In this country, however, the Puritans and the Pilgrims approved of neither the common law nor the English judicial system, and as lawyers were only part of that system, they considered the abolition of the profession from their society as an end devoutly to be wished for and promptly sought. Among the Pilgrim fathers there was not a single lawyer, while among the Puritans there were only four or five who had been educated as lawyers and even they had never practiced. The consequence was that during the seventeenth century and far into the eighteenth, lawyers had little place in the social or political institutions of the colonies. In New England there was a theocracy. The judges--none of them lawyers--were all either ministers or directly under the influence of the clergy. A colonial common law grew up among them, based on a theological reasoning and was really administered without lawyers. In the Massachusetts body of liberties, it was provided that a man unfit to plead might employ a person not objectionable to the Court to plead for him, on condition that he give him no fee or reward. In 1663 a usual or common attorney was prohibited from sitting in the general court. As society progressed, however, as commerce and trade increased, as wealth grew, as business transactions became more extended and as learning spread from the clergy to other persons, opportunity and inducement were furnished for the study of the law, and professional training became more general. The crying need for a learned and honorable profession of the law was made manifest by the growth of a class of advocates and advisers whose influence was most pernicious. Litigants needed guidance in the presentation of their cases and no learned profession being available, the underbailiffs, undersheriffs, clerks and other underlings of the administration of justice began to practice, without real knowledge. Greedy and lacking in principle, they developed trickery and stirred up litigation for their own profit, just as their predecessors had done three hundred years before in England. Colonial statutes were then passed, forbidding such underlings of the court to practice law at all. But lawyers were not popular in colonial days even after the Bar became able and respectable. In fact a bitter spirit was manifested against lawyers even as late as Shays's Rebellion after the Revolutionary War.