PROHIBITION is sometimes seen as the inevitable outcome of settlers from Europe who brought their extreme Evangelical Protestantism with them, but the truth is that those Pilgrim Fathers, often portrayed as stern and starchy, teetotal Puritans, arrived in North America with brandy, port, and all the skills necessary to brew beer and make wine. The tavern was just as important a part of early settlements as the church, and often close by.
In John Hull Brown’s book Early American Beverages, he argues: “The two basic social institutions of Colonial America were the church and the tavern,” which “may seem shocking . . . and not at all in harmony with contemporary views of the daily life of the Puritans”. The records, however, do not lie. Worship and quaffing booze went together like Calvin and predestination for the Pilgrim Fathers.
These taverns, or “ordinaries”, were not simply pubs: there was an obligation on local settlements to provide lodging houses that also served basic food and drink, and, in some cases, the drink outweighed everything else. In others, strict licensing by church-weighted authorities meant that clients were limited to two drinks a day, and there were restrictions on “immoral” activities, such as dancing, singing, and playing games.
Other communities were much more liberal, and the ordinary was a place where the strictures of the Church could be balanced by the relaxed letting-your-hair-down vibe of the tavern. The ordinaries did not simply pop up at the same time as meeting houses and churches, but were often licensed on the condition that they were built close together. Sometimes, it wasn’t just the clientele that was interchangeable. In Cambridge, Massachusetts, the keeper of the first licensed “house of entertainment” was a deacon of the church and later Steward of Harvard College.
And, if there wasn’t a church, the tavern would do as a place of worship. In Providence, Rhode Island, and Fitchburg, Massachusetts, it’s on record that the tavern served as a meeting house before a separate building was erected. Also, elders and deacons would often meet in the tavern to thrash out matters of church discipline, and that crucial aspect of worship — seating arrangements.
Conditions in the early meeting houses were often bitterly cold, and sermons could be very long. It’s no wonder that some parishioners, finding themselves warm both internally and externally in the comfort of a tavern, were reluctant to trudge through ice, snow, or mud to the cold and forbidding church. A law was eventually passed in Massachusetts forcing tavern-keepers to stop serving while a service was taking place.
THE drinks sold in these early colonial hostelries would be locally brewed beer, imported wine (often fortified), and the occasional spirit brought over in barrels from Europe. It’s obvious that civil authorities exercised control under the Church, and that they expected moderate consumption and good behaviour. Equally, it’s clear that, sometimes, things could get out of hand.
And nobody personifies this more than Thomas Morton, a lawyer, would-be settler, and landgrabber, maypole dancer, arms dealer, libertine, rebel, chancer, and “Lord of Misrule”, as he was described in 1628 by William Bradford, Governor of the Plymouth Colony.
He is the antithesis of a Puritan: a dodgy, colourful, sometimes apparently deranged figure, whose own personal colony of Merrymount stands like a beacon of neo-pagan licentiousness amid the tightly controlled world of tavern and meeting house. He was also keen on fraternising with the natives, trading with them, learning from them, and, indeed, selling them guns. No wonder he terrified the living daylights out of some of his colonial neighbours.
Morton was born in south-west England into Devon gentry in 1579. His family were landowners and High Anglicans, at a time when Devon was a remote corner of the land that was, if not immune to Protestant reform, then perhaps contemptuous of it. Devon was different, and the kind of Anglo-Catholic worship there also incorporated many aspects of popular folk culture that seemed to many reformers too close to paganism.
Morton’s life in England is shadowy and combines what were clearly important social and political connections with a populist, crusading zeal for the rights of the underdog, along with an affection for bad behaviour of all types, involving drink and women, and an attitude to litigation that seems at best mischievous, and at worst nefarious.
He studied law at Clifford’s Inn, in London, and the hard-living culture of the Inns of Court was very much to his taste. He mixed with the likes of Francis Bacon and William Shakespeare, and the playwright Ben Jonson became a lifelong friend.
Despite his Royalist beliefs, he was a strong defender of the principles of common law against the centralising influence of the Crown. His early legal career involved working in defence of displaced Devon workers, but the crucial business connection of his life was with the colonial entrepreneur Ferdinando Gorges, an associate of Sir Walter Raleigh who had been part of a conspiracy against Queen Elizabeth I with the Earl of Essex. Gorges was heavily involved in the colonial project in New England, and would eventually found the colony of Maine.
Morton’s marriage to Alice Miller, a relationship which reeks of economic ambition, became embroiled in complex and endless legal wrangling over her father’s inheritance, and extremely difficult relationships with her ultra-Puritan son George, involving assaults, beatings, and worse. All the time, Morton’s attentions and ambitious were turning westward. But, as this High Anglican with somewhat loose morals and an affection for pagan practices set sail, the violent Puritanism of his stepson may have coloured his attitude towards what awaited him on the other side of the Atlantic.
Backed by Gorges, Morton left his legal hassles in England and headed to America in 1622 for a three-month visit. He returned complaining that he had received an unfriendly and intolerant reception by the Puritan communities. He and Gorges convinced the King, Charles I, that they could succeed in trading with the native tribes, and, in 1624, Morton left England aboard the ship Unity with one Captain Wollaston and 30 indentured servants.
SETTLING on a stretch of coast formerly occupied by the Algonquins — now Quincy, Massachusetts — Morton began dealing with the tribe, selling them guns and alcohol in exchange for furs, food, and, crucially, knowledge. Although the weapons were used by the Algonquins against other native Americans, the Puritan settlers at Plymouth were enraged and frightened. Morton and Wollaston’s tiny trading post was successful and expanded into a fully-functioning colony, known initially as Mount Wollaston.
Morton’s instinct to defend the underdog kicked in when he discovered that Wollaston had been selling indentured servants into slavery on the Virginian tobacco plantations. He encouraged the servants who were left to rebel with him against Wollaston, who fled to Virginia, leaving Morton in total, fairly benevolent, control.
Morton then renamed the colony Merrymount, declared the indentured servants free men, and encouraged co-operation, sexual relationships, and economic integration with the local Algonquins, although Morton retained his folk-religion ideal of Devon rural Anglicanism as a set of beliefs which he hoped the tribes could eventually convert to.
Needless to say, the nearby Puritans of Plymouth were aghast. Morton had gone native, the colonists decided, and anyway he was pretty much a heathen to start with. There were rumours of debauchery, including liaisons with native women during drunken orgies in honour of Bacchus and Aphrodite.
Governor William Bradford wrote in his history Of Plymouth Plantation: “They . . . set up a May-pole, drinking and dancing about it many days together, inviting the Indian women for their consorts, dancing and frisking together (like so many fairies, or furies rather) and worse practices. As if they had anew revived & celebrated the feasts of ye Roman Goddess Flora, or ye beastly practices of ye mad Bacchanalians.”
It was all a long way from two drinks only per day at the official tavern.
MORTON was a man of the West Country, fascinated by his native county’s rural customs such as the rituals and celebrations that took place on May Day, and, being an intellectual of decidedly libertine and romantic bent, combined everything with alcohol, the energy of his freed servants, and, to be blunt, their need to find sexual partners.
So, the local tribes were invited to participate in that infamous maypole-dancing episode. Drink flowed, having been brewed on the spot. Morton himself described the events in his three-volume history, polemic, and propaganda book, A New English Canaan, published in Amsterdam in 1637 and promptly banned by the colonists in America — the first book to be banned in the nascent United States.
AlamyJohn Endicott, colonial governor of Massachusetts, cutting down Morton’s maypole at Merrymount in 1627; from a 19th-century American wood engraving
The settlers “brewed a barrell of excellent beer, and provided a case of bottles to be spent, with other good cheer, for all comers of that day”. There were a maypole, guns, drums, pistols, “and other fitting instruments”. The natives arrived to help and participate. A very good time was duly had by — not quite all. Some were less than happy: those “separatists”.
“The setting up of this Maypole was a lamentable spectacle to the precise separatists: that lived at new Plymouth. They termed it an Idoll; yea they called it the Calf of Horeb: and stood at defiance with the place, naming it Mount Dagon; threatening to make it a woefull mount and not a merry mount. . .”
And there was singing. Lots of drinking and lots of singing: “There was likewise a merry song made, which (to make their Revells more fashionable) was sung with a chorus . . . which they performed in a dance, hand in hand about the Maypole, whiles one of the Company sung, and filled out the good liquor like Gammedes and Jupiter. . .”
Incidentally, the location nowadays, in Quincy, is a semi-industrial site near a Dunkin’ Donuts.
This all happened in 1628. The maypole was topped with deer antlers, just to make an explicitly pagan point, and it was all too much for the Puritans next door in Plymouth. A group of militiamen attacked the town, cut down the maypole, and arrested Morton for “supplying guns to the Indians”. He was put in the stocks at Plymouth, brought to trial, and would undoubtedly have been executed for blasphemy had there not been much nervousness about his royal connections.
So, he was marooned off the New Hampshire coast on a deserted island, presumably in the hope that he would die of starvation, but officially until an English ship arrived and could take him home. Morton’s friendship with the local native tribes stood him in good stead, and he was supplied with food by helpful and utterly bemused natives. He gained enough strength to organise his own escape back to England.
In retaliation for all the heathen goings-on at Merrymount, the Plymouth colonists renamed the place Mount Dagon, from 1 Samuel 5.2-7, which tells how the Ark of the Covenant was captured by the Philistines and taken to Dagon’s temple in Ashdod. Next day, the stone idol of Dagon was found lying prostrate before the Ark. It was rescued and re-erected, but the day after that it was again found prostrate before the Ark, this time with head and hands severed.
The meaning was clear: Plymouth was the true home of the one God. Drinking and dancing and having sex around a maypole, not to mention fraternising with the locals, was always going to end in tears.
FOR the sake of balance and fairness, I should probably give another account of the goings-on at Merrymount. Let the Puritans speak! William Bradford had come to America aboard the Mayflower, and was the diametrical opposite of Morton: a hardline Puritan activist, unwilling to give native Americans an inch, let alone gunpowder, weapons, and alcohol. And, probably worse, he was from Yorkshire, almost the other end of England from Morton’s south-western outpost of Devon.
He was also governor of the Plymouth colony. Just as Morton wrote his epic justification in A New English Canaan, Bradford published what is still seen as the most authoritative account of the Pilgrim Fathers’ journey from persecution in England through Holland to their early colonies in America. It is called Of Plymouth Plantation, and was written between 1630 and 1651.
His sheer loathing of Morton and everything he stood for simply reeks from his prose. Morton had arrived with Captain Wollaston, “but had little respect among them and was slighted by the meanest servants”. Wollaston had headed off to Virginia, and, while he was away, Morton had run riot, aided by alcohol, conspiring to get rid of Wollaston’s man Lieutenant Fitcher:
“But this Morton . . . got some strong drink and other junkets, and made them a feast; and after they were merry, he began to tell them he would give them good counsel (which was) . . . easily received, so they took opportunity and thrust Lieutenant Fitcher out of doors and would suffer him to come no more among them.” After this, “they fell to great licentiousness and led a dissolute life, pouring out themselves into all profaneness. And Morton became lord of misrule and maintained (as it were) a school of atheism.”
Lacking its leader, or host as he preferred to be called, Merrymount survived as a community for another year, despite its renaming. During a severe famine in winter 1629, as baldly described by Bradford, residents of New Salem, led by John Endecott, raided “Mount Dagon” for its corn supplies and destroyed what was left of the maypole, denouncing it as a pagan idol and calling it the “Calf of Horeb”.
Morton returned to his former Utopia soon afterwards, but most of his followers had scattered around the countryside. He was arrested, again put on trial, and banished. The following year what had been the flourishing colony of Merrymount was burned to the ground, and Morton was sent home to England.
BACK in England, Morton was briefly imprisoned, but, with the support of his mentor, Gorges, and with the help of King Charles I, who was now seriously threatened by the mounting power of the Puritans at home and abroad, took legal action against the Massachusetts Bay Company, the power behind the Puritans’ godly throne.
He was heavily backed by the economic and political enemies of Puritanism, and the company’s charter was revoked in 1635. In 1637, Morton’s magnum opus, A New English Canaan, was published, and, in 1642, he prepared for a triumphant return to America, with his associate Gorges declared governor of the east coast colonies.
There was a snag, however. The English Civil War had broken out, and the stage was set for the eventual dissolution of the English monarchy and the triumph of Puritan power at home and abroad. Gorges, always one to sense which way the wind was blowing, decided not to go to America to claim his governorship, which was already under threat from the colonists there.
Fatefully, Morton crossed the Atlantic alone, to represent Gorges in Maine. He was arrested in Plymouth and put on trial for sedition. The locals were having none of the King’s appointment of Gorges; Morton was accused of being a Royalist agitator and imprisoned in Boston. His book was already banned. Ageing and unwell, he was given clemency, and died, aged 71, among whatever friends and supporters remained in Maine.
I am not alone in my fascination with Morton. Artists and writers are fascinated by him as the “anti-Puritan”. He appears as a character in the Nathaniel Hawthorne story The Maypole of Merrymount; two novels by John Lothrop Motley; and a 1934 opera, Merry Mount, by the American composer Howard Hanson.
An excellent biography by Peter C. Mancall, The Trials of Thomas Morton, perhaps sums up his importance most soberly: “The Colonists who thrust Morton out of New Plymouth wanted to silence him. They had good reason to erase the influence of this potent antagonist whose actions defied their authority time and again.”
Morton liked a drink, and used alcohol in the wild and licentious ceremonies he promoted. But there was a certain daft innocence in his maypole-erecting orgies. He was a libertine High Anglican with a great deal of knowledge and understanding of rural Devonian new-paganism. He admired ordinary people in England, and wanted to understand and collaborate with and protect the Native Americans he came in contact with. They in turn protected and helped him. And of course, he wanted money and power.
Pitted against him were the hard and fast political and theological structures of Puritanism, which had history on its side. The Puritans were firmly against any integration with native American culture, to the extent of violence, the deliberate introduction of disease, and eventually straightforward extermination. While alcohol was central, indeed essential to the building of colonial society, its use was carefully monitored and controlled. The beginnings of the temperance movement and prohibition could already be discerned.
And between Morton and Bradford, between Plymouth and Merrymount, we can see the start of America’s central dichotomies: freedom and authority; enforced sobriety and wild drunkenness; devout Protestantism and the instinct to live outside religious law or within a much more liberal theological regime. Sin and redemption. Guns and flowers. Saturday night and Sunday morning.
Today, if you go to Quincy, Massachusetts, you will be warmly welcomed by the Merrymount Residents’ Association, whose website states “Merrymount remains an integral yet unique part of Quincy, MA — minus the Maypole, but filled with warm and friendly neighbors, friends and families.”
This is an edited extract from Holy Waters: Searching for the sacred in a glass by Tom Morton (no relation to Thomas Morton), published by Watkins Publishing at £14.99 (Church Times Bookshop £13.49); 978-1-78678-656-2.