East Field

Research notes

What we know. John Gurney Sr. was the original grantee of two separate two-acre lots in the East Field, both confirmed at manuscript level in the Weymouth Land Grants book (film 007009659): the first (ms p. 12, “John Gurny”) by 1643 held by Robert Randoll, bounded east by Edmond Hart and the highway, west by Robert Cooke, north and south by Nathaniel Addames; the second (ms p. 23, “John Gurnie”) held by Nathaniel Addames, bounded east by Jeffery Staple, west by Robert Randoll, north by a cedar swamp, south by the highway (Nash’s printed transcription, Historical Sketch of Weymouth, Appendix C, pp. 258, 270, matches the manuscript). Both were “first granted/given to” John and reassigned by 1643.^[1] The East Field was one of early Weymouth’s communal open-field arable divisions in the original North/East Weymouth settlement: neighboring lots are bounded “with the sea,” the Back River, and “a greate pond” (Whitman’s Pond), so the field lay east of the first settlement toward the water. Several of these neighbours were Buckinghamshire (Aylesbury-Vale) emigrants — Robert Randall of Wendover, and (in the adjacent Mill Field) William Brandon of Ashton Clinton — part of a documented Wendover/Lee → Dorchester → Weymouth cluster; see the cohort analysis in research/topics/g13-john-gurney-immigration-by-association.md.

What we don’t. The bounds of the 17th-century East Field are not established from sources to hand, and the grant was “subsequently granted to others,” leaving no later Gurney occupation to anchor it. The coordinate is a low-precision placement in the North/East Weymouth settlement area near the Back River. Locating it would require the Weymouth proprietors’ land-grant book entries. Tracked as a research lead.

See the John Gurney (G13) companion and case file, the printed extracts in nash-…-gurney-extracts.md, and the manuscript read in weymouth-land-grants-book-1643-gurney-manuscript-extracts.md. Related places: Mill Field, Great Lots east of Whitman’s Pond.