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sorts of cattle, the just interests of each person therein having been legally settled more than forty years; and the proprietors have accordingly respectively bought and sold their interests, as they have seen meet; and for the securing said lands from damage to ourselves by our neighbors of Watertown, the proprietors of the said lands have, at their great charge, erected a stone wall, more than one mile in length, and made provision of gates upon the highways as was needful.
We do also humbly inform your Excellency and Council, that the lands above petitioned for are of so great concernment to the inhabitants of this town for their necessary supplies of timber, firewood, and pasture, that, should we be deprived thereof, it would be the inevitable ruin of more than eighty families of his Majesty's subjects here settled, who have spent their strength and estates in confidence of their indubitable right and peaceable enjoyment thereof, by virtue of his Majesty's royal Charter, and to them legally derived in manner as is above recited.
We do therefore humbly render to your Excellency and honorable Council our humble and thankful acknowledgement of your respect to our welfare (as well as to justice and equity) in giving us this opportunity to inform your Excellency and Honors of our claim and just title to those lands petitioned for, as above said, and do humbly pray that the royal authority wherewith his Majesty have invested your Excellency for the government of this part of his dominion may put a check upon the abovesaid information and unreasonable request of the petitioner for said lands, and that your petitioners may not be thence illegally ejected or disturbed in their peaceable enjoyment thereof, contrary to his late Majesty's declaration of the 26 July 1683, published upon the issuing a Quo Warranto against the late charter of this Colony, and to his present Majesty's gracious declaration to all his loving subjects for liberty of conscience and maintaining them in all their properties and possessions in any their lands and properties whatsoever; the benefit whereof we humbly claim.
Your petitioners are his Majesty's most loyal subjects and your Excellency's humble servants, in the name and by the order of the inhabitants of Cambridge.
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1 Mass. Arch., CXXVIII. 297.
Boston. Houghton and Mifflin. 1877.
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