eight years. As a result of a royal inquisition held on 1 April 1634, funds remaining in the custody of Rice and Newman were to be transferred to the bailiff and burgesses of Berkhamsted as part of an effort to transfer and consolidate several royal charity grants for administration under civil authority. While living in Berkhamsted, Rice acquired and was taxed on of land in 1627, and on from 1633 to 1637. There is no record in Berkhamsted of Rice paying taxes on his land in 1638, possibly due to its sale to finance his trip to America. There is no surviving record of Edmund Rice's voyage to America with his family, but it was surmised to have occurred between the 13 March 1638 baptism of his son Joseph in Berkhamsted and the petition to the Great and General Court to found Sudbury, Massachusetts 6 September 1638, showing all the Sudbury petitioners residing in Watertown, MA. However, the 1638 petition to the General Court to found Sudbury did not explicitly mention Rice's name, so documentation of Rice's presumed short-term residence in Watertown is poor. The first documented record of his presence in Massachusetts is in the Township Book of Sudbury prior to 4 April 1639 in which he was already serving as a selectman. Between 1638 and 1657, Rice resided in Sudbury where he became a leader in the community. Sumner Chilton Powell wrote in his 1964 Pulitzer Prize-winning Puritan Village: The Formation of a New England Town, "Not only did Rice become the largest individual landholder in Sudbury, but he represented his new town in the Massachusetts legislature for five years and devoted at least eleven of his last fifteen years to serving as selectman and judge of small causes." He was appointed on 4 September 1639 by the General Court to lay out the roads and lots of Sudbury, and he was granted of land near the original Sudbury meetinghouse . On 3 April 1640, Rice was granted in southeastern Sudbury near the Old Connecticut Path. He served as a selectman in Sudbury in 1639 and 1640, and subsequently for several years between 1644 and 1656. He was designated by the General Court as a freeman on 13 May 1640, and was first elected as a deputy (representative) of the Great and General Court in October 1640. He was later appointed by the General Court on 2 June