placed temporarily in their hands, and as a result the documents were exposed to all sorts of vicissitudes in the various houses where they were from year to year deposited. If the records and papers of any town have been carefully preserved, it has been by rare good luck.

There are two official publications of the State of Massachusetts to which the ordinary investigator would naturally turn for information as to the date of a charter of a town established prior to the revolution. The first of these is the Manual of the General Court, which furnishes the date of the creation of all towns in the Commonwealth, and the second is the publication generally spoken of as the Province Laws. A third official source of information, not so generally known, is the report of Carroll D. Wright, Commissioner of Public Records. This was published in 1889 and contains information of the same character. It furnishes no new knowledge on the subject, since it refers to the Province Laws as authority for the date of incorporation of Charlton. There are, in addition, the contemporary publications of the laws passed during the provincial period, but these are classified by sessions and do not give the dates of the passage of specific acts. The Manual is published annually for the benefit of the members of the General Court and contains, besides the names of the State officials and of the legislators, much condensed information as to the counties and towns in the Commonwealth. From time to time since this volume was first issued new tables have been added to its contents and it has now become a vade-mecum for the members of the legislature, without which they would be at a loss to know where to turn to gain the information contained in its pages. In 1871 the practice began of furnishing the dates of the charters of the towns in this Commonwealth, and, if originally incorporated as a district, the date of that incorporation. The date of a charter does not change from time to time, and presumably the date first inserted in the Manual should appear thereafter from year to year. Such was not the case, however, in regard to the charter of Charlton. From 1871 to 1891 inclusive, the Manual gives the date of that charter as November 2, 1754. From 1892 to 1900 inclusive, the date is given as November 21, 1754. From 1901 to the present time the date has been given as January 10, 1755.

Any person seeking for the date of this charter would necessarily

assume its stability. He would, therefore, feel at liberty to quote the date given in any one of the forty-five volumes of the Manual containing this information. If by chance he sought to corroborate the date that he found by consulting the Province Laws, he would find that October 21, 1754, was the date of the passage of the charter according to that authority, a date which agrees with that given in eight only of these volumes.

If he should seek for explanation of these discrepancies he would find a possible explanation for the first date given in the Manual in the fact that this is the date given for the incorporation of the town of Charlton by Peter Whitney in his History of the County of Worcester. This work is a standard and is in its way reliable and fairly accurate, but is hardly to be accepted as a suitable basis for an official announcement of this kind in a State publication. It was published in 1793, and it is probable that the compiler of the table in the Manual in 1871, not finding the Engrossed Act in the archives, turned to Whitney's pages for information as to the date. The language used in the History is: "This Town was taken wholly from Oxford, and was the westerly part thereof: It was incorporated November 2d, 1754, and then received its present name" (p. 221).

On the second of November, 1754, the legislation which finally resulted in the incorporation of Charlton as a district was in its preliminary stages and consisted merely of the appointment of a joint committee to consider the subject and make report thereon. The date given in the History must, therefore, have been an error, and probably was a compositor's error. It is not unlikely that Whitney wrote November 21, a date for which authority is to be found in the Records of the General Court, for the statement which he made and the compositor when setting it in type mistook the numeral one for a letter d. What was sufficient to satisfy a historian seeking merely for the first official record of an incorporation, no matter what its form, would not necessarily be enough for one, who, like the editor of the Province Laws, was seeking for the date of an incorporation of a district, the details of which were at his command in the pages of the contemporary

1 Whitney's error was reproduced by Anson Titus, Jr., in Charlton Historical Sketches (p. 21), but George F. Daniels in his History of the Town of Oxford (p. 40) and John Haven in his Historical Address (p. 7) give the date January 10, 1755. So also do each of the two histories of Worcester County published respectively in 1879 (i. 374) and 1889 (i. 746).

publication of the perpetual laws. So far as he was concerned, there was no reason for choice between November, 1754, and January, 1755; but the thought suggests itself that a clue to the time of the passage of the Act might be inferred from its position in chronological sequence in the perpetual laws. If, however, we consult the preface to the first volume of the Province Laws, we find that the arrangement of the Acts in those volumes "is not strictly chronological, nor could it be made so without disarranging the order uniformly pursued in the early editions." In other words, the clue fails us because the arrangement in the early editions is not strictly chronological.

It is not essential to follow in detail the action of the General Court in reaching a final decision to incorporate Charlton as a district, but in order to understand how the date November 21, 1754, could have been selected for a result which apparently was not actually reached until January 10, 1755, it is important to examine some of those details. This examination will disclose certain unexpected features in the progress of the legislation as recorded in the official records which are in themselves interesting and call for explanation.

The matter first turns up in the Records, April 8, 1754, when a petition signed by William Allton and others, inhabitants of the west part of Oxford, setting forth the great distance of their homes from the body of the town and the inconvenience of attending worship there, and praying that they might be set off with their families and estates into a separate town or district, was presented to the General Court.1 Some of these people lived ten miles from the church which they were through taxation obliged to support.

There was no question that those thus situated were entitled to relief, and the town clerk of Oxford was ordered to appear at a given day and show cause why the prayer of the petition should not be granted. In due time the answer of the town clerk was filed and thereafter a joint committee was appointed which reported November 7, 1754, in favor of the petitioners. A bill was, on November 9, introduced in the House for setting off the inhabitants as also the estates of the westerly part of Oxford, and also the westerly part of the Country Gore, into a separate district by the name of and a second reading was ordered for the next succeeding Tuesday. This is the last that is heard of this particular bill, but on the 13th of November a 1 The petition is in the Archives, cxvi. 586.

new bill was introduced in the House having similar import with the exception that its purpose was to incorporate the same persons and estates into a town by the name of This bill was read a first, second, and third time, and was passed to be engrossed and was sent up for concurrence. In the Council it was read once on the thirteenth, twice on the fourteenth, and on the same day a concurrence was voted. These dates and these facts are taken from a copy of the bill to be found in the Archives.1

Under date of November 21, 1754, there is an entry in the General Court Records 2 to the following purport: "An engrossed Bill, entitled an Act for setting off the inhabitants as also the estates of the westerly part of Oxford, as also the westerly part of the Country Gore into a separate town by the name of having been read three several times in the House of Representatives and in Council, Passed to be enacted by both Houses and signed by the Governor." Here we have in the official records authority for the positive statement of the final passage of an Act incorporating a town, as yet nameless, but comprehending within its bounds the area known as Charlton.

In the Province Laws, the editor sought to append to each Act not only the date of its passage but also the date of the publication thereof, and the Commissioners quote, in a note to their preface to the first volume, from an order of the General Court in 1673 to the effect that all laws and orders of every session thought fit to be published should "be read in the Market Place, Boston, upon the fifth day being a lecture day, within ten days after the end of such sessions, which being performed is, and shall be accounted sufficient publication." The official publication of Province Acts, whatever the method may have been, was not always easy to ascertain, and there are many in the different volumes of the Province Laws of which only the date of the passage could be learned. In such cases the editor was obliged to content himself with the date of the passage of the Act. The Act relating to the charter of Charlton is one of those which lack a date of publication. Whether the publication of the Act was an essential for its validity or not, it would seem as though this statement of the

1 cxvi. 764.

2 xx. 327.

• Province Laws, vol. i. p. XXV.

Province Laws, iii. 781.

passage of the Act on the pages of the official document in which the doings of the General Court are recorded, was adequate to relieve Peter Whitney from the charge of having no basis for the date given in his History for the incorporation of Charlton, provided the conjecture is correct that he put down November 21 in his manuscript which was converted by the compositor into November 2d.

On the other hand, the person who decided the date in the Province Laws had several reasons for not accepting November 21 as the date of the passage of the Act actually published in Volume III of that publication. The language of the Act as given in that volume corresponds with the language used in a contemporary publication of the perpetual laws, in which the incorporation of Charlton is described as a district, and the territory included in that district does not comprehend the Country Gore - two vital differences. If we could say positively that reliance was had on the entry that we have quoted for the determination of the date given in that document, we should have a right to say that there was gross carelessness displayed in this acceptance. As matters stand we can only say that there is no other evident record upon which that opinion could have been based, and that being the case there is a probability that the date given in the Province Laws rests upon the record quoted. Had the editor examined the House Journal he would have found evidence, that notwithstanding the statement in the Court Records to the effect that the Governor had signed the bill, such was not actually the case. Under date of January 6, 1755, the following entry is made in the Journal:

Ordered, That the Secretary be directed to attend the House, who accordingly attended, and Mr. Speaker was pleased to ask him, Whether the bill for creating the westerly part of Oxford into a town was passed the Honorable Board, and signed by his Excellency the Governor?

Mr. Secretary informed the House that the Council had passed the Bill and that it had been laid before the Governor, and he had not signed it.

Thereupon a bill entitled "An Act for setting off the inhabitants as also the estates of the westerly part of Oxford into a separate district by the name of was read a first time.

It may be inferred from the rapidity of the action of the representatives in introducing a new bill that they already knew that the previous bill had been held up by the Governor and from the change