SOURCE: “The English Calendar in Colonial America,” in Bonfires and Bells: National Memory and the Protestant Calendar in Elizabethan and Stuart England, Wiedenfeld and Nicolson, 1989, pp. 190-206.

[In the following essay, Cressy evaluates changes in the Protestant English calendar occasioned by its transfer to the New World.]

The English calendar amalgamated astronomical, classical-pagan, and traditional Christian elements. In addition to marking the seasons and pacing the agricultural year, the calendar fixed and proclaimed the major Christian holy days, and registered such secular events as law terms, court days, times of fairs, and anniversaries. Lady day, May day, and Lammas marked the wheeling of the English year, alongside holidays with more specific religious connotations. … [M]any of the saints' days of the old Roman Catholic calendar were rejected after the Reformation, but still in the seventeenth century the calendrical cycle of Protestant England was modelled on that of Catholic Europe. The year was shaped by the Christian observances of Lent and Easter, Whitsuntide, and Christmas. (The English refused until 1752 to adopt the Gregorian calendar reforms of the Counter-Reformation, but this only affected the timing of the calendar, not its overall structure.) The English calendar of the seventeenth century also drew attention to red-letter days such as royal accession days and birthdays, and to the anniversaries of English Protestant ‘deliverances’. Each of these calendrical layers had meaning in Stuart England, making the passage of time a matter of cultural and political significance.

How much of this complex calendar crossed over to colonial America? What happened to English seasonal patterns and observances in the seventeenth-century English settlements overseas? These questions turn our attention to the seasonal, religious, ceremonial and festive components of the year in New England and Virginia, and to the larger issue of the transfer of culture to the colonies. A study of time and the ritual marking of its passage in colonial America provides an instructive contrast to Elizabethan and Stuart England, and to the experience of the British diaspora elsewhere in the world.

Did the migrants carry over a deeply rooted experience of periodicity and seasonality which was as natural to them as their language? How attached were they to the annual cycle of commemorations and observances, and did they attempt to replicate this English pattern in the New World? To what degree did the colonists perpetuate or reject the customary calendar of old England when their political and religious circumstances were transformed? The questions can be more finely focused in terms of religion and agriculture, since some migrants disapproved of the ancient calendar, and others found themselves too busy to follow it. How effective was the puritan effort to discard the old religious routine and to suppress seasonal observances in the godly commonwealth of New England? What was the impact of puritan dominance in Massachusetts and Connecticut, and did it find any echo in the anglican and Catholic settlements of the south? What were the cultural effects of the seasonality of Atlantic shipping, and the different rhythms of tobacco farming, corn growing, and animal husbandry? To what extent did the social and economic rhythms of early America alter the experience of time?

In seventeenth-century England the calendar and its customs were deeply rooted and well recorded, so questions about the experience of time can be addressed without great difficulty. In colonial America, by contrast, there is little documentation of the sort that might illuminate the problem. There is no seventeenth-century American equivalent of the English borough chamberlains' accounts that record civic processions and drinkings, or the parish churchwardens' accounts that indicate when the bells were rung in celebration or when bonfires were lit. The private record is as meagre as the public. Early colonial diarists were few, and little more than hints can be taken from their jottings. How are we to gauge the significance of Lent and Easter, for example, in the religious calendar of New England or Virginia if contemporaries said nothing about it? It becomes a matter of judgment whether silence suggests that an established English custom was observed without mention, or whether it had faded from view.

The evidence is better when calendrical observances were controversial. If one group within the colonial community wished to maintain the old customs and another sought to suppress them the issue was likely to leave traces in court records, diaries, polemic, or correspondence. Such sources are thin by English standards, but they reveal aspects of a struggle over the calendar in colonial New England that echoed disputes in the homeland. The English settlers of seventeenth-century New England and Virginia were inheritors of ancient European traditions and at the same time creators of a new American culture. They brought with them established rhythms of life and ingrained patterns of behaviour, and adapted them, sometimes consciously and at other times unwittingly, to the demands and opportunities of the colonial environment. Agriculture and religion both played a part in the modification of English customs that travelled across the Atlantic. So too did distance and detachment from the cultural sources and context in which the old-world traditions had thrived.

Newcomers from England found the cycle of the seasons familiar enough in America, although the climate was more extreme. (Spring and autumn could be delightful, but winters were severe, especially in New England, and summers were humid and hot, especially in the south.) Health and fortune would be governed by the same sun, the same turning moon, and the same cycling of the constellations. From an astrological point of view the transatlantic world would be quite familiar, even if adjustments had to be made for the lower American latitudes.

Subsistence agriculture followed similar cycles in England and America, but new crops—indian corn in New England, corn and tobacco in Maryland and Virginia—required a new farming calendar as well as new techniques. In New England the wheat crop came in during July, and the Indian corn in September, with corn shucking and husking parties to follow. Harvest was a time for neighbourly festivity and thanksgiving, similar to that observed in England. Many of the days of public thanksgiving prescribed by the puritan magistracy of New England coincided with the completion of the annual harvest, especially during the later decades of the seventeenth century.¹

In the tobacco regions of Virginia and Maryland, however, planters spoke of cutting but nothing so final as ‘harvest’. There was no time for relaxation after the crop was cut in September. Workers moved immediately to curing, stripping, sweating and prizing, and these tasks kept them busy throughout the autumn. October was often the busiest time, but the preparation and packing of the precious weed kept men occupied until the turn of the year. By then it was time to plant again, and the cycle began anew. The packed hogsheads of tobacco lay in warehouses until the ships arrived from England in the late winter or early spring, and the planter might wait another half season before he saw his money. The tobacco regions may have developed a distinctive culture, as T. H. Breen has suggested, but it was one without community festivity and ritual dimensions.²

In the colonies to the north and south the lifeline to the old world also tightened and slackened with the passage of the year. English shipping to New England normally left in the spring to catch the most favourable Atlantic weather, and the vessels arrived in Boston harbour about eight weeks later in the early summer. Captains preferred to begin their onward or return voyages with a minimum of delay. The Chesapeake tobacco fleet arrived early in the year to land servants and to collect the previous autumn's crop.

Dependence on the transatlantic economy dictated an economic rhythm unlike anything known in Europe. In Massachusetts the economic year climaxed between May and September. Summer was the prime time for payments, deeds, contracts, and exchange of goods. (This can be verified by a seasonal analysis of colonial economic documents.) The flow of information in the colonies was also paced by the sailing season, with fresh gazettes from England in June and a dearth of news in the winter. Chesapeake rhythms were also paced by the Atlantic traffic, with major tobacco sales and purchases of goods in February or March. If indentured servants counted their term from their arrival in the colony they could look forward to freedom on an equivalent date some years into the future. The employment and tenurial cycle of old England, pivoting on Lady day (25 March) and Michaelmas (29 September), had little relevance in the pioneer colonies, although neither of these terms was forgotten.

The ritual infrastructure of the early colonies was thin and deficient by English standards. Whereas each parish in England followed the liturgical calendar of the established church (in a lavish or subdued manner according to local preference), the institutionalized religious routine was weak in Virginia and non-existent in seventeenth-century New England. Without the discipline of the prayer book and the momentum and tradition of official religion, the sweep of the Christian year narrowed to a succession of Sundays. English towns followed old traditions which, though weakened by reform and reformation, still gave pattern to the urban year, but colonial communities, by contrast, were ab initio and slow to develop civic memory. Nor were there craft guilds or other associations with a keen sense of tradition and a developed practice of annual activity. It is hard to keep customs when the mechanisms of support and regulation are undeveloped.

The public calendrical cycles in early Virginia were loosely related to English rhythms, which in turn rested on older ecclesiastical foundations. The governor received his quarterly salary ‘upon the feast day of St John the Baptist, St Michael the Archangel, the nativity of our Lord God, and the annunciation of the Blessed Virgin Mary’ (24 June, 29 September, 25 December, 25 March, approximating the four seasons). Other salaries were paid for a year ending at Lady day. Vestrymen met for official business ‘upon the feast day of St Michael the Archangel, being the 29th day of September’. Land grants were made ‘for the term of ten years next ensuing after the feast of St Thomas the Apostle last past’.³ In choosing these days the southern colonial rulers attempted to replicate the ceremonial cycle of the old country.

Beginning in 1619 Virginia's ministers were supposed to meet as a judicial council with the governor four times a year, ‘at the feast of St Michael the Archangel, of the nativity of our saviour, of the Annunciation of the blessed Virgin, and about midsummer’. These quarterly meetings were soon superseded by the establishment of county courts which were supposed to meet on a similar schedule.⁴ In planning dates of meetings, periods of office or terms of agreements it was natural for the early colonists to follow the conventional dating scheme which was familiar to them in England. The old religious holidays were dates that the Virginia settlers would recognize, even if they no longer observed them with festivity or devotion. There were other regularities, too, imposed or encouraged by the colonial assembly. Easter was the time to choose churchwardens as well as being one of the three occasions when adults were supposed to take communion. Ministers and churchwardens were required to attend the ‘midsummer quarter courts holden at James city on the first day of June’ to register burials, christenings and marriages together with their financial accounts.⁵

These early calendrical attachments are not surprising, given that the society and popular culture of Virginia was an overseas extension from the homeland. The religion of Virginia was based on the English prayer book (though without the discipline imposed by English bishops). Virginia's population, like England's, contained the devout and the reprobate, and all shades between. Social and demographic conditions were not conducive to a settled parochial liturgical routine, but the leaders of the colony repeatedly asserted their conformity in religion. Alexander Whitaker, one of the first ministers at Jamestown, described in 1614 a religious regime with sabbath observances, monthly communions, and annual fasts that would not have been out of place in Jacobean England. In 1619 the General Assembly agreed that ‘all ministers shall duly read divine service, and exercise their ministerial functions, according to the ecclesiastical laws and orders of the Church of England’. In 1624 and again in 1632 the Assembly insisted on ‘uniformity in our church as near as may be to the canons in England, both in substance and circumstance’, including the ecclesiastical calendar of feasts and fasts.⁶

In practice there was laxity and indifference, illuminated by shafts of zeal. The easy-going latitudinarianism of religion in Virginia was not unlike the ecclesiastical culture of Jacobean England from which it sprang. The tendency was to tradition rather than reform. In 1647, when the revolutionary regime in England attempted to introduce the Directory of Worship, the Virginia Assembly ordered continuing use of the Book of Common Prayer. By this time, however, the pattern of observances had become a parish option, with strict anglicans and nonconformists each going their way.⁷ In any case, economic circumstances, the rigour of the tobacco business, and the harshness of the climate and environment, all worked against the maintenance of old-world liturgical rhythms.

Virginia's ministers were supported by annual tithing that tied together aspects of the economic, social and religious calendar. It is tempting to see here a distinctly Virginian ritual, shaped by tobacco culture, but the evidence is insufficient. By order of the General Assembly in 1632, parishioners had to bring in their ‘duty’ of ten pounds of tobacco for the minister each 25 October, and a bushel of corn each 19 December. The date of the tobacco contribution was subsequently changed to 20 November.⁸ By this time of year planters were prizing or packing their tobacco in hogsheads ready for storage, and this may have been a convenient time to set some aside for the minister. Most likely, however, the tithing involved a paper transaction with a sum set aside on the minister's account. Only detailed diaries or records of disputes would show how the tithing was conducted, and what position it occupied in the early Virginia calendar. Few planters would willingly bring in their tithe or tax until dunned for it, and general laxity worked against the establishment of seasonal fiscal patterns.

England's Protestant holidays—crownation days, Gunpowder Treason day, etc.—left no distinctive mark on seventeenth-century Virginia, but it did not take long for the colony to adopt significant anniversaries of its own. On 22 March 1622, Good Friday, an Indian uprising left about 350 English settlers dead and the survivors severely shaken. The Assembly ordered ‘that the 22nd of March be yearly kept holy in commemoration of our deliverance from the Indians at that bloody massacre’. A second Indian rising on 18 April 1644 added another special day to the Virginia calendar. Ministers were required to announce these days on the preceding sabbath, rather as their English counterparts were supposed to bid feasts and fasts. For the survivors at least the March and April anniversaries were days of significant commemoration, invested with special status. Like the church feast days (few of which were strictly observed) the massacre holidays were days free from work. Nor could sheriffs or court officers serve writs or warrants on these occasions. The discovery in 1664 of ‘a desperate conspiracy’ among indentured servants prompted the Assembly to dedicate 13 September as yet another day of thanksgiving to be kept ‘in a perpetual commemoration’.⁹

Through what sectors of Virginia society these days were recognized, and for how long after the events they were observed, is a matter of conjecture. There may be a shallow generational depth to the memory of momentous occurences unless they continue to occupy a niche in the culture. Commemoration only endures so long as one or other group finds it useful for ideological or religious purposes, or for entertainment. Certainly by the eighteenth century these early colonial anniversaries were forgotten, even if the injunction to observe them in perpetuity had not been repealed.

After the Restoration, Virginia added the Stuart commemorative fast of 30 January and the feast of 29 May to its official holiday roster. The General Assembly ordered in 1662 that 30 January ‘be annually solemnized with fasting and prayers, that our sorrows may expiate our crimes and our tears wash away our guilt’ for the execution of Charles I. In honour of Charles II they ordered that 29 May, ‘the day of his majesty's birth and happy restitution, be annually celebrated as an holy day’. These dynastic observances brought the public calendar of Virginia into closer conformity with that of metropolitan England, but in practice the demands of the tobacco culture kept labourers at work. Gunpowder Treason day left little trace in the records of seventeenth-century Virginia, but was well known later in the Williamsburg era when it may have been reintroduced from England.¹⁰

It is difficult to go deeper into the calendrical experience of seventeenth-century Virginia since diaries and letters from that period are so rare. It is even harder to discern the pattern in the neighbouring Chesapeake colony of Maryland. Catholics worked with conforming anglicans in the founding of Maryland, and their devotion shows in their choice of place names—St Mary's city, county and river, St George's river, St Clement's hundred. Maryland was a Christian colony, but one with a unique concern ‘for the suppressing of all such disputes tending to the cherishing of a faction in religion’. By the 1670s there were Presbyterians, Independents, Baptists, and Quakers in Maryland, as well as adherents of the Church of England and Roman Catholics. The colony had laws for sanctifying the sabbath (not always enforced), but did not adopt the Book of Common Prayer until forced to in 1696.¹¹ Marylanders most likely observed the principal occasions of the Christian year, in accord with their opportunities and inclinations, but not in a way to draw attention to their activities or to leave useful historical records.

The ritual calendar of seventeenth-century New England was spare and austere compared with that of the old country, but popular customs developed around harvests and thanksgiving days. Celebration and commemoration were constrained by the dominance of puritan religion, which in its American form looked critically on the pattern of the year. A distinctive puritan culture developed in Plymouth Colony, Massachusetts and Connecticut because there the godly held power. Ministers and magistrates gave legal and political endorsement to reforms that were but briefly adopted in revolutionary England. Out went episcopacy, vestments, altars, and the prayer book, along with other popish and superstitious elements that had, in their eyes, contaminated the English church. There were no Candlemas illuminations, no Rogationtide perambulations, no church ales. Massachusetts substituted an austere perambulation of the bounds of each town, to be conducted ‘in the first or second month’ every three years.

New England sabbatarianism was antithetical to traditional religious observances, and averse to the distinction of commemorative days. The Christological year fell into decay, with nothing to mark the liturgical seasons of Advent, Epiphany, Lent and Easter. Marriages could be entered at any time of the year without regard for the traditional prohibited periods. Christmas observances were banned in Plymouth and Massachusetts long before the crackdown on Christmas began in England in the 1640s. The year was shorn of its ritual dressing. Thomas Lechford, a New Englander who was out of sympathy with these developments, explained ‘there are days of fasting, thanksgiving and prayers upon occasions, but no holy days except the Sunday’. A Massachusetts law required attendance at church on these days, but no others.¹²

In New England as in Virginia, official legal and political business followed an annual cycle similar to the one back home, with quarterly courts and annual elections. In Massachusetts the magistrates met in March, June, September and December, approximating the English law terms. Elections were scheduled for ‘the last Wednesday of every Easter term’. This was a rare official mention of Easter in New England records. The year was also marked by musters and training days, and at Cambridge by the Harvard commencement. Fasts and humiliations were called according to the needs of the moment, and had no regularity or periodicity. However, of twenty-nine thanksgivings called by the General Court of Massachusetts between 1632 and 1686 seventeen fell in November, and had some of the flavour of traditional harvest festivals. A similar pattern prevailed in Connecticut, where annual thanksgiving days in October in the 1650s had shifted to November by the 1670s.¹³

By October the harvest was complete, and larders were beginning to fill with fresh-killed animals. A Massachusetts almanac greeted November, ‘One day this month each fruitful year / Give thanks to God and eat good cheer.’ The spiritual purpose of the thanksgiving was sometimes overwhelmed by the popular pleasures of the postharvest season. Ned Ward, an English writer who visited Boston in 1682, observed, ‘husking of indian corn is as good a sport for the amorous wagtails in New England as Maying amongst us is for our forward youths and wenches. For 'tis observed, there are more bastards got in that season than all the year beside, which occasions some of the looser saints to call it rutting time.’¹⁴

Beginning in the mid-1630s, the godly in New England attempted to popularize an entirely secular calendar, purged of all pagan and superstitious associations. They adopted a new dating system substituting numbers for the offensive names of the days and months. As Thomas Lechford observed in 1642, somewhat derisively, ‘they call the days of the week, beginning at the first, second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth, and seventh, which is Saturday; the months begin in March, by the names of the first, second, and so forth to the twelfth, which is February; because they would avoid all memory of heathenish and idols' names'.¹⁵

The General Court of Massachusetts began using this system in the spring of 1636, but without consistency or assurance. Business was recorded on ‘the 13th day of the 2nd month’, on ‘September 8th, 1636’, and on ‘8th month, the 25th’. For several years the new and the old dating systems coexisted, with the pagan monthly names being entered in the margin. Plaintiffs were bound over to appear in court in 1637 ‘the first Tuesday in March’, not ‘the 3rd day of the 1st month’ which might have confused them. The same year the court agreed ‘that there should be a general fast the 19th of the 11th month, being the fifth day of the week Thursday come month’. And in 1638 ‘the court desired that the 12th day of the 2nd month, called April, being the 5th day of the week, should be kept a day of humiliation’. For legal, didactic and communications purposes it was necessary to explain that ‘the 4th month’ in fact meant June. By the 1640s the court had reverted to the traditional pagan usage. The court records of New Haven also mixed pagan names and puritan numbers, but Connecticut and Plymouth retained the conventional dating.¹⁶

New England's fairs were regulated by the calendar of numbers. The fairs at Boston, for example, were scheduled ‘on the first third day of the third month, and on the first third day of the eighth month’ (i.e. first Tuesdays in May and October, spring and autumn). Similar wording regulated the fairs at Salem, Watertown and Dorchester.¹⁷

Such a confusing reform had few consistent followers. The numerological usage was at its height in the late 1630s and early 1640s, and was thereafter little more than an affectation of the most fastidious. Some will-makers of the 1640s adopted the reformed dating but by the time they came to probate the old months were back in fashion. George Alcock of Roxbury, Massachusetts, dated his will ‘22 day 11th, called December, Anno Domini 1640,’ although December was the tenth month in this scheme. Thomas Nelson of Rowley, Massachusetts, who had returned to England on business, amended his will on ‘the sixth day of persextilis, here called August, 1648’. The anti-pagan dating system had already begun to decline in New England by the time a petitioner suggested it to Parliament in England in 1648. The Boston magistrate Samuel Sewall attempted to revive the use of numbers and to cleanse the week of pagan names, but without success.¹⁸

It is difficult to discover how much of the old religious calendar survived in popular consciousness and popular culture. At least a few New Englanders of the 1630s yearned for the beauty and regularity of the Church of England's traditional religious practices. Others missed the leisure and enjoyment of the old holidays. A minority observed Shrove Tuesday, May day and Christmas, especially after the Restoration.¹⁹ The low intensity of disputes about Christmas from the 1620s to the 1650s suggests that the first generation of settlers was generally in harmony on the suppression of the ancient festival, but this view may be an illusion created by the surviving records.

Early Plymouth Colony was plagued with ‘malcontented persons and turbulent spirits’ who were likely to be attached to ‘barbarous’ customs and the unreformed calendar. Some of them gravitated to Thomas Morton's outpost at Merry-Mount where every day was May day and a maypole in 1627 symbolized liberty and good cheer. Morton's maypole, ‘a goodly pine tree of eighty foot long … with a pair of buck's horns nailed on somewhat near unto the top of it’, lasted until John Endecott descended from Salem and cut it down.²⁰ The reprobates and traditionalists of Massachusetts were never so well organized, but their presence reminds us that not all New Englanders were puritans. Newcomers who were not so fully accultured to the godly Commonwealth helped to sustain or reintroduce old customs and to restore familiarity with the English festive calendar.

Like their co-religionists Henry Burton and William Prynne, the leaders of New England frowned on May day and regarded May frolics as the devil's work. Without community support the May day custom withered. Nonetheless some individuals made merry on this traditional spring occasion, and a few paid for it before the courts. Offenders were mostly marginal people, servants, sailors, newcomers, rather than solid householders. Paul Wilson, a servant at Charlestown, was rebuked for larking on May day in 1658, awakening neighbours with music, dancing, and early-morning revelry. The puritan magistrate Samuel Sewall cracked down on the equally ignorant observance of April Fool's day a few years later.²¹

More persistent was the keeping of Christmas. The Plymouth separatists ostentatiously ignored the occasion, but the less godly settlers observed Christ's birthday with traditional pastimes. Governor Bradford led his people to work on 25 December 1621 but a party of newcomers declared ‘it went against their consciences to work on that day’. At mid-day Bradford found them ‘at play openly, some pitching the bar, and some at stool ball and such like sports’. The governor confiscated their playthings, ‘and told them that was against his conscience that they should play and others work. If they made the keeping of it a matter of devotion, let them keep their houses, but there should be no gaming or revelling in the streets.’²²

The puritans of Massachusetts Bay followed Plymouth's lead. There would be no official countenance of Christmas, no public festivity on 25 December, no decoration with bays and holly. But Christmas was a winter occasion, traditionally observed indoors over dinner; it was hard to prevent individuals from keeping a private Christmas provided they did it with decorum.

In their revision of the laws in 1658 (published in 1660) the leaders of Massachusetts declared, ‘for preventing disorders arising in several places within this jurisdiction, by reason of some still observing such festivals as were superstitiously kept in other countries, to the great dishonour of God and offence of others, it is therefore ordered … that whosoever shall be found observing any such day as Christmas or the like, either by forbearing labour, feasting, or any other way upon any such account as aforesaid, every such person so offending shall pay five shillings as a fine to the county’.²³ This resolve may have been prompted as much by the campaign against Christmas in Cromwellian England as by a resurgence of unreformed practices in the Bay Colony.

Resurgent Christmas customs were among the abuses that were said to mark New England's declension in the second half of the seventeenth century. The puritan grip on New England weakened as a less resolute generation came of age and as the colony became part of the post-Restoration Atlantic world. Anglican practices revived. The royal agent Edward Randolph was offended in 1676 by the Massachusetts prohibition of Christmas and other holidays. In 1682 the laws restricting Christmas were repealed. Anglican traditionalists worshipped and played seasonal games, most notably in Boston, while puritans worked and frowned. Judge Samuel Sewall used his powers as a magistrate to impede Christmas celebrations.²⁴

The observance of Christmas divided puritans from anglicans, and saints from sinners. In effect this meant a division between masters and servants, and perhaps between seaport towns and the more conservative hinterland. For Peter Thacher, a young minister at Barnstable in Plymouth Colony, 25 December 1679 was a day like any other (excepting sabbaths), but to his servant Mary Claghorne it was a day of jollification. Thacher promptly dismissed her with the warning, ‘if she endeavoured to stifle conviction by running into merry company she would find it bitterness in the latter end’.²⁵

Increase Mather, in his Testimony against several prophane and superstitious customs, now practiced by some in New-England, charged that the keeping of Christmas was pagan, papist, irreligious, erroneous, and profane. Mather marshalled the arguments that others had used against Christmas during the English revolution. But, he concluded, ‘such vanities … are good no where; but in New England they are a thousand times worse’. There was nothing he could do, however, to prevent the return of old English customs, especially in a pluralist community like later-Stuart Boston. Increase's son Cotton Mather wrote with disgust about the Christmas revels in 1711.²⁶

English almanacs enjoyed a limited circulation in the colonies in the early years. Henry Dunster, president of Harvard College, imported two dozen almanacs from England in 1641. Although their astrological projections were calculated for different latitudes, their calendars and other apparatus still had some value, not least as models for the colonial production. Almanacs were among the first publications produced by the printing presses established in Massachusetts in the late 1630s. New England almanacs presented an eviscerated version of the English calendar. Reflecting the advanced puritan style, some early American almanacs set aside pagan names and substituted ‘the first month’, ‘the eighth month’, etc. Urian Oakes combined both systems in his almanac for 1650, and freely used the pagan names when discussing astronomy. Samuel Cheever's almanac for 1661 began the year with ‘the first month called March’, but later almanacs reverted completely to the traditional terms. Samuel Danforth apologized in his almanac for 1686, ‘if that I the names imposed by old idolatry on months and planets still retain, because I'm forced thereto by cruel custom's laws’.²⁷

Cambridge and Boston almanacs indicated subbath days, election days, court days, artillery days, fairs, tides, and a rich range of astronomical information. But they were silent or reticent about traditional holidays. Red-letter printing was unknown in New England almanacs before 1692, and then was not used to mark red-letter days. Most American almanacs ignored 5 November. Not until the anglican revival of the 1680s did New England almanac-makers risk offending the puritan elite by listing the Christian holy days and national remembrances that were commonplace in old England. Under James II they became even bolder. John Tulley's Boston almanac for 1687 was the first in the colonies to begin the year with January, and the first to list the feast and fast days of the English church. Tulley was a supporter of James II and a toady of Sir Edmund Andros and the Dominion of New England. It must have pained the puritan elders to read Tulley's calendar of significant days which was tailored to the taste of the newly ascendant regime. The almanac featured New Year, Twelfth day, Valentine's, Shrove Sunday and Tuesday, Ash Wednesday, St Matthias, Lady day, Easter, St George, Saints Philip and James, Whitsunday, St John the Baptist, St Swithin, St James, Lammas, St Bartholomew, St Matthew, Michaelmas, St Luke, Saints Simon and Jude, Powder Plot day, ‘Martlemas’ (St Martin), St Andrew, St Thomas, Christmas, St Stephen, St John the Evangelist, and Holy Innocents. To these Tulley's 1689 almanac added Candlemas and St Crispin, and the anniversaries of the ‘murder’ of Charles I and the birth of James II, in a holy calendar that exceeded the usual recognition of feasts and fasts in England. Tulley continued to produce almanacs after the revolution, but the wind had gone from his sails. His publication of the 1690s were austere to the extreme. No day in 1692 gained special recognition; in 1697 he drew attention only to 4 and 5 November, the birthday of William III and the anniversary of the Gunpowder Plot.²⁸

Gunpowder Treason day was not an annual observance in the New England colonies, but autumn thanksgiving days sometimes coincided with 5 November. Days of public thanksgiving in Connecticut in the 1680s were usually held on the first Wednesday in November, and from time to time this happened to be the fifth. Unlike their English counterparts, New England ministers did not take to their pulpits on 5 November to reflect on the history of England's deliverances and to urge closer walking with God. (Though some of them, including Thomas Hooker and John Wilson, had delivered Gunpowder Treason sermons in England.) Instead they reserved their remarks for fast-day and election sermons with a purely local compass. There was no echoing tintinnabulation, no Gunpowder Treason day beer for the bellringers, because early American churches had no bells to ring.

Although strenuous Protestants in England saw the Gunpowder deliverance as a signal of God's interest in ‘true religion’, New Englanders had other evidence of providence, and regarded the popular November commemoration as a sign of unreformed superstition. The godly in Massachusetts separated themselves from the celebrations of Gunpowder Treason day, just as their predecessors withdrew from the culture of license back home. There are, however, hints and indications that some of the English customs were transmitted or re-imported across the Atlantic where their observance sometimes caused friction between the godly and the less devout.

Carousing sailors built a fire at Plymouth Plantation in 1623 that flamed out of control and destroyed three or four houses. William Bradford records that ‘this fire was occasioned by some of the seamen that were roystering in a house where it first began, making a great fire in very cold weather, which broke out of the chimney into the thatch’. Bradford naturally saw this as symptomatic of the clash in culture and discipline between the saints and the reprobate masses. Emmanuel Altham, who was visiting Plymouth at the time, adds the significant information that this incident occurred on 5 November.²⁹ It seems that the sailors were hosting a Gunpowder Treason day party.

The next recorded incident took place a generation later. The silence of the records may be construed to mean that England's central Protestant anniversary had little part in New England's folk life until it was reintroduced after the Restoration. In 1662, the royalist Samuel Maverick complained, ‘divers youths [were] lately prosecuted at Boston for making bonfires on Gunpowder Treason day at night, it being kept as a thanksgiving for the return of the New England agents, the youths being willing to conform to the practice that such a time affords in old England; for this the parents of the youths were fined, but the children of the church members who were guilty as much as others scraped all scot-free’.³⁰

The Middlesex County court records of 1662 tell more of the story. Two servants, Thomas Facy and Paul Wilson (who had earlier been reprimanded for Maying), were ‘convicted of disorderly carriage on the fifth of November last, being a day of public thanksgiving, in abetting sundry young persons and others gathering themselves into companies and kindling fires in the evening, and absenting themselves from their masters' houses and lodgings after nine at night to the disquiet of the inhabitants, sundry men having their fences by that occasion pulled up and burnt, and one house tumbled into a cove, and sundry guns shot of whereof Paul Wilson confesses he shot one of them’.³¹ With its mixture of liberty, noise, fire, and danger, this drew its inspiration from popular Gunpowder observances in London.

The unlicensed celebration on 5 November continued through the rest of the seventeenth century, and became more elaborate in the eighteenth. Puritan ministers averted their eyes or gnashed their teeth, while the magistrates worked to prevent things from getting out of hand. Increase Mather wrote in his diary on 5 November 1664, ‘at night much troubled to see the bonfires’.³² As they were at Plymouth in 1623, the celebrants were malignants, mariners and young people outside the dominant stream of devout New England culture.

In 1665 a group of anglicans, Samuel Maverick among them, petitioned the General Court of Massachusetts to make the laws of the colony conform more closely with those of England. ‘There ought to be inserted and ordained to be kept the fifth of November, and the nine and twentieth of May, as days of thanksgiving; the first for the miraculous preservation of our king and country from the Gunpowder Treason; the second for his majesty's birth [and] miraculous and happy restoration to his crowns upon the same day; as also the thirtieth of January as a day of fasting and praying, that God would please to avert his judgment from our nations for that most barbarous and execrable murder of our late sovereign, Charles the first.’ This loyal proposal was rejected, but 5 November 1667 was declared ‘a day of thanksgiving unto God for the continuance of our peace and liberties’.³³ This was one of the annual thanksgivings, whose day varied from year to year, and it may have served to co-opt or deflect the Gunpowder Treason festivities.

Other evidence testifies to the revived vitality of the memory of the Gunpowder Plot in Restoration New England. In 1669 Thomas Bailey, a resident of Massachusetts, wrote a four-page poem entitled ‘In Quintum Novembris’. Bailey recited the history of the plot and praised Jehovah, ‘Who sav'd us on 5th day of November / Which may us cause God still to remember.’³⁴

In America as in Stuart England, the fear of a Catholic succession in the 1670s gave new life to the Gunpowder commemoration. News of the mock pope burnings in London circulated in New England, perhaps prompting emulation. John Wilson's Song of deliverance for the lasting remembrance of God's wonderful works, written in England in the 1620s, was reprinted at Boston in 1680. Wilson himself had moved from Sudbury, Suffolk, to become a minister in Massachusetts. Now his verse on the ‘the hellish Powder-Plot’ made the same transit. The rising generation in New England could marvel, ‘Never since world began was thought plot more abominable. / Never deliverance was wrought more strange and admirable.’ If solid puritans had once recommended commemoration ‘by sermons, prayers, or loud songs, bells, bonfires, or by feast’, who could gainsay such celebrations?³⁵

New England preachers sometimes invoked the memory of Gunpowder Treason, although they did not observe the special day of prayer and thanksgiving that was part of the seasonal cycle in England. Puritans could countenance the day as part of a pattern of providences while dissociating themselves from disorderly festivity. Samuel Sewall was disappointed on 5 November 1685, noting in his diary, ‘Mr Allin preached … mentioned not a word in prayer or preaching that I took notice of with respect to Gunpowder Treason.’ The next year things were more to his liking when Mr Morton, preaching at Charlestown, ‘took occasion to speak of the 5th of November very pithily’.³⁶

While the godly were at services, the rowdies were in the streets. In November 1682 Benjamin James and others were brought before the Suffolk County Court for gathering people together to start a bonfire in Boston. On 5 November 1685, ‘although it rained hard, yet there was a bonfire made on the common. About fifty people attended it.’ On the following night the weather improved and ‘about two hundred hallowed about a fire on the common’. Merchants and magistrates were apprehensive that the celebrations might lead to disturbances, but for most years in the late seventeenth century the night passed without violence. At Marblehead in 1702 the day was enlivened with a bull-baiting, to be followed by distribution of the meat to the poor.³⁷

With the accession of William III the Gunpowder Treason anniversary became merged with celebration of the king's birthday on 4 November and with the annual autumn thanksgiving. Puritan fastidiousness gave way to English Protestant patriotism. At Boston in 1697, ‘guns fired with respect to the king's birthday. At night great illuminations made in the Town House, governor and council and many gentlemen there. About eight Mr. Brattle and Newman let fly their fireworks from Cotton Hill. Governor and Council went thither with a trumpet sounding.’³⁸

This organized civic commemoration was soon to be overwhelmed by popular celebration. Over the next half century the 5 November observance developed into an annual carnival and fire-festival which culminated with the ritual burning of an effigy of the pope. A full account of the evolution of Gunpowder Treason day in North America is beyond the scope of this study, but two episodes from eighteenth-century Boston are well worth recording. The Boston almanac for November 1735 year noted, ‘Gunpowder Plot / We ha'n't forgot.’ Just in case the memory was cold the Boston Evening Post recited the story of Guy Fawkes and the conspiracy of 1605, ‘for the information of such of our readers as are not furnished with the history of this surprising attempt’. On 10 November 1735 the paper reported, ‘Wednesday last, being the 5th of this instant November, the guns were fired at Castle William, in token of joy for the happy deliverance of our nation from one of the most horrid and damnable conspiracies that ever was contrived by hell and Rome … In the evening there was a bonfire on Dorchester neck, and several in this town; and there were a variety of fireworks played off upon this occasion, both on the land and on the water.’ Apprentices went out in boats to watch the spectacle, and four of them were drowned on their way home.³⁹

A generation later the celebration involved competitive processions, effigies and bonfires. In 1764 there was death and destruction as the rival north end and south end gangs of Boston paraded their popes. The annual outbreaks of violent rejoicing had more to do with the social strains of Hanoverian Boston than with distant events in Jacobean England. The calendar provided the occasion for current anxieties to fuse with custom and tradition. The evening had noise, light, licence, festivity, and danger, essential ingredients in this anti-Catholic and anti-authoritarian catharsis. Colonial officials attempted to maintain order as Gunpowder Treason mutated into Pope day and was eventually overshadowed and ended by the American revolution. In 1774 imported tea and an effigy of Lord North were consigned with the pope and the devil to the 5 November fires at Newport, in a politicized adaption of the old vocabulary of celebration.⁴⁰

As in the England of an earlier generation, calendrical observances were harnessed by competing ideological traditions. As always, they were capable of bearing multiple meanings. Bonfires and bells accompanied the partisan fracturing of Anglo-American political culture, but here too they served the forces of social and cultural cohesion. Public practices that began in the Elizabethan era in the service of the Tudor state were adapted in the seventeenth century to criticize the ruling regime. By the end of the Stuart era the sensitized calendar marked a battery of occasions, royal, dynastic, religious, providential, and political. The versatility of the vocabulary of celebration proved itself in its eighteenth-century florescence and in its transfer to other parts of the English world.

Notes

1. Thomas Minor, The Diary of Thomas Minor, Stonington, Connecticut (New London, 1899); Samuel Clough, The New-England Almanack for 1701 (Boston, 1701); Richard P. Gildrie, ‘The ceremonial puritan: days of humiliation and thanksgiving’, New England Historical and Genealogical Register, 136 (1982), pp. 3-16.

2. Rhys Isaac, The Transformation of Virginia 1740-1790 (Chapel Hill, 1982), esp. pp. 22-30; T. H. Breen, Tobacco Culture: The Mentality of the Great Tidewater Planters on the Eve of Revolution (Princeton, NJ, 1985), esp. pp. 45-55. For more on this displaced English community see Gloria L. Main, Tobacco Colony: Life in Early Maryland, 1650-1720 (Princeton, 1983), Darrett and Anita Rutman, A Place in Time: Middlesex County, Virginia, 1650-1760 (New York, 1984), and the work of Lorena Walsh for the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation.

3. William Waller Hening (ed.), The Statutes at Large: Being a Collection of all the Laws of Virginia (New York, 1823), vol. 2, p. 566; George Maclaren Brydon, Virginia's Mother Church and the Political Conditions under which it Grew (Richmond, Virginia, 1947), p. 440; ‘Decisions of Virginia General Court, 1626-1628’, in Virginia Magazine of History and Biography, 3 (1896), p. 367; ‘Council Papers, 1698-1702’, in Virginia Magazine of History and Biography, 24 (1916), p. 395.

4. William, J. Van Schreeven and George H. Reese (eds.), Proceedings of the General Assembly of Virginia July 30-August 4, 1619 (Jamestown, Virginia, 1969), pp. 59-61; Brydon, Virginia's Mother Church, p. 83.

5. ibid., pp. 427, 430.

6. Van Schreeven and Reese (eds.), Proceedings of the General Assembly, p. 59; Brydon, Virginia's Mother Church, pp. 24, 85, 90, 426.

7. ibid., pp. 121, 131.

8. ibid., pp. 432, 438-9.

9. ibid., pp. 85, 144, 434, 447, 462.

10. ibid., pp. 461-2. For eighteenth-century recognition of Gunpowder Treason see The Virginia Gazette, 4-11 February 1736-7; ibid., 1 December 1774; and The Virginia Almanack (Williamsburg, 1743, 1764, 1774).

11. Archives of Maryland (Annapolis, 1883-99), vol. 4, p. 38; vol. 5, p. 133; vol. 1, p. 343; vol. 19, pp. 436-7.

12. Winton U. Solberg, Redeem the Time: The Puritan Sabbath in New England (Cambridge, Mass., 1977), pp. 47, 114; Thomas Lechford, New-Englands Advice to Old England (London, 1644), pp. 56-8. For another perspective on calendrical inhibitions and cultural transfer see David Cressy, ‘The seasonality of marriage in old and New England’, Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 16 (1985), pp. 1-21.

13. The Book of the General Lawes and Libertyes … Massachusetts (Cambridge, Mass., 1648), p. 14; Nathaniel B. Shurtleff (ed.), Records of the Governor and Company of the Massachusetts Bay (Boston, 1853-4), vol. 1, p. 277; Massachusetts Historical Society, microfilm, ‘Diary of Francis Borland’, 1682 and 1683; W. DeLoss Love, The Fast and Thanksgiving Days of New England (New York, 1895), pp. 241-8; Gildrie, ‘Ceremonial puritan’, pp. 3-16.; J. Hammond Trumball (ed.), The Public Records of the Colony of Connecticut (Hartford, 1850), vol. 1, passim.

14. Diary of Thomas Minor; Samuel Clough, The New-England Almanack for the Year of our Lord, MDCCIII (Boston, 1703); Ned Ward, ‘A Trip to New England’, in George P. Winship (ed.), Boston in 1682 and 1699 (Providence, Rhode Island, 1905), p. 55.

15. Thomas Lechford, Plain Dealing or News from New England [1642], ed. Darrett B. Rutman (London, 1969), p. 54.

16. Shurtleff (ed.), Records … Massachusetts, vol. 1, pp. 143, 173, 176, 177, 181, 184, 187, 200, 226, etc.; Charles J. Hoadly (ed.), Records of the Colony and Plantation of New Haven, 1638-49 (Hartford, 1857), pp. 40, 46; New-Haven's Settling in New England (London, 1656; Hartford, 1858), p. 14.

17. General Lawes and Libertyes … Massachusetts, pp. 21-2.

18. Suffolk County Wills (Baltimore, 1984), p. 3; The Probate Records of Essex County, Massachusetts (Salem, 1916-20), vol. 1, p. 110; M. Halsey Thomas (ed.), The Diary of Samuel Sewall 1674-1729 (New York, 1973) vol. 1, p. 351; David D. Hall, ‘The mental world of Samuel Sewall’, in David D. Hall, John M. Murrin, and Thad W. Tate (eds.), Saints and Revolutionaries: Essays on Early American History (New York, 1984), p. 84.

19. Lechford, New-Englands Advice, pp. 56-8; Increase Mather, A testimony against several prophane and superstitious customs, now practised by some in New-England (London, 1687), p. 38.

20. Letter from James Sherley in William Bradford, Of Plymouth Plantation 1620-1647, ed. Samuel Eliot Morison (New York, 1963), p. 372; William Bradford, History of Plymouth Plantation 1620-1647 (Boston, 1912), vol. 2, p. 54; Thomas Morton, New English Canaan … an Abstract of New England, ed. Charles Francis Adams, Jr (Boston, 1883), pp. 276-282: ‘of the revels of New Canaan’.

21. Deloraine Pendre Corey, The History of Malden Massachusetts 1633-1785 (Malden, 1899), p. 124; Roger Thompson, ‘Adolescent culture in colonial Massachusetts’, Journal of Family History, 9 (1984), p. 131.

22. William Bradford, Bradford's History ‘Of Plimoth Plantation’ (Boston, 1898), p. 135.

23. Record Commissioners of the City of Boston, The Colonial Laws of Massachusetts … 1660 … to 1672 (Boston, 1889), p. 153; The Colonial Laws of Massachusetts … 1672 … through 1686 (Boston, 1890), pp. 57-58.

24. Robert Noxon Tappan (ed.), Edward Randolph; Including His Letters and Papers … 1676-1703 (Boston, 1898), vol. 2, pp. 198-201; Colonial Laws … Through 1686, p. 291; Hall, ‘Mental world of Samuel Sewall’, p. 84.

25. Massachusetts Historical Society, microfilm, ‘Journal of Peter Thacher 1679-99’.

26. Mather, Testimony against several prophane and superstitious customs, pp. 18, 22, 35, 40; ‘Diary of Cotton Mather 1709-1724’, Massachusetts Historical Society Collections, ser. 7, vol. 8 (1912), p. 146. Cf. William Waldron to Richard Waldron Jr.: ‘Christmas which used to be a time of wickedness in some of the towns is now arrived to such a regulation as that all disorders are banished and instead thereof a serious sermon is preached and collections made for the poor’, Massachusetts Historical Society, ‘Dana MSS.’ 1725.

27. ‘The Dunster Papers’, Massachusetts Historical Society Collections, ser. 4., vol. 2 (1854), p. 191; Urian Oakes, An Almanacke for … 1650 (Cambridge, Mass., 1650); Samuel Cheever, An Almanack for … 1661 (Cambridge, Mass., 1661); Samuel Danforth, The New-England Almanack for … 1686.

28. Benjamin Harris, Boston Almanack for … 1692 (Boston, 1692); John Tulley, An Almanack for … 1687 (Boston, 1687), also 1689, 1692, 1697; Marion Barber Stowell, Early American Almanacs: The Colonial Weekday Bible (New York, 1977), pp. 40-62.

29. Bradford, Bradford's History, p. 182; Sydney V. James, Jr. (ed.), Three Visitors to Early Plymouth (Plymouth, Mass., 1963), p. 37; Morton, New English Canaan, p. 260.

30. Maverick to the Earl of Clarendon, in Collections of the New York Historical Society (New York, 1870), p. 47.

31. Thompson, ‘Adolescent culture in colonial Massachusetts’, p. 132.

32. American Antiquarian Society, ‘Increase Mather's Diary’. At New London on 5 November 1711, ‘the sailors made a bonfire in the evening’, Diary of Joshua Hempstead of New London, Connecticut (New London, 1901), p. 3.

33. Shurtleff (ed.), Records … Massachusetts, vol. 4, pt. 2, p. 212; Record Commissioners of the City of Boston (eds.), Sixth Report (Boston, 1881), ‘Roxbury land and court records’, p. 206.

34. Massachusetts Historical Society, MSS. Miscellaneous bound, 1657-1671.

35. John Pynchon to John Winthrop, Jr., 1674, in Carl Bridenbaugh (ed.), The Pynchon Papers (Boston, 1982), p. 126; John Wilson, A Song of deliverance from the lasting remembrance of Gods wonderful works (Boston, 1680).

36. Diary of Samuel Sewall, vol. 1, pp. 81, 124.

37. Abstract and Index of the Inferior Court of Pleas (Suffolk County Court) held at Boston 1680-1698 (Boston, 1940), p. 116; Diary of Samuel Sewall, vol. 1, pp. 82, 300, vol. 2, p. 627; Josiah Cotton to Rowland Cotton, in Massachusetts Historical Society Collections, 80 (1972), p. 271, ‘Saltonstall Papers’.

38. Diary of Samuel Sewall, vol. 1, pp. 380, 416.

39. A start is made in Alfred F. Young, ‘English plebian culture and eighteenth-century American radicalism’, in Margaret Jacob and James Jacob (eds.), The Origins of Anglo-American Radicalism (London, 1984), pp. 185-212. Nathaniel Ames, The Almanack for 1735 (Boston, 1735; Boston Evening Post, no. 13, 10 November 1735; Henry W. Cunningham (ed.), ‘Diary of Rev. Samuel Checkley, 1735’, Publications of the Colonial Society of Massachusetts, 12 (1908-9), p. 288.

40. Anne Rowe Cunningham (ed.) Letters and Diary of John Rowe (New York, 1969), pp. 67-8, 76, 114, 145, 194, 254, 287; Cunningham (ed.), ‘Diary of Samuel Checkley’, pp. 288-95; Virginia Gazette, 1 December 1774. See also Hiller B. Zobel, The Boston Massacre (New York, 1970), pp. 27, 37-8, 65; and Gary B. Nash, The Urban Crucible: Social Change, Political Consciousness and the Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge, Mass., 1979), pp. 260-1, 299; ‘Report of the Journey of Francis Louis Michel’, Virginia Magazine of History and Biography, 24 (1916), pp. 127-8.