ABSTRACT
The first snow arrived in October of 1641, taking the fall colors with it. Thomas Gorges sat in the “one pretty handsome roome & studdy” afforded by his uncle’s house in Maine and considered the letter he was composing to family friend, Richard Bernard.1 “Longe have these poor people groaned for want of government,” he wrote, describing Sir Ferdinando Gorges’s newly recreated Province of Maine.2 Thomas Gorges and Bernard were Puritans, a religious affinity shared with the leaders of Massachusetts Bay Colony, though Massachusetts laws and government made both men uneasy. Massachusetts colonist John Wheelwright was banished in 1637 for religious heresy and wrote to Gorges in 1641 to ask what sorts of laws his family might find in Maine. “I told him,” Gorges told Bernard, “for the civill we steared as neere as we could to the course of Ingland. For the ecclesiastical we forced noe man to the common prayer booke or to the ceremonies of the Church of Ingland but allowed the Liberties of Conscience.” Gorges’s planned legal code never came to fruition but his letters suggest an active interest in modeling Maine law on English law in the mid-seventeenth century.
