hority; the commissioners themselves
attempted to organize a government and to exercise jurisdiction there in
the King's name; but in 1668 Massachusetts, denying all other
pretensions, adopted a resolution asserting her full right of control,
and, sending commissioners with a military escort to York, resumed
jurisdiction of the province. The inhabitants did not know what to do.
Some upheld the Gorges agents and the commissioners; others adhered to
Massachusetts. Even in Massachusetts itself there were grave differences
of opinion, for the younger generation did not always follow the old
magistrates, and the people of Boston were developing views both of
government and of the proper relations toward England that were at
variance with those of the more conservative country towns and
districts.

The larger disputes between the colonies were frequently accompanied
with lesser disputes between the towns over their boundaries; and both
at this time and for years afterwards there was scarcely an important
settlement in New England that did not have some trouble with its
neighbor. In 1666 Stamford and Greenwich came to blows over their
dividing line, and in 1672 men from New London and Lyme attempted to mow
the same piece of meadow and had a pitched battle with clubs and
scythes. Not many years later the inhabitants of Windsor and Enfield
"were so fiercely engag'd" over a disputed strip of land, reported an
eye-witness, that a hundred men met to decide this controversy by force,
"a resolute combat" ensuing between them "in which many blows were given
to the exasperating each party, so that the lives and limbs of his
Majesties subjects were endangered thereby."

Though clubs and scythes and fists are dangerous weapons enough, the
only real fighting in which the colonists engaged was with the Indians
and with weapons consisting of pikes and muskets. Indian attacks were an
ever-present danger, for the stretches of unoccupied land between the
colonies were the hunting-grounds of the Narragansetts of eastern
Connecticut and western Rhode Island, the Pequots of Connecticut, the
Wampanoags of Plymouth and its neighborhood, the Pennacooks of New
Hampshire, and the Abenaki tribes of Maine. Plague and starvation had so
far weakened the coast Indians before the arrival of the first colonists
that the new settlements had been but little disturbed; but,
unfortunately, as the first comers pushed into the interior, founding
new plantations,