Here the governor entertained Père Gabriel Dreuillettes, in 1650 with a fish dinner, because, says the good old Jesuit, it was a Friday. The governor was equal to the courtesy; yet, I fancy, fish dinners were often eaten in Plymouth.
Bradford's second wife survived him thirteen years. With her came his brother-in-law, George Morton, her sister, Bridget Fuller,[194] and two daughters of Elder Brewster. She lived thirty years with her second husband, and, from the tribute of Nathaniel Morton,[195] must have been a woman of an exemplary and beautiful character. Her sister, Mary Carpenter, lived to be ninety years old. She is referred to in the church records of Plymonth as "a godly old maid, never married."
Apropos of the governor's wedding, I extract this notice of the first marriage in the colony from his history: "May 12th, 1621, was ye first marriage in this place, which, according to ye laudable custome of ye Low Countries, was thought most requisite to be performed by the magistrate, as being a civill thing, upon which many questions aboute inheritance doe depende," etc.
When Edward Winslow was in England as agent of the colony, and was interrogated at the instance of Laud, Archbishop of Canterbury, before the Lords Commissioners of the Plantations, he was, among other things, questioned upon this practice of marriage by magistrates. He answered boldly that he found nothing in Scripture to restrict marriage to the clergy. He also alleged that the plantation had long been without a minister, and finished by citing, as a precedent, his own marriage by a magistrate at the Staat-haus in Holland. Morton, who appeared as an accuser of Winslow, says, "The people of New England held the use of a ring in marriage to be a relique of popery, a diabolical circle for the Devell to daunce in."
As soon as they had definitely settled upon a location, the colonists went to work building their town. They began to prepare timber as early as the 23d of December, but the inclemency of the season and the distance every thing was to be transported—there were no trees standing within an eighth of a mile of the present Leyden Street—made the work painfully laborious and the progress slow. On the twenty-eighth day the company was consolidated into nineteen families, the single men joining some household in order to lessen the number of houses to be built. They then staked out the ground, giving every person half a pole in breadth and three in length. Each head of a family chose his homestead by lot, and each man was required to build his own house. By Tuesday, the 9th of January, the Common House wanted nothing but the thatch to be complete; still, although it was only twenty feet square, the weather was so inclement that it took four days to cover it. They could seldom work half the week.
SITE OF THE COMMON HOUSE.
Captain Smith says, in 1624, the town consisted of two-and-thirty houses and about a hundred and eighty people. The Common House is believed to have stood on the south side of Leyden Street, where the abrupt descent of the hill begins. In digging a cellar on the spot, in 1801, sundry tools and a plate of iron were discovered, seven feet below the surface of the ground. This house is supposed to have served the colonists for every purpose of a public nature until the building of their fortress on Burial Hill. Mourt calls it their rendezvous, and relates that a few days after completion it took fire from a spark in the thatch. At the time of the accident Governor Carver and William Bradford were lying sick within, with their muskets charged, and the thatch blazing above them, to their very great danger. In this Common House the working parties slept until their dwellings were made ready.
It was worth living two hundred years ago to have witnessed one street scene that took place here. John Oldham, the contentious, the incorrigible, dared to return to Plymouth after banishment. He had, with Lyford, tried to breed a revolt among the disaffected of the colony. A rough and tough malignant was Oldham, fiercely denouncing the magistrates to their teeth when called to answer for his misdeeds. He defied them roundly in their grave assembly. Turning to the by-standers, he exclaimed: