"We look at the present through a rear-view mirror. We march backwards into the future. "
Marshall McLuhan

McLuhan has proposed that the first content of any new medium is the old media and that there is a moment, a boundary, when that transition occurs. While this idea has been applied to the transitions between oral language, written language, the codex and various incarnations of electronic language, the idea can also be applied to the transition faced by seventeenth century English emigrants to New England. Though these colonists crossed a quite obvious geological boundary, they carried the content of their "old media" with them in the form of their presuppositions about how society is organized, how it functions, and how its participants should function within it.

The form those presuppositions took, and the alterations they underwent as colonists from different areas encountered each other, adapted to their new environment, and passed from one generation to the next, is the subject of Sumner Chilton Powell's Puritan Village: The Formation of a New England Town. The book explores the town of Sudbury, Massachusetts in its earliest years. The author suggests that even though the inhabitants came from England with specific assumptions about how their society should be organized, the fact that they came from several areas, each with its own distinct structures, led to the establishment of new, complex, societies. Many of the early settlers stated explicitly that they were interested in creating new laws and social structures that did not conform to those they left behind in England. The Massachusetts colonial land granting system was such that they could attempt this on a town by town basis.

As Powell pursuasively argues, those new social structures were developed by people whose backgrounds differed in various ways. Powell traces the pre-colonist life of several of the leaders of Sudbury to explore those differences. The most important, in terms of subsequent practice in new England, was in land use. Settlers from the communal, open-field system of East Anglia organized their towns as central living space surrounded by communal fields, pastures, and woodlands. Land division and ownership were neither communal nor egalitarian, however, shared use of the land was the norm for the early Sudbury community. The process of land distribution was unlike that in England. As Powell points out: "the Bay government and the town government were accomplishing a virtual revolution in the systems of social and economic status of each community. For the first time in their lives, the inhabitants of an English town were assuming that each adult male would be granted some land free and clear." (Powell, )With that land came expectations of responsibility. Land grants were not sustained for those who would not settle in the town, that is, for absentee landlords and speculators, taxes were to be determined and collected by the town, decisions were to be made as a town through town meetings, and communal land practices were to continue.

In Sudbury, as in similar towns throughout colonial New England, the development of the town government was one of adaptation based on the prior experience of the participants. In addition to those with an open-field system background, early leaders came from such disparate systems as that of Berkhamstead, a market town and borough with a written charter that delineated specific rights and Sudbury, Suffolk, where parish and town government were inextricably intertwined, and town governance rotated through the hands of a few. While seventeenth century New Englanders came from a culture that accepted the communal regulation of their personal behavior, the extent of that regulation, and thus the expectations of what constituted the "correct" degree, also varied from region to region.

Despite a concerted effort on the part of colonists to work together as a community, reconciling such differing backgrounds and expectations did result in conflict. Problems related to the division, use and maintenance of the land appear to have been the subject of much of this early conflict. Powell also finds problems related to structuring town government and determining the amount of service deemed appropriate by the free townsmen, as well as implementing an appropriate tax system to cover town expenses. Other areas of conflict settled around the church, especially the responsibilities of the minister and his role in the community. Resolving intra-community relations, as well as relations with neighboring towns, the General Court, and with the indigenous population were also the purview of the selectmen.

While the first generation of colonists needed to adapt to both a different physical and social environment, the second generation brought its own challenges. Powell suggests that most Sudbury settlers, given the structure of colonization process, became landowners, a fate they may not have achieved had they stayed in England. By moving into the ranks of land owners, or, for some, by owning or acquiring rights to larger areas of land than they could have expected in England, settlers accepted for themselves the definitions, expectations, identities and responsibilities that land ownership entailed. Among these was the belief that land ownership was a family concern and that land was an inheritable item.

Powell, Demos, and Greven all look at the impact of population pressure on this system. In a society where children were valued and seen as potential contributors to the family welfare yet infant mortality was high, a large number of infant births was the norm. While the low infant mortality rates of the first years of settlement were no doubt greeted as a blessing, that population growth, which according to Demos doubled every 15 years, was not without challenges. Later citizens may have seen the United States in terms of limitless space and Manifest Destiny. For New England colonists, claiming the uncleared and still hostilely populated forests to their west involved rather more, politically and practically, than simply picking up and moving. If the colonists maintained the open-field system of agriculture, land use patterns would determine what types of land, in what proximity, would need to be allotted.

Perceptions of familial roles would also be a determining factor in deciding how expansion would occur. Although Greven falters when attempting to adduce the reactions and motivations of colonists, his work does show some interesting trends. Marriage was a family decision, with age of marriage being most closely linked to when the married couple could acquire a home and attendant properties of their own. Thus, elder sons who could receive an inheritance of new land from their parents would marry at a slightly earlier age, while younger sons, who might have to wait to inherit the home of their parents, married at later ages. The communal expectations of families, that members would continue to interact closely and even live in close proximity, combined with the expectations of subsequent generations that land ownership was a given, combined  with the expanding population of those families, put pressure on the system.

These second and subsequent generations of colonists, though acting within a social system transported from England by their parents, filtered and adapted that system based on their new circumstances. Some practices continued to be observed while others changed. Land ownership and a right to vote may have been available to a larger percentage of the white males in the community than that experienced in the world they left behind, but deference, an acceptance of one's rank within a stratified social system, remained in force throughout the seventeenth century. Through his study of  meetinghouse seating arrangements, Dinkin concludes that "within the 'democratic' framework of Massachusetts society, where a majority of the people owned at least some property. . .there existed a highly ordered social system that ranked persons according to their standing in the community." (Dinkins, 415)

However, definitions determining both rank and community roles, changed. The younger colonists New England experience combined several variations of community and governmental forms, and they adapted accordingly. For example, in Sudbury the structure of the second generation land grants are markedly different from that of the first generation. The uniformity of lot shape and size indicated a move toward individual ownership and use, and away from the seemingly haphazard, but emminently practical, first division of land that privileged open-field communal use. Town governance also shifted, as described by Lockridge and Kreider. Examing the towns of Dedham and Watertown between 1640-1740, they conclude that "the locus of effective political power in these two towns shifted from one body--the board of selectmen--to another--the town meeting--and that the locus of power remained firmly with the meeting thereafter." (Lockridge, 550)

Powell, Demos, Lockridge, Greven, and Dinkins illuminate societal beliefs and practices of specific New England communities. In Fierce Communion: Family and Community in Early America, Helena Wall shows how those beliefs spanned the many communities of the English speaking New World. Her work focuses on court cases and traces the shift from a society based on communal interests to that which prized the individual. Through arbitration and court, colonists sought to achieve community stability by guarding their reputations, regulating the personal affairs of their members, and controlling the behavior of their children through pressure on parents. Hall suggests that a society that saw disorder in personal affairs as a threat to the whole community, had no compuntion in exerting "its influence even when its goals were contradictory or when they ran contrary to the needs and desires of couples. . .Community influence tended to give greater weight to social obligations than to emotional needs, to the reinforcement of expected roles within marriage, and to maintaining the appearance of a happy marriage while sacrificing hopes for its achievement." (Hall, 49, 66) This power of community is also reflected by Rutman: "we can postulate good neighborliness to be an aspect of the mentalité of the neighborhoods, for we are probably not far wrong when we assume that, to the degree that the necessity of being a good neighbor required, good neighborliness was internalized." (Rutman, 160)

Like Hall, Rutman looks at colonial communities and community studies to try and find overarching similarities and differences. However, despite the differences in individual community practices among English-based colonies, the continuity between English life in England and life in New England is thrown into sharp relief when compared to the social structure and practice of the Dutch. Despite the myriad differences between individual English colonial communities, Merwick shows that those differences fade in the face of comparison to the quite different "town" system developed by the Dutch colonialists in the Albany region with its own conceptions of land use, land expectations, and governance practices. The early English settlers, in pouring the "old medium" of their lives in England into the "new medium" of life in the colonies certainly created a new society with changing expectations. Though the world they created was to become something different from that which they had left, they certainly, intentionally or not, eyed their English "rear-view mirror" as they "marched backwards into the future."