PLUS CA CHANGE. Just finished David Lindsay's Mayflower Bastard (details or comparison shop.) Lindsay is a descendant of Richard More, a man with a convoluted pedigree who along with his brother and sisters travelled on Mayflower. Richard More was either a foster child or an indentured servant of William Brewster. Some of the side stories merit note. Consider entrepreneur Isaac Allerton. At p. 68, Lindsay combines speculation with fact. "At the same time, as Allerton dropped in on Brewster more often to discuss such things, he began to let his gaze rest a little longer than usual on the body of Richard's foster sister, the twenty-year-old Fear Brewster. A cynic might say that he was taking out a little insurance. In any event, the same year saw both his marriage to Brewster's daughter and his appointment to the task of straightening out Plimouth's accounts." Puts Chelsea Clinton's entry level job in perspective, doesn't it?

As the colony developed, tensions grew between the Believers and the Adventurers. By 1636, religious tensions developed: ""Founded by the Dutchman Hendrik Niclaes in the sixteenth century, familism sometimes went by the name 'the Family of Love.' Its central tenet held that mankind had become sinless since the Crucifixion; thus, any human impulse should be deemed pure. Familists freely practiced adultery (with one early adherent going so far as to marry his own daughter) and sometimes held property in common. The most pernicious aspect of the sect, however, was the tendency of its members to infiltrate normal society, attending church and holding positions of prominence. Caught, familists would renounce their ways, then simply continue to observe them on the sly." Ye hippie communes and coate and tye radicals, forsooth!

The concluding pages, on the collapse and re-emergence of the Puritan tradition, now coexisting with the commercial tradition, is worth reading, particularly in light of the efforts of Old Believers to equate Iraq with Vietnam, and other returns to the skirmishes of the Sixties.