and a house near the Old Connecticut Path in southern Sudbury and also that same month he sold of adjacent land to Thomas Axtell. But only three years later on 6 May 1646, Rice, along with his son Edward Rice and Philemon Whale, administered the estate of the deceased Thomas Axtell and he purchased back the land from the estate shortly thereafter. On 8 April 1657, Rice purchased the "Jennison Farm" in the southeastern part of Sudbury. And by 1659, Rice had acquired about of land in southeastern Sudbury (present day Wayland and Cochituate), including nine acres of land and the homestead purchased back from Philemon Whale (see image of the homestead), and the probated estate of Henry Dunster that included the former Glover family lands. The General Court made grants of land to Rice in what is now Framingham, in 1652 and in 1659. These lands in Framingham were passed on to Rice's son Henry in 1659, and became known as Rice's End. As the Enclosure Movement was a contentious political issue in England, the issue of land tenure was also highly contentious in 17th-century Massachusetts Bay Colony and in Sudbury in particular. Open-field or communal farming was practiced in most of Sudbury, following traditions of the commons and governance practices brought from central and western England during the early 17th century. Rice and twelve other dissenters from Sudbury who were interested in 'closed-field' or owner-operator farming, as it was practiced in southeastern England, petitioned the Great and General Court in 1656 to create the town of Marlborough where individual ownership of farmland was to be exclusively practiced. The tract of land was west of Sudbury that, in addition to becoming Marlborough, eventually became Northborough, Westborough, Southborough, and Hudson as well. Rice was elected as selectman of Marlborough in 1657 as the town was being established. The town was formally chartered on 12 June 1660 by the General Court. Upon being granted a maximum allotment of of land in Marlborough, Rice was one of the three largest initial landholders of the new town. According to Powell (1963), the founding of Marlborough with exclusive closed-field land tenure was a seminal event in establishing the predominant freehold or fee simple land tenure system of America. Rice was reelected as selectman in Marlborough every year after 1657 until his death. Edmund Rice died on 3 May 1663 in Marlborough, Massachusetts, and is