Explanation:
Massachusetts Bay Colony, one of the original English settlements in present-day Massachusetts, settled in 1630 by a group of about 1,000 Puritan refugees from England under Gov. John Winthrop and Deputy Gov. Thomas Dudley. In 1629 the Massachusetts Bay Company had obtained from King Charles I a charter empowering the company to trade and colonize in New England between the Charles and Merrimack rivers. The grant was similar to that of the Virginia Company in 1609, the patentees being joint proprietors with rights of ownership and government. The intention of the crown was evidently to create merely a commercial company with what, in modern parlance, would be called stockholders, officers, and directors. By a shrewd and legally questionable move, however, the patentees decided to transfer the management and the charter itself to Massachusetts. By this move, they not only paved the way for local management, but they established the assumption that the charter for a commercial company was in reality a political constitution for a new government with only indefinable dependence upon the imperial one in England. Among the communities that the Puritans established were Boston, Charlestown, Dorchester, Medford, Watertown, Roxbury, and Lynn.
Massachusetts Bay Colony
Massachusetts Bay Colony
Massachusetts Bay Colony.
Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.
Massachusetts Bay Colony
QUICK FACTS
DATE
1630 - 1691
KEY PEOPLE
John Winthrop
Anne Bradstreet
Mary Barrett Dyer
Hannah Emerson Duston
Henry Dunster
Jonathan Belcher
John Endecott
Thomas Dudley
John Winthrop, the Younger
John Underhill
MAJOR EVENTS
Pequot War
Cambridge Agreement
RELATED PLACES
United States
British Empire
Massachusetts
American colonies
RELATED TOPICS
Western colonialism
Puritanism
theocracy
“Bay Psalm Book”
The Puritans established a theocratic government with the franchise limited to church members. Winthrop, Dudley, the Rev. John Cotton, and other leaders zealously sought to prevent any independence of religious views, and many with differing religious beliefs—including Roger Williams of Salem and Anne Hutchinson of Boston, as well as unrepentant Quakers and Anabaptists—were banished. By the mid-1640s Massachusetts Bay Colony had grown to more than 20,000 inhabitants.
TOP QUESTIONS
When was the Massachusetts Bay Colony founded, and how long did it last?
What was the purpose of the Massachusetts Bay Colony?
What is the importance of the Massachusetts Bay Colony?
Increasing estrangement between the colony and England resulted in the annulment of the company’s charter in 1684 and the substitution of royal government under a new charter granted in 1691. The charter of 1691 merged the Plymouth colony and Maine into the Massachusetts Bay Colony.
