In March John Alden and Miles Standish were directed to go to Sandwich, “with all convenient speed, and set forth the bounds of the land granted there.” In October Thomas Prince and again Miles Standish were appointed to pass upon questions affecting land tenure. Complaint, however, seems to have been then not so much in regard to the division of land as to certain members of the community who were deemed “unfit for church society.” And for the adjustment of future dangers, “evils or discords that may happen in the disposal of lands or other occasions within the town,” it was agreed that some one of the Governor’s Council should sit, in an advisory capacity, with the town committee to determine who should be permitted to hold land. John Alden and Miles Standish served many times as such advisers; in 1650 Standish received a tract of some forty acres for his trouble in settling land disputes. It is interesting that Freeman, historian of Cape Cod, claims Priscilla Mullins for Barnstable, and allows us to suppose that the visits there of Alden and Standish led to the acquaintance that ended in the discomfiture of Standish, and to the particular glory of Priscilla, with her thrust: “Why don’t you speak for yourself, John?” Another love story is told by Amos Otis, in his “Barnstable Families,” of Thomas Hatch, who was among the first landowners in Yarmouth and Barnstable, a widower and rival with another for the hand of a neighbor’s daughter. All three were expert reapers, and Grace agreed to marry the man who should worst her in the field. Three equal portions were set off and the contest began; but when Grace saw that she was likely to come out ahead, with Thomas a bad third, she slyly cut over into his plot; and he, fired by such encouragement, justified her favor. The system of government and land tenure in the later settlements were patterned after Plymouth: there were individual holdings of land and common lands which from time to time were apportioned to the townsmen, not only in accord with “necessity and ability,” but “estate and quality”: fertile ground, one might guess, for difference of opinion. By 1651, at Sandwich, “the conditions on which the grant of the township was made having been fulfilled, a deed of the plantation was executed by Governor Bradford to Mr. Edmund Freeman, who made conveyance to his associates,” a process which resembled the taking over of Plymouth from the Merchant Adventurers of London.