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This episode is about a happy-go-lucky Englishman named Thomas Morton, whom William Bradford dubbed the “Lord of Misrule,” and who would be a thorn in the side of Puritans in New England for more than fifteen years. Here’s how Bradford described Thomas Morton in Of Plymouth Plantation:
…Morton became Lord of Misrule, and maintained (as it were) a School of Atheism. And after they had got some goods into their hands, and got much by trading with the Indians, they spent it as vainly in quaffing and drinking, both wine and strong waters in excess (and, as some reported) £10 worth in a morning. They also set up a maypole, 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.
Frisking! And worse…
But Thomas Morton was much more than that. In many ways, he was the first new American of a very particular sort, and his story reminds us that American traditions have always been in a struggle with each other.
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Selected references for this episode
William Bradford, Of Plymouth Plantation
John G. Turner, They Knew They Were Pilgrims: Plymouth Colony and the Contest for American Liberty
William Carlos Williams, In the American Grain
Peter C. Mancall, The Trials of Thomas Morton: An Anglican Lawyer, His Puritan Foes, and the Battle for a New England
William Heath, “Thomas Morton: From Merry Old England to New England,” Journal of American Studies, April 2007
Michael Zuckerman, “Pilgrims in the Wilderness: Community, Modernity, and the Maypole at Merry Mount,” The New England Quarterly, June 1977
John Endecott (Wikipedia)
