oke, "a very glory of womanhood," as her elaborate tombstone in the Peabody cemetery at Springfield declares. "I am the more solitary," wrote Pynchon "as son Smith is of a reserved melancholy, and my daughter (Anna) is crazy." She lived until after her husband's death in 1681. William Pynchon the founder, died in Wraysbury aged seventy-two years, October 29, 1662. This was the very year that Hampshire County was formed including all of the present counties of Hampden, Hampshire, Franklin and Berkshire.

William Pynchon had no other children than the four already mentioned, John being his only son. The 1638 letter of Rev. George Moxon to Governor Winthrop, already quoted, contains the allusion to one of Pynchon's numerous hired helpers, which has misled so many historians:

Mr. Pynchon lately lost a boy who, tendinge cowes near our river, too venturously went into a birchen canowe, wch overturned & he was drowned.

One of the four large bronze tablets on the Hampden County Memorial Bridge at Springfield starts with the following inscription:

Memorial of William Pynchon, who in 1636 led the first company of settlers to this river in the Massachusetts Bay Colony: and of his son, John Pynchon, soldier, magistrate & citizen, who after his father's return to England, sixteen years later, was for half a century the important man of an ever-widening region.

As has been well said, "William Pynchon founded Roxbury, mother of fourteen towns, and Springfield, mother of thirteen New England towns, and god-mother to quite as many more." Both Roxbury and Springfield have named streets for him, and there is an elaborate Pynchon family tombstone in the Peabody Cemetery. Beyond these, the only other public memorial of William Pynchon takes the form of three of the sixteen bronze panels designed by Gail S. Corbett for main doors to the Municipal Group in Springfield, entitled respectively, "Buying Lands," "Trading With the Indians," and "William Pynchon and Settlers from Roxbury en route to Springfield."

Shays's Rebellion*

BY CHARLES A. SHRINER, PATERSON, N. J.

E demand a revision of the constitution in order that the state government may be deprived of its aristocratic features; that the salary of the governor and the grants made to the attorney-general may be reduced; that lawyers may be prevented from continuing their extortions; that all debts may be annihilated; that taxes may be made less burdensome; that the payment of the debt to the Federal Government may cease and our state debt liquidated by the sale of state lands; that there may be a large issue of paper money.-The Massachusetts rebels in 1786.

No morn ever dawned more favorably than ours did, and no day was ever more clouded than the present. We are fast verging to anarchy and confusion.-Washington to Madison, November 6, 1786.

Discontent-The people of Massachusetts had made great sacrifices in the cause of liberty and had hoped for great results. When the close of the Revolutionary War, with an unsettled state of government and commerce, brought on a wave of "hard times," they began to wonder whether what they had secured was worth the price they had paid. They had liberty, but there was less prosperity than there had been in colonial times. A large majority viewed with disfavor the recently adopted state constitution; the United States constitution was still among the things talked of, and all was so unsettled that the people began to squirm, knowing not which way to turn for relief.

In the light of the present day the causes of this discontent are plainly discernible. Before the war the debt of Massachusetts was £100,000; at the close of the war this sum had grown to £1,300,000 and in addition to this the state was indebted to its own soldiers to the extent of £250,000; its proportion of the Federal debt was

*This is the fifth and last of a series of articles on "American Rebellions" by Mr. Shriner, who is author of "Wit, Wisdom and Foibles of the Great." For more extensive treatment of modern date of this subject the reader is referred to a chapter in "Western Massachusetts-A History," to appear from the press of the Lewis Historical Publishing Company, Inc., of New York City, early in 1926.

computed at £1,500,000. The continental paper money had depreciated almost to the point of worthlessness and nothing better had been found to take its place as a circulating medium. The Federal government was as poor as were the individual states; all had difficulty in meeting ordinary expenses.

Demand for many necessaries of life, and a few of its luxuries, had established commerce with the nations of Europe, but this commerce required coin made of gold or silver or an equivalent; the state indulged its ever expensive spirit of patriotism by contributing to the needs of the Federal government and the result of it all was that the purse, which had never been anything but slender, was almost depleted.

People resorted to barter: they carried grain, food and fish to market, but there were no large warehouses and cold storage was not to be found even in the dictionary. The currency proved cumbersome, even when taken for immediate consumption, and there was no authority to fix a standard of value. The legislature in 1782 attempted to afford some relief by enacting that neat cattle and some other products of the soil could be used as a medium of exchange, but the law so little answered the purpose for which it was enacted that it remained in force only a very short time.

Numerous as were the perplexities besetting continual barter, the people might have worried along, for nearly all were in the same predicament, but the annoying became the impossible when taxes and foreign exchange fell due. The products of the field could not be exchanged for a receipted tax bill and the merchants of Europe objected to fish as a substitute for coin.

As the general impoverishment of the country increased the work of the courts kept pace with it. The laws for the collection of debts were crude the creditor who had priority in bringing suit had the best chance of having his claim satisfied. Executions were levied in the order of the attachments and the laws still provided imprisonment for insolvent debtors. In 1784 every fourth man in Groton, if not every third, had from one to twelve suits against him, and in the same year Gloucester, with a population of less than 50,000, had a civil court calendar of over two thousand suits. Men who were accounted experts at figures declared that all the money in circulation was not equal to one-sixth of the total amount of taxes levied.

Blaming the government for all discontent not otherwise easily accounted for having already developed as one of the frailties of human nature in the American republic, the belief gained ground that the governor and council intended to bring the state into lordships and make serfs of all people who had no means of paying their taxes. The senate was pointed to as a body of aristocrats, the members of which took care of themselves and their families, instances being cited where seven or eight prominent offices were held in one family. There were complaints that there were too many officials with high salaries, that unreasonable grants had been made to the attorney-general and others; people felt assured that if the governor and some other high officers would be satisfied with a moderate compensation for services taxes would be less burdensome.

The dislike of lawyers, due to the numerous civil suits, soon spread to the courts and a cry arose for the abolishment of both, as they were regarded equally culpable as means of extortion.

The people in the interior counties saw that they were suffering more in proportion than the residents along the coast: an intense feeling of bitterness was the result. But even in the coast towns there was no lack of discontent and the people there pointed with envy at Boston, where there was a greater resemblance at least of prosperity than anywhere else. So Boston became a word. of reproach and, if the people of the state had been permitted to vote on the proposition, Boston would have been shorn of its power, and the General Court would have been compelled to resolve itself into a peripatetic body.

To make matters worse, the soldiers, whose manners and habits had certainly not been refined by years of warfare, were seeking employment which was not to be found.

Resistance to constituted authority as a means of redressing grievances had been successful in so many instances, especially in Massachusetts, that the argument was soon advanced that what had been done before could be done again. The air was still surcharged with the electricity of rebellion. Conventions had been the beginning of the overturning of British rule and so the people in Western Massachusetts, presuming that conventions could have no result other than the attainment of the will of the people, began to meet as early as 1782 to discuss the overturning of the rule of Boston, just as they had met only a few years before to discuss the