John Winthrop with his company arrived at Salem in June, 1630, and ten weeks later the first court in the Colony was held at Charlestown. The maintenance of the ministry was the first concern, to be followed by an order regulating the wages of carpenters, bricklayers, thatchers and other building trades. Thomas Morton at "Merry Mount" was not forgotten for he was to be sent for "by processe," and a memorandum is entered to obtain for the next Court an estimate "of the charges that the Governor hathe beene att in entertaineing several publique persons since his landing in Newe England."
At the second meeting of the Court of Assistants, three of the magistrates were fined a noble apiece for being late at Court and three weeks later Sir Richard Saltonstall, because of absence, was fined four bushels of malt. It was at this Court that Thomas Morton was ordered "sett into the bilbowes" and afterwards sent prisoner into England by the ship called the _Gifte_. His goods were ordered seized and his house burnt to the ground "in the sight of the Indians for their satisfaction, for many wrongs he hath done them from time to time." Several towns were christened the names by which they are still known, and those who had ventured to plant themselves at Aggawam, now Ipswich, were commanded "forthwith to come away."
Aside from Morton's offences at Mount Wollaston, nothing of a criminal nature seems to have been brought to the attention of the Court until its third session on September 28th. To be sure the Governor had been consulted by the magistrates of the Colony at Plymouth concerning the fate of one John Billington of Plymouth who had murdered his companion John New-Comin. Billington was hanged, and "so the land was purged from blood."
Unless murder may have been committed at an earlier date by a member of some crew of unruly fishermen along the coast, this was the first murder committed in the English settlements about the Massachusetts Bay. But unfortunately it was not the last. Walter Bagnell's murder in 1632 was followed by that of John Hobbey and Mary Schooley in 1637, and the next year Dorothy, the wife of John Talbie, was hanged for the "unnatural and untimely death of her daughter Difficult Talby." The daughter's christian name at once suggests unending possibilities.
