Scope and Content: While Massachusetts session laws, commonly known as Province laws (1692-1780) and Acts and resolves (from 1780), and codes beginning with Revised statutes (1836) are readily available, such materials from the colonial period are considerably more obscure. –The Massachusetts General Court passed an order on Mar. 12, 1638 (Mass Recs 1: 222) to have drawn up a “compendious abridgement” of “necessary and fundamental laws” proposed by the freemen of every town, also a compendium of orders passed by the court to this point. As Governor John Winthrop noted a year later (History 1: 388), while the effort continued to produce a legal code, “the people had long desired a body of laws, and thought that their condition was unsafe, while so much power rested in the discretion of the magistrates.”  Both John Cotton and Nathaniel Ward prepared drafts, that of the latter being chosen as the basis for the colony’s first code. On Dec. 10, 1641, what was known as the Body of liberties (History 2:66) was voted by the General Court to “stand in force” (Mass Recs, 1: 346). It was circulated only in manuscript, a copy of which survives at the Boston Athenaeum, and was not printed until 1843 (Mass Hist Soc Coll 3rd ser, viii) –A 1648 revision authorized in 1647, The book of the general laws and liberties. Cambridge, 1648, exists in a unique printed copy at the Huntington Library. The existence of a printed 1650 supplement, not surviving, has been inferred. A 1660 revision authorized in 1658, was printed in Cambridge with the same title, followed by various supplements, 1664-1668. A 1672 revision was printed, The general laws and liberties of the Massachusetts Colony. Cambridge : S. Green, 1672, followed by supplements through 1686.
Notes: The state secretary is custodian of this and other foundation records of the Commonwealth
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