The seven-year partnership between the London adventurers and the planters at Plymouth, unless renewed, as once had been suggested, was to end about 1627 or 1628. In fact, the succession of blighted hopes and dissensions just described dissolved it earlier. Several innovations prepared the way for a new arrangement satisfactory both to the colonists and to their English supporters. After two harvests the colony itself had decided that the task of raising food for the settlers would prosper only if it was separated from that of earning profits for London. In 1623 a parcel of land was allotted to each man to till for his family and to maintain those who were exempt from agricultural employment because of other duties. In abandoning the “common course and condition” everyone worked harder and more willingly. The food problem was ended, and after the first abundant harvest under individual cultivation, the Pilgrims did not have to endure the meager rations of the first years. The plots assigned them permanently in 1624 became privately owned in 1627. Three heifers and a bull sent over by the adventurers in response to Bradford’s request throve and multiplied, so there was cattle to be divided among the households when the general stock was terminated.[17] [Illustration: Print by Wenceslaus Hollar in 1644 reproduced here through the courtesy of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. ] The alliance between the London adventurers and the colony began to crack as early as 1623, when several men arrived in Plymouth “upon their own Particulars.” This meant they were not financed by the joint stock and thus had no share in the land or profits common to the company; they were also free from employment for the common good. John Oldham and his associates, arriving in the _Anne_, were the first. Those of the “particulars” who accepted Bradford’s terms and stayed soon displayed jealousy over the details providing for their inclusion as members of the colony. The Reverend John Lyford, a Puritan clergyman sent over by the adventurers, probably to restrain the Separatist tendency of the Pilgrims, succeeded in fanning to flame the friction smoldering among the colonists who held different religious views. While Bradford’s scathing condemnation of Lyford is clearly biased, it must be admitted that the minister was a malcontent and hypocrite, to specify some of his more mentionable sins. He and Oldham secretly wrote letters full of disgruntled complaints to the company about how things were run. For example, the “particulars” disliked their exclusion from the fur trade and the restrictions giving them so small a voice in government. Fortunately, Bradford intercepted their letters and held them until the elements of ferment gave rise to a public display of the Oldham-Lyford opposition. The Governor skillfully suppressed the dissidents, but when Lyford’s friends among the adventurers in England heard about it, their distrust of the Pilgrims’