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Plantation with thirty-five non-Separatist emigrants—most of them “lusty yonge men, many of them wild enough.” One month later, onChristmas, a holiday that the Separatists didn’t recognize, most of them refused when Bradford called them out to work. He respected their appeal to their own religious law, but when he returned from the frozen fields to find them “pitching the barr” and playing “stoole-ball, and shuch like sports”—frolicking while others toiled away—he confiscated their “implements” and officially forbade “gameing and reveling in the streets.” He recounts this Christmas story as a bit of “mirth” but concludes it with a haunting boast: play was gone from Plymouth Plantation, “at least openly.”
    Plymouth’s most severe crackdown on pleasure came in the year 1642, a year “of sundrie notorious sins,” when a young servant,Thomas Granger, no older than seventeen, was spied having sexual congress with a mare. After submitting to days of interrogation, which required him to identify a parade of animals with whom he may or may not have lain, Granger confessed to committing “buggery” with: “a mare, a cowe, tow [
sic
] goats, five sheep, 2 calves, and”—a winking joke among Early American scholars—“a turkey.” According toLevitican law (20:13, per Bradford), this bizarrely detailed crime ofperversion (Bradford calledit a “sadd accidente”) required an equally ridiculous punishment. Poor Granger, whose likeness was also recognized in a certain piglet’s face, had to stand by as the mare, the cow, and the “lesser catle” were slaughtered before his eyes. “Then he him selfe,” Bradford writes, “was executed.” The cattle were buried in a massive pit, “and no use made of any part of them.” Apparently the turkey lived to sin another day.
    This story warned “how one wicked person may infecte many” and showed what happens when “so many wicked persons and profane people” come pouring in from Europe to “mixe them selves amongst” the Separatists. Granger had learned to practice “such wickedness” in England (not, Bradford contended, on Plymouth Plantation), and the only way to prevent the foreign sickness from spreading throughout the God-fearing colonies was to cure it with the harshest medicine.
    Granger’s may have been the most perverse example in Bradford’s cautionary history, but it wasn’t the most menacing. That had come some fifteen years earlier, when they crushedThomas Morton’s “New English Canaan.”
    BRADFORD CAME TO PLYMOUTH to build a spiky fortress to fence out all things mixed and messy. His eventual enemy, Thomas Morton, crossed the same ocean two years later with an eye for natural beauty and a powerful libido. From the moment Bradford arrived in America, he put up his dukes against the “hidious & desolate wilderness, full of wild beasts & wild men,” but Morton wanted to dive right in. An Anglican lawyer from England’s West Country, he described the lush landscape as a light-toned virgin who “long[s] to be sped” and to “meete her lover in a Nuptiall bed.” Morton belonged to a leisurely class, and an older generation. If Bradford was at the forefront of a Puritan revolution that was rattling its sabers across Northern Europe, Morton was a son of theElizabethan Age, with its free-spirited politics and quick-witted hedonism. On his first trip over, he was taking a summer vacation.
    Little is known of Morton’s Devonshire youth. He was born to landed gentry around 1579. From an early age he practiced falconry and other noble sports. Yet the fact that he studied law atClifford’s Inn, on FleetStreet, all but guarantees he had a healthy education in the “science” in the “Art of Revels.” TheInns of Court and Chancery, in Morton’s time, fostered a fast-paced college culture (not unlike today) that asked little more of their young gentlemen scholars than to show their faces at regular moot courts. There was