the 18th century, tells a folk tale to Bulkley Emerson (1818-1861), the retarded brother of Ralph Waldo Emerson.
Journal Entry, November 27, l96l
Bulkley's favorite story: Mary-Louise has told it to him maybe twenty-five times. He knows it by heart but insists on hearing it tirelessly.
"It was a long time ago on a Sabbath morn and all the people were to church save a little herd boy and his sister. And as they were tending their flock in the green hills didn't they catch sight of something moving in the shadows of the ravine and then while they two did watch, out flowed a long cavalcade a' fairies. They wound through the wooded hollow and snaked among the knolls and disappeared all to the north. And weren't they all in antique jerkins and long gray cloaks and little red caps and some in bright waistcoats with polished brass buttons and all with their wild untamed locks shooting out and they had spindly legs and long little noses and eyes that glimmed like water jewels. And didn't they sing an ancient music and some did walk and some did hobble and some did go upon the backs of tiny shaggy horses, all spackled and dun. And didn't the little herd boy call out and say:
`Where are ye ga'n, little mannie? and who be ye?'
And wasn't there an old glinty-eyed one among them all dressed in harlequin, and he didn't he turn and say
`Not of the race of Adam be we. And no more shall the people of peace be seen in all Angleland.'"
"Not of the race of Adam be we," Bulkely echoed. "And no more shall the people of peace be seen in all England."
"But one stayed back in the shadows of the ravine," said Mary-Louise. "A large thing in ivy clothed."
"And all hairy with fur."
"All furry and shaggy. And he lived all alone in the wildwood and dells, all alone by himself, an 'e was ni man ni beastie."
"The Wild Man of Greenwood..."
"The Wild Man of Greenwood, and he ga'ed all in green..."
"And he fed little lost children..."
"And he spake to all saints and to spirits and ghosties..."
"And he danced by the moon?"
"Na Bulk, he did na dance, and thou
knowest' it well."
She tousled his shaggy head and kissed his forehead.
The characters in this story live outside of the constraints of linear time. In this scene, Mary Louise Dudley, an accused witch who lived in the 18th century, tells a folk tale to Bulkley Emerson (1818-1861), the retarded brother of Ralph Waldo Emerson.
Journal Entry, November 27, l96l
Bulkley's favorite story: Mary-Louise has told it to him maybe twenty-five times. He knows it by heart but insists on hearing it tirelessly.
"It was a long time ago on a Sabbath morn and all the people were to church save a little herd boy and his sister. And as they were tending their flock in the green hills didn't they catch sight of something moving in the shadows of the ravine and then while they two did watch, out flowed a long cavalcade a' fairies. They wound through the wooded hollow and snaked among the knolls and disappeared all to the north. And weren't they all in antique jerkins and long gray cloaks and little red caps and some in bright waistcoats with polished brass buttons and all with their wild untamed locks shooting out and they had spindly legs and long little noses and eyes that glimmed like water jewels. And didn't they sing an ancient music and some did walk and some did hobble and some did go upon the backs of tiny shaggy horses, all spackled and dun. And didn't the little herd boy call out and say:
`Where are ye ga'n, little mannie? and who be ye?'
And wasn't there an old glinty-eyed one among them all dressed in harlequin, and he didn't he turn and say
`Not of the race of Adam be we. And no more shall the people of peace be seen in all Angleland.'"
"Not of the race of Adam be we," Bulkely echoed. "And no more shall the people of peace be seen in all England."
"But one stayed back in the shadows of the ravine," said Mary-Louise. "A large thing in ivy clothed."
"And all hairy with fur."
"All furry and shaggy. And he lived all alone in the wildwood and dells, all alone by himself, an 'e was ni man ni beastie."
"The Wild Man of Greenwood..."
"The Wild Man of Greenwood, and he ga'ed all in green..."
"And he fed little lost children..."
"And he spake to all saints and to spirits and ghosties..."
"And he danced by the moon?"
"Na Bulk, he did na dance, and thou
knowest' it well."
She tousled his shaggy head and kissed his forehead.
Tuesday, January 1, 2008
The MIll
The year the war began we were living in an old grist mill with a stonework dam and a big pond behind it where mink patrolled the banks and frogs kept me awake at night. It was one of the noisiest places I ever lived. You were never out of earshot of the sound of rushing water there --- a heavy and roaring in the spring freshets when a great fall of brown and silver pond washed over the dam, and a thin, icy trickle at the end of January when nothing but a narrow stream of water spilled through the rocks.
I moved there in late February when the ice was rough and one of my first introductions to the nature of the place occurred when I fell through the ice one afternoon skating on the stream above the pond. It was shallow and muddy and there was no harm done, and I skated home with wet socks. But this minor adventure marked the beginning of the spring breakup.
By early March the ice loosened and the waters of the dam began to roar, a sound which reached full crescendo by mid April, about the same time that the frogs began to call. The duck-like quack of the wood frogs calling from the surrounding forest was always the first, but spring peepers made up the bulk of the early spring chorus. This was followed in April by the long trill of toads, and then the twang of green frogs or pickerel frogs, and then the bird like call of the gray tree frogs in June, and then, finally, in July, the full chorus of jug-of-rum calls from the resident bullfrog population. These carried on for the whole summer, and their nightly calling filled the sultry air; there was not a room in the mill that you could escape them.
This was an obscure little mill at the bottom of a dead end road on an obscure little stream that fed into and unrecognized river whose only claim to history was that the American Impressionist painter Child Hassam once did an oil of its only bridge. I lived there with my brother, who was the one who had rented the place, and as soon as the weather warmed, I began poking around the stream bed and the pond shores. One day on one of these outings, I found a leghold trap, which, somewhat ungraciously, I sprung. I had seen the little darting forms of mink along the pond shores and hated to think of them struggling bravely there so close to the water's edge. Green herons used to stalk the shores as well, once an osprey dove down into the middle of the pond, and came up empty, and shaking its feathers, and one evening I heard the distinct, pumping call of an American bittern. Barn swallows nested in an old unused section of the mill building, and every evening in summer they would skim over the pond waters along with tree swallows and bank swallows.
Summer was the season of the turtles as well as swallows. I'd see many painted turtles; once in winter I saw a wood turtle swimming under the ice, and periodically I would spot the great primordial head of a huge snapper who lived there and whose children, presumably, I found later in the year in September, dashing along down the middle of the little dead end road. Fat bodied water snakes patrolled the shallow waters, and periodically I was able to catch the fine tuned little ribbon snakes that hunted along the pond shores.
But always in the background of these little discoveries there was the sound of running water. By mid September the flow dwindled to a steady, narrow stream that cut through the race and barely arched over the stonework. But with the coming of the autumn rains, the waters increased. Leaves drifted over the dam, the swallows had long flown south, and one by one the other birds disappeared from the pond and the dam. Last to go was a little phoebe that nested in the mill under some eves. It hung around until December, snatching insects on the sunny side of the building.
The frogs were long quiet by then, and nightlong now we heard only the rush of the waters, and the occasional night call of a goose, or the caterwauling of barred owls from the swampy woodlands beyond the pond.
There was a late northeaster that autumn that broke off a new passage in the dam so that the waters ran out with more force than ever and by winter, the pond used this breach as it main course. With January, everything stilled down into silent ice, and before the spring break up, I moved on.
I moved there in late February when the ice was rough and one of my first introductions to the nature of the place occurred when I fell through the ice one afternoon skating on the stream above the pond. It was shallow and muddy and there was no harm done, and I skated home with wet socks. But this minor adventure marked the beginning of the spring breakup.
By early March the ice loosened and the waters of the dam began to roar, a sound which reached full crescendo by mid April, about the same time that the frogs began to call. The duck-like quack of the wood frogs calling from the surrounding forest was always the first, but spring peepers made up the bulk of the early spring chorus. This was followed in April by the long trill of toads, and then the twang of green frogs or pickerel frogs, and then the bird like call of the gray tree frogs in June, and then, finally, in July, the full chorus of jug-of-rum calls from the resident bullfrog population. These carried on for the whole summer, and their nightly calling filled the sultry air; there was not a room in the mill that you could escape them.
This was an obscure little mill at the bottom of a dead end road on an obscure little stream that fed into and unrecognized river whose only claim to history was that the American Impressionist painter Child Hassam once did an oil of its only bridge. I lived there with my brother, who was the one who had rented the place, and as soon as the weather warmed, I began poking around the stream bed and the pond shores. One day on one of these outings, I found a leghold trap, which, somewhat ungraciously, I sprung. I had seen the little darting forms of mink along the pond shores and hated to think of them struggling bravely there so close to the water's edge. Green herons used to stalk the shores as well, once an osprey dove down into the middle of the pond, and came up empty, and shaking its feathers, and one evening I heard the distinct, pumping call of an American bittern. Barn swallows nested in an old unused section of the mill building, and every evening in summer they would skim over the pond waters along with tree swallows and bank swallows.
Summer was the season of the turtles as well as swallows. I'd see many painted turtles; once in winter I saw a wood turtle swimming under the ice, and periodically I would spot the great primordial head of a huge snapper who lived there and whose children, presumably, I found later in the year in September, dashing along down the middle of the little dead end road. Fat bodied water snakes patrolled the shallow waters, and periodically I was able to catch the fine tuned little ribbon snakes that hunted along the pond shores.
But always in the background of these little discoveries there was the sound of running water. By mid September the flow dwindled to a steady, narrow stream that cut through the race and barely arched over the stonework. But with the coming of the autumn rains, the waters increased. Leaves drifted over the dam, the swallows had long flown south, and one by one the other birds disappeared from the pond and the dam. Last to go was a little phoebe that nested in the mill under some eves. It hung around until December, snatching insects on the sunny side of the building.
The frogs were long quiet by then, and nightlong now we heard only the rush of the waters, and the occasional night call of a goose, or the caterwauling of barred owls from the swampy woodlands beyond the pond.
There was a late northeaster that autumn that broke off a new passage in the dam so that the waters ran out with more force than ever and by winter, the pond used this breach as it main course. With January, everything stilled down into silent ice, and before the spring break up, I moved on.
Saturday, December 29, 2007
Cross-lot Walking
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.
Winter Solstice, 2007
December 22:
Heavy snows after two storms
December 24:
Deer attack on garden. Virburnums, arbor vitae, mahonia, and hollies attacked. Stringing deer fencing.
December 28:
A warming rain. A flock of robins feeding on bittersweet.
Heavy snows after two storms
December 24:
Deer attack on garden. Virburnums, arbor vitae, mahonia, and hollies attacked. Stringing deer fencing.
December 28:
A warming rain. A flock of robins feeding on bittersweet.
Friday, December 28, 2007
Solar Origins of the Bullfight
The Sunday bullfight on Easter Day is said to be a command performance for Sevillian society. There are many mantillas in the old style, traditional spotted frilled dresses, much make up, and gleaming hooped earrings, and elaborate Goyesque fans. The arena is packed on this day and there is a restless air of excitement spinning through the stands. The majordomos always arrange to get the best matadors for the Seville corrida as well as the wildest, most dangerous fighting bulls from the Miura or Romero fincas. Watermen pass around with pottery jugs of water, begging gypsies mill outside the Roman amphitheater with blood red carnations, and the arena is filled with the sound of brass bands playing off key over and over again the old bull fight favorites, such as El Gato Montes. It’s all a civilized, polite and save for certain bloody rituals soon to follow a gentile celebration. But it has ancient roots, tinted with sacrifice, death and rebirth out of a cold earth.
On Easter Sunday, the crowd waits, the tension builds, the band plays on, and then into the center of the arena, the gladiators appear, dressed for the occasion in their bright, “suits of light” as they are called, holding high their weapons. They are followed by lank, padded horses and high-speared picadors, and the grand procession circles the arena, salutes the majordomo, and then retires behind the barricades. The procession has all the elements of some high church ceremony.
Just before the gates open to allow the bull into the ring, a quiet tension settles over the crowd. A silence descends and waits in the air like a crouched cat. And then, suddenly, out into the bright light of the bullring, the hunch-shouldered black Minotaur charges, his great spearpoint horns swinging, his coat glistening coat and his bright hoofs gleaming.Following this spirited entry, the sacrificial rites begin. Altar boys in the form of arena workers, or “wise monkeys” scurry here and there in their blue coveralls and red bandanas, the acolytes and monks, in the form of the light-footed banderilleros and the heavy horsed picadors, circle and dance, and then, the high priest himself appears,, the trim, sword-bearing killer of bulls. He walks with the grace of a cat. Straight backed, slippered, and gleaming in his suit of lights, a feminine, ballerina-like killer, light footed and deadly. He starts with the great red cape, tests his victim with nonchalance, as if he himself could never be killed by the snorting, horned Minotaur, who by this time charges down on him again and again, head lowered to better hook his opponent.
Having tested his victim, the matador priest ends this act of the drama with a swirling flourish of his red cape and the acolytes move in to weaken and enrage the beast. The banderilleros place colorful barbed darts in his shoulder, ducking and dodging his horns, as they do so. Then the horse-borne picador lances the bull’s neck muscles as he charges again and again into the sides of the padded horse, occasionally lifting it off its feet. And then finally, with the beast prepared for sacrifice, his priestly nemesis returns, this time with the sword and the small cape called the muleta. There follows now the final dance of death. The bull continues to charge, continues to attempt to kill, until finally, standing side ways, his sword lined up on his arm, the killer priest, shakes the muleta and the bull charges in for the last time.
The matadores, the good ones, kill cleanly, going in over the horns and spinning away just before they are hooked. The huge dark Minotaur, staggers, sways, and then collapses in the sand in the yellow sun of the afternoon. And the crowd, if they are pleased with the sacrifice, will call for a reward. The altar boys cut the ears, sometimes even the tail, from the sacrificed beast, and then, still cool and collected, as if he had not himself faced death in the afternoon, the matador struts around the ring, bearing his awards aloft, and then exits, his work completed.
Little wonder that this primal rite has been the subject of much literature.
The bullfight is now a much-despised ritual, a brutal, even barbaric, event in the eyes of the modern world, and I suppose, in the end, it’s indefensible. But in my callow youth, I used to attend these rituals with an almost religious zeal. I was caught up, even then, in the richness of ancient rituals and old primal gods and goddesses, and I perceived the bullfight in historical terms.
As far as sacrifices go, especially when compared to the mass human sacrifices of the Aztecs and other Mesoamerican cultures to appease their sun good, this one was balanced. For one thing the sacrificial animal, while fated to die no matter what, still has a chance to defend himself and even do some damage to the priests and their acolytes.
For most of the twetieth century, it was believed that the Spanish corrida evolved from the bull cults of Crete, and the story of the Minotaur and the Cretan bull leapers. According to the accepted history, originally promulgated in the early 20th century by the English archeologist Sir Arthur Evans, the Minoan culture was associated with the bull worship and part of the ritual associated with this veneration involved a dangerous dance of death in which young athletes, men and women alike, would leap over the horns of a charging bull, sometimes arcing over the horns and the bull’s back in elaborate somersaults. Evans believed this ritual was associated with the story of Theseus and the Minotaur and the famous labyrinth at Knossos.
Of all the labyrinths and mazes of the ancient world, the most famous, and the one that has lent its name to many maze traditions, was the Minoan labyrinth at Knossos on Crete. The structure may have existed in some form as early as 2000 BC, and there is some indication that the Cretans may have borrowed the idea of a vast, internal, citylike maze from the earlier Egyptian labyrinth at Crocodilopolis at Lake Moeris. The Cretan maze was essentially a complex of winding paths deep in the interior chambers of the walled city. Here the Minoans practiced the sport of bull leaping, which was an important aspect of the Minoan bull cults of the period. Young men and women would dodge or leap over the horns of a charging bull as a part of one ceremony. The bull or, Taurus, of King Minos, is the origin of the story of the terrible Minotaur, who lurked in the depths of the maze. The word labyrinth is derived from this palace; Labrys is a double headed ax, and the interior rooms where the bull cult ceremonies would take place was called the House of the Double Axes. Here captives were trained for the dangerous bull leaping sport that gave rise to the legend of Theseus and the Minotaur.
According to the Greek myth, the maze at Knossos was designed by the craftsman Daedalus. It was an elaborate and complex series of paths, and once you got inside, you could not get out without a guide. In the center, lived the Minotaur, a being with the body of a man and the head of a bull, or vice versa in some versions. In either form he had an insatiable appetite for human flesh. The Minotaur was the unfortunate offspring of the wife of Minos the King of Crete, Pasiphae, who, in one of those sweet revenges so common in Greek mythology, was tricked by Poseidon into coupling with a white bull.
The son of King Minos had been murdered by the Athenians and as retribution for this crime, every nine years, Minos decreed that a tribute of seven young men and seven maids must be sent to Knossos for sacrifice. The young people were then sent into the labyrinth constructed by Daedalus to be eaten by the Minotaur. The King of Athens at this time was Aegeus, whose son was the hero, Theseus. Early in his heroic career Theseus offered to join the troop of young people sent off to Knossos and vowed to slay the monster and put an end to the tribute. Over his father’s objections, he sailed off, but before leaving Athens, Theseus told his father that when the ship returned, if he had been victorious, he would hoist a white sail. If he had lost, his crew would raise a black sail.
During the review of the sacrificial victims before the king at Knossos, Theseus was spotted by the king’s daughter, Ariadne, and the two fell in love. Ariadne gave Theseus a sword and a ball of thread, and on the appointed day of the tribute, Theseus attached the thread to the entrance and entered into complex pathways of the labyrinth, working his way deeper and deeper through the dark hallways, spinning out the thread behind him. At the center of the maze he encountered the Minotaur and a great fight ensued. Theseus killed the Minotaur, followed the thread back out to the entrance and then fled Crete, taking Ariadne with him.
The story has the sad ending of many of these mythological tales, however. Instructed by a dream, Theseus deserted Ariadne on the island of Naxos and sailed for home. But as he entered the harbor, he forgot his promise to signal and sailed in with the black sail raised, the traditional color of the sails of Greek vessels. His distraught father, believing his son dead, threw himself from a cliff, thus giving his name to the Aegean Sea.
There was more to come, though. The enraged Minos had Daedalus and his son, Icarus, imprisoned in his own labyrinth. Here, the ingenious Daedalus constructed wings with feathers and wax and the two flew off to freedom. But, even though he had been warned not to fly too high --- or too low --- the ecstatic young Icarus, with typical teenage exuberance, soared ever higher and came too close to the sun. The heat melted the wax that held the wings together, and he crashed into the sea and drowned.
Arthur Evans freely interpreted the wall paintings of bull leapers he uncovered at Knossos as evidence of these legends, attributing the story and the bull cults to the indigenous Cretan culture with no influence from contemporary Greek or Egyptian ideas or myths. But the newest argument, most recently put forth by the archeologist J. Alexander MacGillivray is that the bull images on the palace of Knossos have to do with the sun and are in fact images of the constellations, and the bull leaping frescoes represent Orion the Hunter, confronting the constellation Taurus, which contains the Hyades and the seven sisters, the Pleiades. The leaper, MacGillivray argues, is the hero Perseus. He somersaults over the back of the bull to rescue Andromeda who had been chained to a rock to be sacrificed to a sea monster.
According to MacGillvray, the configuration of stars described on the walls would occur at the end of the agricultural year in ancient Eygypt, Greece, and Crete. The images of the bull leapers served to recall the astral calendar and were used for both time keeping and navigation. Furthermore, the recurring image in the Cretan art of two rising steep peaks which Evans interpreted as the horns of the sacred bull were a known contemporary symbol for the horizon in Egypt. MacGillivary argues that both the Greeks and the Egyptians strongly influenced the Minoan culture, and that the horn imagery is actually a solar calendar. The twin peaks mark the two solstices and the valley marks the equinox. Furthermore, the famous double ax symbol that occurs throughout Cretan art and which, incidentally, is the origin of the English word labyrinth (from the Greek word for double ax labros) symbolizes, according to MacGillavray, the equinox. The vertical shaft, in the center of two equilateral triangles represents the equality of day and night.
Actually there is an even earlier solar interpretation of the bull cults and the story of the Minotaur. In 1905 a German scholar, basing his theory on his translations of early Greek place names, believed that the Minotaur was a stand-in for the sun, and the monster’s mother, Pasiphae, was the moon. To trace the wanderings of the stars astrologers used the labyrinth in which the famous Theseus story plays out.
Whatever the origins, the tradition of bull leaping, as did so many Cretan customs, spread from Knosos and was adopted by other European cultures. During the eight centuries of the Spanish War of the Reconquest (711-1492 A.D.), the knights, Moors and Christians, weary of killing one another, would occasionally allow themselves a respite; but in order to avoid boredom, and also to release their pugnacious instincts, they would compete in hunting the wildlife that still existed on the Iberian lands. Deer and other equally docile animals were easy prey, and while a cornered bear or boar would occasionally put up a fight, it was never a challenge for such valiant knights. However, the scenario changed every time they faced the Iberian bull.
This beautiful and awe-inspiring beast, with its unique noble bravery would, when provoked, rather die fighting than flee - in essence, transforming the hunt into an avid exchange in which the bravest warriors could bring to light their courage. Perhaps a nobleman with an entrepreneurial spirit thought about capturing several of these horned beasts, taking them to the village, and recreating the thrill of the hunt so that the knights could demonstrate their skill and win the admiration of their subjects. Thus, in a remote corner of Medieval Spain, the beginning of what today is the national Spanish spectacle of bullfighting was created.
The first historic bullfight, or corrida, took place in Vera Logro, in 1133, in honor of the coronation of king Alfonso VIII. From that point on, history is full of instances in which kings organized corridas to commemorate important events and to entertain their guests. After the Spanish War of the Reconquest, the celebration of corridas expanded throughout Spain and became the outlet where the noblemen demonstrated the zeal that allowed them to defeat the Moors. Even the Emperor Charles I in Valladolid in 1527, and later King Philip IV took part in the lancing of bulls in the bullfighting arenas.
The spectacle is still with us today, in dimished form. But generally speaking the ancient pagan roots are forgotten or overlooked. Better not to consider the fact that in Catholic Spain, the most important of Christian of holy days is celebrated by the ritualistic killing of a bull in order the assure the smooth workings of the cosmos.
On Easter Sunday, the crowd waits, the tension builds, the band plays on, and then into the center of the arena, the gladiators appear, dressed for the occasion in their bright, “suits of light” as they are called, holding high their weapons. They are followed by lank, padded horses and high-speared picadors, and the grand procession circles the arena, salutes the majordomo, and then retires behind the barricades. The procession has all the elements of some high church ceremony.
Just before the gates open to allow the bull into the ring, a quiet tension settles over the crowd. A silence descends and waits in the air like a crouched cat. And then, suddenly, out into the bright light of the bullring, the hunch-shouldered black Minotaur charges, his great spearpoint horns swinging, his coat glistening coat and his bright hoofs gleaming.Following this spirited entry, the sacrificial rites begin. Altar boys in the form of arena workers, or “wise monkeys” scurry here and there in their blue coveralls and red bandanas, the acolytes and monks, in the form of the light-footed banderilleros and the heavy horsed picadors, circle and dance, and then, the high priest himself appears,, the trim, sword-bearing killer of bulls. He walks with the grace of a cat. Straight backed, slippered, and gleaming in his suit of lights, a feminine, ballerina-like killer, light footed and deadly. He starts with the great red cape, tests his victim with nonchalance, as if he himself could never be killed by the snorting, horned Minotaur, who by this time charges down on him again and again, head lowered to better hook his opponent.
Having tested his victim, the matador priest ends this act of the drama with a swirling flourish of his red cape and the acolytes move in to weaken and enrage the beast. The banderilleros place colorful barbed darts in his shoulder, ducking and dodging his horns, as they do so. Then the horse-borne picador lances the bull’s neck muscles as he charges again and again into the sides of the padded horse, occasionally lifting it off its feet. And then finally, with the beast prepared for sacrifice, his priestly nemesis returns, this time with the sword and the small cape called the muleta. There follows now the final dance of death. The bull continues to charge, continues to attempt to kill, until finally, standing side ways, his sword lined up on his arm, the killer priest, shakes the muleta and the bull charges in for the last time.
The matadores, the good ones, kill cleanly, going in over the horns and spinning away just before they are hooked. The huge dark Minotaur, staggers, sways, and then collapses in the sand in the yellow sun of the afternoon. And the crowd, if they are pleased with the sacrifice, will call for a reward. The altar boys cut the ears, sometimes even the tail, from the sacrificed beast, and then, still cool and collected, as if he had not himself faced death in the afternoon, the matador struts around the ring, bearing his awards aloft, and then exits, his work completed.
Little wonder that this primal rite has been the subject of much literature.
The bullfight is now a much-despised ritual, a brutal, even barbaric, event in the eyes of the modern world, and I suppose, in the end, it’s indefensible. But in my callow youth, I used to attend these rituals with an almost religious zeal. I was caught up, even then, in the richness of ancient rituals and old primal gods and goddesses, and I perceived the bullfight in historical terms.
As far as sacrifices go, especially when compared to the mass human sacrifices of the Aztecs and other Mesoamerican cultures to appease their sun good, this one was balanced. For one thing the sacrificial animal, while fated to die no matter what, still has a chance to defend himself and even do some damage to the priests and their acolytes.
For most of the twetieth century, it was believed that the Spanish corrida evolved from the bull cults of Crete, and the story of the Minotaur and the Cretan bull leapers. According to the accepted history, originally promulgated in the early 20th century by the English archeologist Sir Arthur Evans, the Minoan culture was associated with the bull worship and part of the ritual associated with this veneration involved a dangerous dance of death in which young athletes, men and women alike, would leap over the horns of a charging bull, sometimes arcing over the horns and the bull’s back in elaborate somersaults. Evans believed this ritual was associated with the story of Theseus and the Minotaur and the famous labyrinth at Knossos.
Of all the labyrinths and mazes of the ancient world, the most famous, and the one that has lent its name to many maze traditions, was the Minoan labyrinth at Knossos on Crete. The structure may have existed in some form as early as 2000 BC, and there is some indication that the Cretans may have borrowed the idea of a vast, internal, citylike maze from the earlier Egyptian labyrinth at Crocodilopolis at Lake Moeris. The Cretan maze was essentially a complex of winding paths deep in the interior chambers of the walled city. Here the Minoans practiced the sport of bull leaping, which was an important aspect of the Minoan bull cults of the period. Young men and women would dodge or leap over the horns of a charging bull as a part of one ceremony. The bull or, Taurus, of King Minos, is the origin of the story of the terrible Minotaur, who lurked in the depths of the maze. The word labyrinth is derived from this palace; Labrys is a double headed ax, and the interior rooms where the bull cult ceremonies would take place was called the House of the Double Axes. Here captives were trained for the dangerous bull leaping sport that gave rise to the legend of Theseus and the Minotaur.
According to the Greek myth, the maze at Knossos was designed by the craftsman Daedalus. It was an elaborate and complex series of paths, and once you got inside, you could not get out without a guide. In the center, lived the Minotaur, a being with the body of a man and the head of a bull, or vice versa in some versions. In either form he had an insatiable appetite for human flesh. The Minotaur was the unfortunate offspring of the wife of Minos the King of Crete, Pasiphae, who, in one of those sweet revenges so common in Greek mythology, was tricked by Poseidon into coupling with a white bull.
The son of King Minos had been murdered by the Athenians and as retribution for this crime, every nine years, Minos decreed that a tribute of seven young men and seven maids must be sent to Knossos for sacrifice. The young people were then sent into the labyrinth constructed by Daedalus to be eaten by the Minotaur. The King of Athens at this time was Aegeus, whose son was the hero, Theseus. Early in his heroic career Theseus offered to join the troop of young people sent off to Knossos and vowed to slay the monster and put an end to the tribute. Over his father’s objections, he sailed off, but before leaving Athens, Theseus told his father that when the ship returned, if he had been victorious, he would hoist a white sail. If he had lost, his crew would raise a black sail.
During the review of the sacrificial victims before the king at Knossos, Theseus was spotted by the king’s daughter, Ariadne, and the two fell in love. Ariadne gave Theseus a sword and a ball of thread, and on the appointed day of the tribute, Theseus attached the thread to the entrance and entered into complex pathways of the labyrinth, working his way deeper and deeper through the dark hallways, spinning out the thread behind him. At the center of the maze he encountered the Minotaur and a great fight ensued. Theseus killed the Minotaur, followed the thread back out to the entrance and then fled Crete, taking Ariadne with him.
The story has the sad ending of many of these mythological tales, however. Instructed by a dream, Theseus deserted Ariadne on the island of Naxos and sailed for home. But as he entered the harbor, he forgot his promise to signal and sailed in with the black sail raised, the traditional color of the sails of Greek vessels. His distraught father, believing his son dead, threw himself from a cliff, thus giving his name to the Aegean Sea.
There was more to come, though. The enraged Minos had Daedalus and his son, Icarus, imprisoned in his own labyrinth. Here, the ingenious Daedalus constructed wings with feathers and wax and the two flew off to freedom. But, even though he had been warned not to fly too high --- or too low --- the ecstatic young Icarus, with typical teenage exuberance, soared ever higher and came too close to the sun. The heat melted the wax that held the wings together, and he crashed into the sea and drowned.
Arthur Evans freely interpreted the wall paintings of bull leapers he uncovered at Knossos as evidence of these legends, attributing the story and the bull cults to the indigenous Cretan culture with no influence from contemporary Greek or Egyptian ideas or myths. But the newest argument, most recently put forth by the archeologist J. Alexander MacGillivray is that the bull images on the palace of Knossos have to do with the sun and are in fact images of the constellations, and the bull leaping frescoes represent Orion the Hunter, confronting the constellation Taurus, which contains the Hyades and the seven sisters, the Pleiades. The leaper, MacGillivray argues, is the hero Perseus. He somersaults over the back of the bull to rescue Andromeda who had been chained to a rock to be sacrificed to a sea monster.
According to MacGillvray, the configuration of stars described on the walls would occur at the end of the agricultural year in ancient Eygypt, Greece, and Crete. The images of the bull leapers served to recall the astral calendar and were used for both time keeping and navigation. Furthermore, the recurring image in the Cretan art of two rising steep peaks which Evans interpreted as the horns of the sacred bull were a known contemporary symbol for the horizon in Egypt. MacGillivary argues that both the Greeks and the Egyptians strongly influenced the Minoan culture, and that the horn imagery is actually a solar calendar. The twin peaks mark the two solstices and the valley marks the equinox. Furthermore, the famous double ax symbol that occurs throughout Cretan art and which, incidentally, is the origin of the English word labyrinth (from the Greek word for double ax labros) symbolizes, according to MacGillavray, the equinox. The vertical shaft, in the center of two equilateral triangles represents the equality of day and night.
Actually there is an even earlier solar interpretation of the bull cults and the story of the Minotaur. In 1905 a German scholar, basing his theory on his translations of early Greek place names, believed that the Minotaur was a stand-in for the sun, and the monster’s mother, Pasiphae, was the moon. To trace the wanderings of the stars astrologers used the labyrinth in which the famous Theseus story plays out.
Whatever the origins, the tradition of bull leaping, as did so many Cretan customs, spread from Knosos and was adopted by other European cultures. During the eight centuries of the Spanish War of the Reconquest (711-1492 A.D.), the knights, Moors and Christians, weary of killing one another, would occasionally allow themselves a respite; but in order to avoid boredom, and also to release their pugnacious instincts, they would compete in hunting the wildlife that still existed on the Iberian lands. Deer and other equally docile animals were easy prey, and while a cornered bear or boar would occasionally put up a fight, it was never a challenge for such valiant knights. However, the scenario changed every time they faced the Iberian bull.
This beautiful and awe-inspiring beast, with its unique noble bravery would, when provoked, rather die fighting than flee - in essence, transforming the hunt into an avid exchange in which the bravest warriors could bring to light their courage. Perhaps a nobleman with an entrepreneurial spirit thought about capturing several of these horned beasts, taking them to the village, and recreating the thrill of the hunt so that the knights could demonstrate their skill and win the admiration of their subjects. Thus, in a remote corner of Medieval Spain, the beginning of what today is the national Spanish spectacle of bullfighting was created.
The first historic bullfight, or corrida, took place in Vera Logro, in 1133, in honor of the coronation of king Alfonso VIII. From that point on, history is full of instances in which kings organized corridas to commemorate important events and to entertain their guests. After the Spanish War of the Reconquest, the celebration of corridas expanded throughout Spain and became the outlet where the noblemen demonstrated the zeal that allowed them to defeat the Moors. Even the Emperor Charles I in Valladolid in 1527, and later King Philip IV took part in the lancing of bulls in the bullfighting arenas.
The spectacle is still with us today, in dimished form. But generally speaking the ancient pagan roots are forgotten or overlooked. Better not to consider the fact that in Catholic Spain, the most important of Christian of holy days is celebrated by the ritualistic killing of a bull in order the assure the smooth workings of the cosmos.
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