Proceedings Of The Bostonian Society At The Annual Meeting January 12 1892 PDF Download

Excerpt from Proceedings of the Bostonian Society: At the Annual Meeting, January 12, 1897 So novel an institution as the Massachusetts town occa sioned a series of new terms. The place where the town met was called the meeting-house. Our Dorchester Town Records have the term by October 8, 1633. The word. Is largely secular in meaning. Perhaps the word church was avoided, for the Massachusetts settlers had no idea of being associated with the Church of England. But their meeting-house was more than a place for common worship. At the Boston Meeting-house were held the General Courts, the early law courts, and all town meetings. Accordingly, one might ask which interest predominated, the Spiritual or the temporal. At any rate, temporal affairs were not neg lected; and there is room, perhaps, for the belief that the secular interest controlled. But the term town meeting came up slowly, if our public records are to be relied upon. It occurs in the Massachusetts Records (i, 275) on Septem ber 9, 1639, and in the Boston Town Records on September 28, 1640. The earlier form was general meeting, due, perhaps, to the fact that it was attended by men in general, without much regard to charter, General Court, or the pre rogative of freemen, whose number was microscopic in 1630, and not overwhelming at any time. The characteristic officer of the town came to be called selectman, apparently not without some implied warning; for the select bodies of Queen Elizabeth's time (4 Co. 77) were known to the men of Boston. We find the term selectmen in the Boston Records of March 4 and 28, 1642. These selectmen took care of the prudentials, meaning the Civil affairs of the town, as distinguished from criminal matters, which were left to the general government. All these terms remain all have a local meaning, and all illustrate the English origin of the founders, together with the novel experiment they made in this New World, when they laid the foundations of a new nation. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.