V.
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An effort was now made to get a confirmation of the grant occupied by the new settlers, but as long as Sir Edmund Andros was the Royal Governor of the Province, it was impossible. A delay ensued until William and Mary became sovereigns of Great Britain. The new settlers had not yet an organized town government. The settlement, like the first settlements in Windsor and Hartford, received its name from the mother town.40 But the New Roxbury people wished to have a name of their own and a town of their own. At the beginning of the year 1690 they chose a committee of three to petition the General Court to substitute a new name for that of New Roxbury. The committee at once conferred with the mother town, for on Jan. 13, 1690, Roxbury held a town meeting at which it was voted to request the General Court to allow the settlement in the Nipmuck country to become a town, to confirm the grant and to give a suitable name. The New Roxbury committee pressed their claims, and on March 18, 1690, the General Court confirmed the grant and voted that the name of the plantation be Woodstock. We owe the name of Woodstock to Capt. Samuel Sewell41 who was Chief-Justice of Massachusetts from 1718 to 1728. He has been called “a typical Puritan” and “the Pepys of New England,”—the man who judged the witches of Salem and afterwards repented of it.42 In 1690, when Count Frontenac’s43 forces were coming down from Canada upon the settlements of the United Colonies, and Massachusetts determined to ask the help of Connecticut in protecting the upper towns on the Connecticut River, Captain Sewell rode past Woodstock on his way to Connecticut. He was no doubt on business of state, being one of the Governor’s Counsellors, and one of a Committee of Seven of the Council with the same power as the Council to arrange “for setting forth the forces.”44 The proximity of New Roxbury to Oxford in Massachusetts suggested to him, he tells us, the name of a famous place near old Oxford in England.
In his Diary of March 18, 1689/90, Capt. Sewell, says:
“I gave New Roxbury the name of Woodstock, because of its nearness to Oxford, for the sake of Queen Elizabeth, and the notable meetings that have been held at the place bearing that name in England, some of which Dr. Gilbert45 informed me of when in England. It stands on a Hill. I saw it as I [went] to Coventry, but left it on the left hand. Some told Capt. Ruggles46 that I gave the name and put words in his mouth to desire of me a Bell for the Town.”47
Though Judge Sewell, years after his first visit had social relations48 with some of the inhabitants of Woodstock, there is no evidence to show that he ever gave a bell to the town or to the church.49 But he gave us something better, a good name,—the name of Woodstock, associated with the memories of Saxon and Norman Kings, the spot where King Alfred translated “The Consolations of Philosophy,” by Boethius, the birthplace of the poet Chaucer, the prison of Queen Elizabeth.50 History and romance51 have made illustrious the names of Woodstock and Woodstock Park, and “the notable meetings” spoken of by Judge Sewell as having taken place in Old England have been transferred to the settlement in New England. Surely the name of Woodstock, as applied to the little village of New Roxbury, has proved to be no misnomer.
It should be said that the western part of the town, when it became a settlement years after, revived the old name of New Roxbury. The church in West Woodstock belonged to what was called the Parish of New Roxbury, or the Second Precinct of Woodstock.52