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the dismissal of the Reverend Samuel Parris, the Salem Village minister who played a central role as a supporter of the trials and an accuser of the witches. And a third, Benjamin Fuller, was one of thirty-six Salem Village residents who refused to pay their taxes in support of Samuel Parris’s ministerial salary when Parris first arrived (amid controversy) in Salem Village in 1689. 29
    The “Salem wassail” (as I have come to call it) surely represented no threat to the social or cultural fabric of Massachusetts, just as more frequent but similar incidents in Europe of misrule and charivari were hardly revolutionary acts. This was a trivial event, and the only harm it did was to the family of one elderly man (possibly a stingy and ill-tempered individual). Still, the episode suggests something of the animosities engendered by the cultural fault lines that continued to divide “official” Massachusetts culture from the lingering traditions it tried so hard (and on the whole with such great success) to eradicate.
    A Window on Popular Culture:

The Dominion of New England
    Once, for a few strange years, the curtain of Puritan suppression was lifted, and not by choice. By 1680 it was becoming clear that the Restoration government in London would not continue to tolerate the Puritan political culture that had been established in New England. Knowing that its official charter of incorporation might be abrogated, in 1681 the Massachusetts General Court reluctantly revoked several of the colony’s laws that were most obnoxious to the English authorities. (One of the laws thus revoked was the act banning the celebration of Christmas.) But this was not enough to save the charter. It was abrogated in 1684, and during the three years from 1687 through 1689, Massachusetts was governed directly from London, as part of a short-lived entity known as the “Dominion of New England.”
    What happened during these three years was deeply humiliating to the Puritans. The hated governor of the Dominion, Sir Edmund Andros,ruled most of New England (along with New York). From his headquarters in Boston, Governor Andros attempted to impose English law and custom in the very seat of Puritan power. On Christmas Day, 1686, for example, two religious services were performed at the Boston Townhouse, and Andros attended both of them, with “a Red-Coat [soldier] going on his right hand and Capt. George on the left.”
    But Governor Andros did not simply impose Anglican practices on a populace that was universally resistant to them. One effect of his rule was to permit the public expression of a set of seasonal practices that were associated with the popular culture of seventeenth-century England. Those expressions of the popular culture could not have surfaced openly without the legal protection offered by the Andros regime. Under its protective mantle, during this brief period, it was possible for the first time in Massachusetts to act out heterodox rituals in public. A few Bostonians celebrated Shrove Tuesday (Mardi Gras) by dancing in the streets, and a maypole was erected in Charlestown.
    Christmas-keeping apparently began even in advance of the Andros regime. On December 25, 1685, the magistrate Samuel Sewall noted that “Some somehow observe the day,” but he added, as if to reassure himself, that “the Body of the People profane it, and blessed be God no Authority yet to compel them to keep it.” (Sewall also offered himself the reassurance that there was “less Christmas-keeping [this year] than last year, fewer Shops Shut up,” but that reassurance implicitly ceded the point that in 1684 an even greater number of persons had “observed” Christmas.) A year later, on December 25, 1686, Sewall once again noted, “Shops open today generally and persons about their occasions.” (Again, the key word here may have been “generally,” because Sewall went on to acknowledge, “Some, but few, Carts [were] at Town with wood….” 30