Customs and Fashions in Old New England

								

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II
COURTSHIP AND MARRIAGE CUSTOMS

In the early days of the New England colonies no more embarrassing or
hampering condition, no greater temporal ill could befall any adult
Puritan than to be unmarried. What could he do, how could he live in
that new land without a wife? There were no housekeepers--and he would
scarcely have been allowed to have one if there were. What could a woman
do in that new settlement among unbroken forests, uncultivated lands,
without a husband? The colonists married early, and they married often.
Widowers and widows hastened to join their fortunes and sorrows. The
father and mother of Governor Winslow had been widow and widower seven
and twelve weeks, respectively, when they joined their families and
themselves in mutual benefit, if not in mutual love. At a later day the
impatient Governor of New Hampshire married a lady but ten days widowed.
Bachelors were rare indeed, and were regarded askance and with intense
disfavor by the entire community, were almost in the position of
suspected criminals. They were seldom permitted to live alone, or even
to choose their residence, but had to find a domicile wherever and with
whomsoever the Court assigned. In Hartford lone-men, as Shakespeare
called them, had to pay twenty shillings a week to the town for the
selfish luxury of solitary living. No colonial law seems to me more
arbitrary or more comic than this order issued in the town of Eastham,
Mass., in 1695, namely:



     "Every unmarried man in the township shall kill six blackbirds or

     three crows while he remains single; as a penalty for not doing it,

     shall not be married until he obey this order."
Bachelors were under the special spying and tattling supervision of the
constable, the watchman, and the tithingman, who, like Pliable in
Pilgrim's Progress, sat sneaking among his neighbors and reported their
"scirscumstances and conuersation." In those days a man gained instead
of losing his freedom by marrying. "Incurridgement" to wedlock was given
bachelors in many towns by the assignment to them upon marriage of
home-lots to build upon. In Medfield there was a so-called Bachelor's
Row, which had been thus assigned. In the early days of Salem "maid
lotts" were also granted; but Endicott wrote in the town records that it
was best to abandon the custom and thus "avoid all presedents & evil
events of granting lotts vnto single maidens not disposed of." This line
he crossed out and wrote instead, "for avoiding of absurdities." He
kindly, but rather disappointingly, gave one maid a bushel of corn when
she came to ask for a house and lot, and told her it would be a "bad
president" for her to keep house alone. A maid had, indeed, a hard time
to live in colonial days, did she persevere in her singular choice of
remaining single. Perhaps the colonists "proverb'd with the grandsire
phrase," that women dying maids lead apes in hell. Maidens "withering on