In the spring of 1629, when the Secretary of the Company of the Massachusetts Bay in New England was preparing a memorandum of materials to be obtained "to send for Newe England" in the ships that sailed on April 25th of that year, among the fabrics and food stuffs, the seed grain, potatoes, tame turkeys, and copper kettles of French making without bars of iron about them, were listed brass ladles and spoons and "pewter botles of pyntes & qrts." The little fleet reached Naumkeck (now Salem) on June 30th, and on its return voyage, a month later, Master Thomas Graves, the "Engynere," expert in mines, fortifications, and surveys, who had come over with Governor Endecott the previous year, sent home a report to the Company in which he listed "such needefull things as every Planter doth or ought to provide to go to New-England," including victuals for a whole year, apparel, arms, tools, spices, and various household implements, among which appear "wooden platters, dishes, spoons and trenchers," with no mention of pewter. The records of the Company make mention of carpenters, shoemakers, plasterers, vine planters, and men skillful in making pitch, salt, etc., but nowhere does the trade of the pewterer appear. Pewter did not come into general use among the more prosperous farmers in England until about the middle of the sixteenth century and then only as a salt--a dish of honor, or three or four pieces for use on more formal occasions. It was the wooden trencher that was commonest in use in all middle-class families until well after the year 1700, and this was true both in New England and Old England. In homes where the shilling was made to go as far as possible, the wooden trencher, like the homespun coat, lingered in use for a century later. At least one family in Essex County, Massachusetts, was still using its wooden plates of an earlier period as late as 1876, when the menfolk left home to work for two or three days in the early fall on the thatch banks beside Plum Island river. And this happened in a comfortably situated, but thrifty, family. The rough usage given the common tableware in the crude camp by the marshes had taught the housewife the desirability of bringing down from the chest in the attic, at least once a year, the discarded wooden plates used in her childhood.