On November 11, 1620, two days before stepping onto the New World, the first Pilgrims (or “Separatists”) composed the Mayflower Compact, swearing “all due submission and obedience” to a soon-to-be-formed “Civil Body Politic.” For sixteen years they—and the thousands of Puritans who arrived in Massachusetts after them—governed themselves under a hodgepodge of mostly English precedents and Old Testament edicts until finally organizing everything into the 1636 Book of Lawes. This, along with Jamestown’s 1610 Lawes Divine, Morall, and Martiall, etc., was the earliest legal code written in America.
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