One of my key insights into Dover’s early character came after noticing that the majority of its early residents came from Devonshire – or Devon – rather than the East Anglia shires of Norfolk, Suffolk, Essex, and Cambridge that dominated New England’s Puritan migration, construction, and social order.

And that holds for even the Puritans who take over Dover in 1633 (or so).

In his groundbreaking Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America (Oxford University Press, 1989), David Hackett Fischer elaborates on what he calls the various folkways of four distinctly different regions of Britain, which in turn gave Colonial Massachusetts, Virginia, the Delaware Valley, and the Backcountry their unique natures – divergences that continue, to various degrees, today.

I had already observed that Dover and, for that matter, New Hampshire’s only other towns of the first 70 years – Hampton, Exeter, and Portsmouth – weren’t built around a definitive town square with its church, town hall, and common, as were typical towns in Massachusetts. It’s a hint that the differences run much deeper.

While Fischer goes into great detail on East Anglia’s impact on Massachusetts, he does not in turn examine Devon. At most, he touches on it as he turns to a larger and vaguer area that provided the Cavalier migration into Virginia, one with a center more in South England rather than the South West of Devon. And much of his presentation focuses on the ways they evolved in Virginia, contrasting life in Massachusetts.

Still, he points to differences that go back into antiquity. The language and laws of Devon and its neighboring shires for example, were shaped by West Saxons to the east and Celts to the north and west. In contrast, East Anglia’s are rooted in its Danish occupation.

From the little I’ve been able to glean thus far comes statements that Devon was regarded as backward by many, a repository of the “old England” of superstition and legend. It was a place of seafaring, with Plymouth as a principal port and Bristol just to the north, and of large manors with their landed gentry.

There are also suggestions of crucial ways its social manners and religious affinities deviated, affecting how Dover residents interacted with the itinerant Quakers.

No, the English weren’t all alike, not by a long shot. Often, they couldn’t even understand the dialect from another part of Britain.

I would love to see a comprehensive study of those Devon folkways along the lines of Fischer’s earlier work. It would no doubt give us a much more detailed picture of life along the Piscataqua in those seminal decades of settlement. How they cooked and dressed, for instance, or raised their children or treated illnesses or buried their dead, as starters.

Still, my upcoming book shares what I’ve found so far.

The conventional explanation that the Puritans migrated to New England for religious freedom misses the obvious.

When the Puritans first arrive in 1629, followed the next year with the beginning of their great flood of migration, theirs is a well-orchestrated and well-financed scheme to establish a utopia, one based on their Calvinist Protestant worldview. In many ways, it ranges well beyond the confines of religion.

Crucially, sensing that their mission could be corrupted by false teachings and practices, they squelch unorthodoxy and dissent early on. Within the first decade of their arrival along Massachusetts Bay, they banish Samuel Gorton, Roger Williams, and Anne Hutchinson, who find refuge in Williams’ new colony of Rhode Island. Early Quaker history turns its focus there and neighboring Cape Cod, for good reason, though much also happens north of Boston in Salem, Hampton, and Dover.

Hutchinson’s brother-in-law, the Reverend John Wheelwright, also takes flight and founds the town of Exeter, on the other end of Great Bay from Dover, in New Hampshire.

Others head more or less straight to Dover. Among them is Hansard Knollys, a minister whose evolving theology will lead him to being a founder of the Baptist denomination when he returns to England. He’s not quite there yet when he formally organizes the church in Dover as a congregational society just six years after its first services. Had he been a bit clearer in his theological evolution, Dover could have established the first Baptist church in America, a year before Williams in Providence. Oh, well.

But that does leave an opening for the Quakers a decade later.

All the more, I sense that Knollys leaves enough nonconformist thought in his wake to lead some independent spirits in Dover to privately question the ongoing Puritan preaching. As my new book will note, there are hints of that in the town records – supposedly subversive thinking that has to await the arrival of the itinerant Quakers for confirmation and action.

As we’ll see, it’s a volatile mix awaiting the spark for explosion.

Speaking of juicy.

Sandwiched in between the arrival of Pilgrims at Plymouth and the Puritans at the Massachusetts Bay colony, we have the libertine plantation at Mare Mount, or Merrymount, on Boston’s South Shore. It’s a provocative whiff of how New England life could have turned, had Thomas Morton successfully warded off the rival raiders.

The very name “merry” at the time was often a synonym for sexual trysting. As for Merry-Mount? It couldn’t have been more graphic.

Unlike Plymouth, this settlement was prospering and welcoming misfits.

Think of hippie. Maybe even commune. Dancing naked with Natives around a giant maypole, one that’s flagrantly phallic. Not just pagan but also reflecting some lingering Devonshire traditions taken to an extreme. (Significantly, for comparison, most of early Dover’s settlers came from Devon, not the East Anglia of Puritan culture.)

That’s the short version, though there’s much more sketched out in my upcoming book.

And after Merrymount comes crashing down, its founder finds shelter in Sir Ferdinando Gorge’s Maine, not far from Dover.

No, early New England wasn’t all stern Puritans, not by a long shot, no matter how much they tried to keep a lid on.

Nearly two decades later, facing the Quaker outbreak, did Puritan authorities fear the Friends movement might trigger another Merrymount in their midst? As I’ll show, Quakers were anything but quaint and respectable when they show up, though I can assure you they stayed sober rather than make merry. Ahem.

But they were still an alternative to the Puritan rigidity.

 

When Edward Hilton settles on Dover Point, his brother William is dwelling in the Plymouth Bay colony. It’s one more suggestion, in fact, that Edward knew about the Piscataqua watershed before setting forth himself.

William arrives on the second ship to the Pilgrim plantation, followed by his wife and family on the next. They definitely aren’t Pilgrims (the term wasn’t even in use then – Separatists was more accurate). And, for that matter, despite sharing a basic Calvinist theology, the Separatists hold some sharp differences from the Puritans who show up later.

Critically, roughly half of the settlers at new Plymouth aren’t members of the Separatist faith. And that includes the only ordained minister in the colony.

Thus, when William and his wife arrange for a secret Anglican (that is, Episcopal) baptism for their infant, a scandal erupts that sends them scurrying northward and brings to light the sordid background of the now disgraced minister who is promptly banished. (No spoiler here – but you’ll still have to read the book.) These events do present a grittier alternative to the Thanksgiving scenario we usually trot out about the Pilgrim experience.

William winds up in New Hampshire, settling at the Pannaway plantation at the mouth of the Piscataqua River, where he’s soon making salt to be used for preserving fish for shipment.

And then, in the demise of Pannaway, he’s finally at Dover Point.

This isn’t the way his arrival in Dover is commonly painted. Quite simply, he isn’t one of the first two settlers. Thomas Roberts, Edward’s apprentice, earns that honor.

Still, like his brother, William is both a member of the powerful fishmonger guild in London and literate. And things get a bit rowdy when he moves on from Dover to live on the Maine side of the river.

Yeah, if you’re looking for gossip, there’s some juicy stuff on his part, especially when we meet his last wife. She’s definitely not holier-than-thou.

It’s hard for modern Americans to understand a basic reality of European colonies in the New World.

None of the players in the story own the land they’re dealing with.

Not the settlers, even though they’re clearing it and building on it.

Nor the proprietors or investors, either. They’re more like developers who offer leasing opportunities. Think of rental agents.

Nor the Indigenous tribes, surprisingly, even though many of the settlers also negotiate a payment to them for their land. The use of their land, more accurately. Admittedly, the payments are largely symbolic – a bushel of corn a year, for example.

No, quite simply, all land “belongs” to the king, and he allocates the privilege of using it as a means of leveraging his own prestige and power.

Under the feudal system, that would mean grants to barons and other lords in return for their fealty.

They, in turn, could dole some out to knights, who then become wealthy, as well.

Add to that the gentlemen farmers, living off the rents to their estates.

And then yeomen, who are still free on their own tenants, as their small holdings were called.

And husbandmen.

And, somewhere below that, the serfs who are bound to the land and its holder. Well, by this point in time, they’d been freed but were still at the bottom of the ladder.

~*~

THIS IS THE MODEL OF LANDHOLDING – not landownership – up through the American Revolution.

Its assumptions are quite different from those of modern Americans. What do you mean? I don’t own the ground under my house and barn?

No, you don’t. And you still have to pay rent on it.

~*~

AS A FURTHER COMPLICATION, charters could be revoked or rewritten.

Falling out of the king’s favor would have costly and dire consequences.

As my upcoming book describes, this land arrangement affected Dover and the rest of New England through a series of realignments and controversies and attempted evictions.

In fact, it almost leads to a rebellion in Boston Harbor against the king a century-and-a-half before Paul Revere’s midnight ride. Well, that’s one aside I don’t develop. There’s too much else going on along the Piscataqua.