revenues from import duties, principally alcohol. After much debate, a different proposal was abruptly proposed and adopted, reviving previous Massachusetts tax laws. These laws had been unpopular with farmers who felt the taxes on livestock were too high. To bring in immediate revenue, Andros also received approval to increase the import duties on alcohol. Many Massachusetts communities stiffly resisted the first attempts to enforce the revenue laws. Several towns refused to choose commissioners to assess the town population and estates, and officials from a number of them were consequently arrested and brought to Boston. Some were fined and released, while others were imprisoned until they promised to perform their duties. The leaders of Ipswich, who had been most vocal in opposing the law, were tried and convicted of misdemeanor offenses. The other provinces did not resist the imposition of the new law, even though, at least in Rhode Island, the rates were higher than they had been under the previous colonial administration. Plymouth's relatively poor landowners were hard hit because of the high rates on livestock, and funds derived from whaling, once sources of profit for the individual towns, were now directed to the dominion government. Town meeting laws One consequence of the tax protest was that Andros sought to restrict town meetings since these were where that protest had begun. He, therefore, introduced a law that limited meetings to a single annual meeting solely for electing officials and explicitly banned meetings at other times for any reason. This loss of local power was widely hated. Many protests were made that the town meeting and tax laws were violations of the Magna Carta, which guaranteed taxation by representatives of the people. It was noted that those who made these complaints had, during the colonial charter, excluded large numbers of voters through the requirement of church membership and then taxed them. Land title reform Andros had been instructed to bring colonial land title practices more in line with those in England and introduce quit-rents to raise colonial revenues. Titles previously issued in Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Maine under the colonial administration often suffered from defects of the form (for example, lacking an imprint of the colonial seal), and most of them did not include a quit-rent payment. Land grants in colonial Connecticut and Rhode Island had been made before either colony had a charter, and there were conflicting claims in some