Massachusetts Bay Colony
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50 free Massachusetts Bay Colony trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
The Massachusetts Bay Colony began in 1628 as a business venture and quickly became something stranger: a Puritan experiment in building a godly society from scratch on the edge of the Atlantic. Within a decade tens of thousands of English settlers had followed, and the towns they built around Boston and Salem shaped New England for centuries. This quiz gathers the fun facts behind that story. You will meet the governors who ran the colony and the dissenters they threw out, the laws that policed holidays, clothing and schooling, the coins the colony minted without permission, and a long list of American firsts in education, publishing and public life. The wars with Native nations, the quarrels with the Crown and the witch trials that closed the era are here too. It is written for students revising colonial America, for teachers and quiz hosts who want accurate questions, and for anyone curious about how early Massachusetts worked. Every answer comes with a short explanation.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which holiday did Puritan Massachusetts Bay outlaw in 1659, fining anyone caught celebrating it five shillings?
Christmas
Christmas was banned because Puritans said the festival had pagan roots and no place in scripture. Celebrating it only became fashionable around Boston in the mid-19th century.
Q 02Which fish, vital to Massachusetts Bay's early trade, is honored by a wooden carving displayed in the State House?
Codfish
Codfish was the catch behind the colony's first industry. A carving nearly five feet long, called the Sacred Cod, has watched over Massachusetts lawmakers for about three centuries.
Q 03Which college, founded by a Massachusetts Bay vote in 1636, was named for a minister who left it his library?
Harvard
Harvard took its name from John Harvard, a young Charlestown minister who died in 1638 and left the school his 400-volume library and a large sum of money.
Q 04Which biblical image did John Winthrop use in 1630 to warn Massachusetts Bay settlers the world was watching?
A city upon a hill
A city upon a hill echoes the Sermon on the Mount. Presidents John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan both borrowed the image centuries later to describe America.
Q 05Despite the popular image of burning, how were the nineteen people condemned in the 1692 Salem witch trials executed?
Hanging
Hanging was the fate of all nineteen, fourteen women and five men. A twentieth victim, Giles Corey, was crushed under heavy stones for refusing to enter a plea.
Q 06Which Salem minister, convicted of sedition and heresy by Massachusetts Bay in 1635, fled south and founded Providence?
Roger Williams
Roger Williams slipped away during a January blizzard, three days before the sheriff came for him. His new settlement promised what he called liberty of conscience.
Q 07Which Founding Father dropped out of Boston Latin School, founded in 1635 and among America's oldest schools?
Benjamin Franklin
Benjamin Franklin's schooling ended when he was ten, though his parents had talked of a career in the church. Five signers of the Declaration of Independence studied at the school.
Q 08Which religious group did Massachusetts Bay ban on pain of death, executing four of its members between 1659 and 1661?
Quakers
Quakers such as Mary Dyer kept returning to Boston to defy the ban. A bronze statue of Dyer was later placed outside the Massachusetts State House.
Q 09The land settler William Blaxton sold to Puritan neighbors in 1634 became which landmark, America's oldest city park?
Boston Common
Boston Common was bought with a one-time tax of six shillings a head and used as a shared cow pasture. Cattle were not banned from it until 1830.
Q 10Which Nathaniel Hawthorne novel about Hester Prynne's public shaming is set in Puritan Boston during the 1640s?
The Scarlet Letter
The Scarlet Letter unfolds in Massachusetts Bay between 1642 and 1649. Hawthorne had a family stake in the era: his great-great-grandfather was a judge in the Salem witch trials.
Q 11Which stray farm animal sparked a 1642 lawsuit that split the Massachusetts Bay legislature into two separate houses?
A pig
A pig lost by a widow had been taken, she claimed, by a merchant. The row over the verdict ended in 1644 with the assistants and the town deputies sitting as separate chambers.
Q 12By what English name was Metacom known, the Wampanoag leader whose 1675 uprising devastated New England's towns?
King Philip
King Philip was a name the English gave Metacom in 1660 as a gesture of goodwill. The war that carries it destroyed twelve of the region's towns in little more than a year.
Q 13Which older colony, founded in 1620, was merged with Massachusetts Bay by the 1691 charter creating a royal province?
Plymouth
Q 21Which flagship carried John Winthrop and the colony's charter to Salem in 1630, a decade after the Mayflower sailed?
Arbella
Arbella had been called Eagle until she was renamed in honor of Lady Arbella Johnson, an earl's daughter who made the crossing as one of the company.
Q 22Thomas Hooker left Massachusetts Bay in 1636 and co-founded which city, earning the title Father of Connecticut?
Hartford
Hartford took its name from Hertford, the English birthplace of Hooker's colleague Samuel Stone. Hooker preached there that authority rests on the free consent of the people.
Q 23The first book printed in British North America, in Massachusetts in 1640, was a translation of which part of the Bible?
Psalms
Plymouth had never held a royal charter of its own, which left its government on shaky legal ground. The same merger swept in Nantucket and Martha's Vineyard.
Q 14Which present-day state did Massachusetts Bay buy from the Gorges heirs in the 1670s and govern until statehood in 1820?
Maine
Maine cost Massachusetts £1,250, paid to a grandson of Sir Ferdinando Gorges. The purchase covered the coast between the Piscataqua and Kennebec rivers.
Q 15The 1629 Massachusetts Bay charter claimed land running west to which ocean, then known as the South Sea?
Pacific
Pacific waters were the charter's limit on paper. In practice the colony never controlled land farther west than the Connecticut River valley.
Q 16Boston, Massachusetts, was named in 1630 after a market town in which English county, home to several leading settlers?
Lincolnshire
Lincolnshire's Boston sent the colony some of its leading figures. The minister John Cotton preached at its St Botolph's Church for about twenty years before he emigrated in 1633.
Q 17Which Boston woman was tried in 1637 and banished from Massachusetts Bay after hosting religious meetings at home?
Anne Hutchinson
Anne Hutchinson was drawing 60 or more people a week to hear her views on the ministers' sermons. Her trial was the climax of what became known as the Antinomian Controversy.
Q 18What name do historians give the 1630s movement that carried about 20,000 Puritans from England to New England?
The Great Migration
The Great Migration slowed sharply once civil war broke out in England in the early 1640s, and some colonists even sailed home to fight on the Puritan side.
Q 19Unlike the Separatist Pilgrims, the Puritans of Massachusetts Bay hoped to stay inside and reform which institution?
Church of England
The Church of England was, to these Puritans, a true church in need of repair. They wanted to purify it of what they saw as leftovers of Roman Catholicism, not to walk away from it.
Q 20Which tree gave its name to the famous silver shillings Boston's mint struck from 1652 without England's permission?
Pine
Pine was the last of three tree designs, after willow and oak, and it gave the whole series its name. Nearly every coin carried the date 1652, whenever it was actually struck.
Psalms in plain English verse filled the Bay Psalm Book, made for singing in Puritan churches. One of eleven surviving first-edition copies sold for $14.2 million in 2013.
Q 24Which Puritan minister, called the apostle to the Indians, translated the Bible into the Massachusett language by 1663?
John Eliot
John Eliot's translation was the first complete Bible printed in the Western Hemisphere. Massachusett had no alphabet of its own, so the language had to be put into writing first.
Q 25What were the villages called, such as Natick, where Massachusetts Bay missionaries settled Native Christian converts?
Praying towns
Praying towns numbered fourteen in Massachusetts Bay by the 1670s. After the war of 1675-76 the colony's lawmakers disbanded ten of them and put the rest under colonists' supervision.
Q 26Margaret Jones, in 1648 the first person Massachusetts Bay executed for witchcraft, worked in which profession?
Midwife
Midwife and healer Margaret Jones lived in Charlestown, and suspicion grew when patients in her care got worse. Her execution came 44 years before the Salem trials.
Q 27Which royal governor, sent by James II to rule all New England, did Bostonians rise up and arrest in April 1689?
Edmund Andros
Edmund Andros was jailed once Boston learned that James II had been overthrown. He broke out that August after his servant got the sentries drunk, but was caught again in Rhode Island.
Q 28How did William Phips, first royal governor of Massachusetts under the 1691 charter, win his fortune and knighthood?
Salvaging sunken treasure
Salvaging sunken treasure from a Spanish galleon made Phips famous in his own lifetime. It also made him the first native-born New Englander to be knighted.
Q 29The first seal of Massachusetts Bay showed a Native American speaking which plea, borrowed from the Book of Acts?
Come over and help us
Come over and help us comes from a vision of Saint Paul, in which a man of Macedonia begs for aid. The seal was authorized with the 1629 charter and served, with one break in the 1680s, until 1692.
Q 30A 1647 Massachusetts Bay law making towns hire schoolteachers is nicknamed for which 'old deluder' it aimed to defeat?
Satan
Satan, the law warned, kept people from the scriptures by keeping them unable to read. Towns of fifty families had to appoint a teacher, and towns of a hundred a grammar school.