Note 534 — NEW ENGLISH CANAAN OR NEW CANAAN. (continued 3)

The first two deacons of the church at Charlestown were Robert Hale and Ralph Monsall. The Charlestown church, however, was not organized until November, 1632, sixteen months after Ratcliff’s punishment. (Budington’s First Church of Charlestown, pp. 31, 34.)

The Boston church in June, 1631, had but one deacon, William Aspinwall (Ellis’s First Church of Boston, p. 328), in regard to whom there is a detailed note in Savage’s Winthrop (p. *32). He was the deacon of the Charlestown church at the time Morton was arraigned and punished, and it is possible that Morton refers to him as Shackles. Aspinwall was a man of prominence in the settlement; but it must be remembered that, thirteen years later, “two of our ministers’ sons, being students in the college, robbed two dwelling-houses in the night of some pounds. Being found out, they were ordered by the gouvernours of the college to be there whipped, which was performed by the president himself—yet they were about 20 years of age.” (Winthrop, vol. ii. p. *166.) If the president of the college could officiate at the whipping-post in 1644, in a case of what Winthrop calls “burglary,” there seems no good reason why the deacon of the church should not have officiated there in 1631 in a case which the same authority calls “foul, scandalous invectives against our churches.”