Record-Keeping and Other Troublemaking: Thomas Lechford and Law Reform in Colonial Massachusetts

Abstract

Historians have long discussed the different ways in which the first professional lawyer to practice in Massachusetts Bay Colony, Thomas Lechford, was at odds with colony authorities in his three-year stay there—from June 27, 1638 to August 3, 1641. Some accounts have focused on his religious views, since Lechford disagreed with the strict forms of church membership prescribed by the colony's religion, Congregationalism. When he returned to England, Lechford wrote a book called Plain Dealing in which he argued against this form of religious organization, claiming that he had received enough first-hand experience to recommend a return to the Church of England. This book has been an important source of information on religious and political arrangements in colonial Massachusetts, and so for many, the picture of Lechford as religious dissenter is familiar. Another important picture of Lechford, especially familiar to historians of the American legal profession, is Lechford the impecunious lawyer disbarred for the unethical practice of law. Lechford himself had written, “I am…forced to get my living by writing petty things, which scarce finds me bread.” He had been disbarred for “embracery,” pleading to a jury out of court, and it was assumed that this combination of circumstances forced him to return to England. James Savage wrote under his biographical entry for Lechford: “left here, aft. vain attempt to earn bread.” Other nineteenth-century scholars of colonial Massachusetts said much the same thing. William Whitmore, in an introduction to a collection of Massachusetts colonial laws, wrote that Lechford “was finally starved into returning to England.”