Sep 30, 2010 - Sale 2223

Sale 2223 - Lot 102

Price Realized: $ 5,760
?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 1,000 - $ 1,500
"NO FRESH'N SHALL TALK SAUCILY TO HIS SENIOR" (HARVARD UNIVERSITY.) Comfort Carpenter's Book. Manuscript memorandum book, 24 pages. 12mo, stitched leaves without covers; one leaf slightly defective, another fragment bound in, otherwise only minor wear. In modern cloth folding case. Stoughton and Cambridge, MA, 1726-30, 1754
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Comfort Carpenter (1709-1739) was a lawyer, merchant and militia captain who spent most of his life in Rehoboth, MA. He entered Harvard College in 1726 and graduated in 1730; according to family tradition, he was killed by Indians at the frontier fort in Charlestown, NH.
Carpenter was apparently presented with this memorandum book upon his arrival at Harvard in 1726. The first pages are a transcript in an unknown hand of the "Statuta Leges et Privilegia," the 23 laws of the college, written out in the original Latin. The final law orders that each student shall receive a copy signed by the president upon his arrival. The next entry is a short Latin note duly signed by President Benjamin Wadsworth and tutor Henry Flynt, dated 11 August 1726. The back page is titled "Comfort Carpenter's Book, March 29th 1727, righten in his study in Stoughton [Hall]."
Following the laws is an amusing list of eight Harvard freshman customs in Carpenter's hand, such as "1. No freshman shall wear his hat in the Colledge yard except it rains snows haills or he is on horsback or hath both hands full or the like" and "2. No fresh'n shall talk saucily to his senior or speak to him w't his hat on but if he be a graduate put Sr before his name." Also of interest is a six-page list of Carpenter's books, many of them noted as sold or loaned to named friends.
A few later entries and doodles were done by Comfort's son Cyril Carpenter (1736-1816), including two pages of quotations from Isaac Watts which Carpenter has dated 1754. This volume was still in the Carpenter family as late as 1898, when the Harvard customs were quoted in Amos Carpenter's genealogy, page 66.