ROANOKE dispelled some illusions, both among the Indians and among the English. The Indians of the Virginia region would not be likely again to mistake the English for gods. The English, on the other hand, would be wary of expecting to find America divided into good Indians and cannibals, with the good Indians eagerly awaiting English help. From this point we can perhaps date the beginnings of the English disposition to regard all Indians as alike. As yet, however, it did not follow that the only good Indian was a dead one. When the first permanent English settlers arrived in America in 1607, their sponsors had not given up hope of an integrated biracial community, in which indigent Englishmen would work side by side with willing natives, under gentle English government.
The sponsors were closely linked to the Roanoke venture. The Virginia Company of London came into existence in 1606, created by a charter from the king to Richard Hakluyt and “divers others,” including one of London’s leading merchants, Sir Thomas Smith.1 Smith, the son of one of Raleigh’s backers, became the treasurer of the new company, its principal officer and its moving force. It was a joint-stock company, and its members hoped for a profit, just as Raleigh’s backers had. But they were barred, ostensibly at least, from the one source of wealth that had paid off for Raleigh: his only returns had come from the Spanish prizes that Grenville and Fernandez took on their voyages to and from the colony. England’s new king, James I, had made peace with Spain, and he did not countenance freebooting expeditions against England’s old enemy. It seems clear that some of the investors in the Virginia Company expected to use an American colony as a base from which to continue their depredations, far from the king’s watchful eye. But the company could not officially engage in such exploits or even condone them, nor could it serve as a cover for schemes to subvert the Spanish empire.2
Probably the majority of investors looked toward legitimate profits. They invested their money in hopes of finding precious metals or minerals, of discovering valuable plants for dyestuffs and medicines, and perhaps of opening a northwest passage to the Pacific. But they were prepared to settle for less spectacular goods like glass, iron, furs, potash, pitch, and tar, things that England needed and mostly had to import from other countries. After the Roanoke experience they must have known that it might take time to develop a trade in any product. Of all the natural treasures mentioned in Barlowe’s and Hariot’s glowing accounts of Virginia, only sassafras (thought to be a cure for syphilis) had yet a ready market in the Old World. Though the promoters of the company still hoped for instant success, they had to stress the country’s future promise, the great multitude of good things it was going to yield.
The plan was to send settlers who would pool their labors to produce whatever proved feasible. After the cargoes of riches, whatever they might be, began pouring into England, the company would pay out dividends to all members in proportion to the number of shares they owned. Men could “adventure” in the company by buying shares (at a rate fixed two years later at £12.10.0 per share). But a man could also get a share simply by going to Virginia at his own expense. With the money from sales of shares the company would send over shiploads of England’s unemployed laborers as well as skilled specialists. Such men would be servants of the company and not entitled to a share in the proceeds. They would work for the company for seven years in return for their transportation and then be free to work as they chose, taking advantage of the limitless opportunities of the New World to create new lives for themselves.3
It was the intention of the sponsors of the colony that benefits for the settlers and their backers would march hand in hand with beneficence toward the natives. While reaping the good things of the new land, the colony would “bring the infidels and salvages lyving in those partes to humane civilitie and to a setled and quiet govermente.”4 The Spanish had planted their false religion and their tyrannical government in the south, but God had reserved the northern parts of the New World for English freedom and true religion. King James himself retained ultimate control of the colony’s government, which he exercised through a council in England, giving orders to a president and council in Virginia. And at the outset the king gave instructions that everyone in the colony must “well en-treate” the Indians and that “all just, kind and charitable courses shall be holden with such of them, as shall conforme themselves to any good and sociable traffique and dealing with the subjects of us, … whereby they may be the sooner drawne to the true knowledge of God, and the Obedience of us.”5
More specific instructions given by the company to the first settlers showed some of the disillusionment toward the Indians derived from the Roanoke experience. The colony was to be planted well to the north of Roanoke in the Chesapeake region, where Raleigh himself had planned to move his settlement. Apart from the superior harbors that this area afforded within Cape Charles and Cape Henry, Ralph Lane had suggested that the Indians to the north were more reliable than those at Roanoke (at least Lane had not yet estranged them).6 But even so, the company was wary of counting on their friendship. The settlers were still to follow the strategy devised by Hakluyt: find a navigable river and settle some distance up it, for defense against European enemies, and for access to different groups of Indians, so that they could play off one against another. They were to allow no Indians in the area between them and the seacoast, “for you Cannot Carry Your Selves so towards them but they will Grow Discontented with Your habitation and be ready to Guide and assist any Nation that Shall Come to invade You.”7 And who more likely to come than the Spanish? Already the shoe seems to be on the other foot: Spanish adventurers may take advantage of natives discontented with English rule.
In spite of its distrust, the Virginia Company was eager to affirm its good will. Its aim for the Indians, as explained a little later, was only to bring them the gospel, and “to cover their naked miserie, with civill use of foode, and cloathing, and to traine them by gentle meanes, to those manuall artes and skill, which they so much affect, and doe admire to see in us.” In return for these blessings, the English would require nothing of them “but a quiet residence to us and ours, that by our owne labour and toyle, we may worke this good unto them and recompence our owne adventures, costs and travells.” They were still expected to become a part of the English community, where they would be “most friendly welcome to conjoyne their labours with ours, and shall enjoy equall priviledges with us.” Virginia Indians would experience none of the “stormes of raging cruelties” perpetrated by the Spanish in the West Indies, but only “faire and loving meanes suting to our English Natures.”8
The Virginia Company thought of the enterprise as something like the conversion of the primitive Britons by the Romans. Without the civilizing influence of the Romans, England itself would still be populated by heathen savages just as America still was.9 The members who stayed in London clung to this vision for most of the company’s life. Their company, they believed, was not like other joint-stock companies, “the ends for which it is established beinge not simply matter of Trade, butt of a higher Nature.”10 Although they hoped for profits, theirs was a patriotic enterprise that would bring civility and Christianity to the savages of North America and redemption from idleness and crime to the unemployed masses of England.
The colony did not work out as the company envisaged it. The adventurers who ventured their capital lost it. Most of the settlers who ventured their lives lost them. And so did most of the Indians who came near them. Measured by any of the objectives announced for it, the colony failed. And it failed, as Roanoke failed, because neither the Indians nor the English lived up to expectations.
At this remove the expectations, considerably reduced from those that preceded Roanoke, do not appear to have been unrealistic. The company wanted the settlers to go at their jobs with a will and make the new land grow the good things that everyone was sure it could grow and that it has since proved entirely capable of growing. They did not have their hearts set on gold and silver and jewels or on any single preconceived product. They were willing to experiment with a variety of prosaic staples. And they did not expect the Indians to fall down before them and do their bidding. The Indians would be welcome to “conjoin their labors with ours,” but only insofar as the Indians saw how advantageous it would be to adopt English civility and civilized techniques.
Nevertheless, the expectations that seem reasonable to us were not fulfilled. Indian and Englishman in Virginia seem to have had different expectations of themselves than the company had. And before examining the disasters that befell them together, it will be necessary to look more closely at the kind of life each had led and the expectations that life engendered in them before they encountered one another on the banks of the James River.
Most Indians of North America felt the force of government in their lives far less than men in England did. If we may believe the testimony of Englishmen who later lived among different Indian tribes in the eastern part of the continent, the power of the chiefs, or kings, or werowances, as they were variously called, rested mainly on personal dignity and prestige. James Adair, a trader among the southeastern tribes, wrote that “the power of their chiefs is an empty sound. They can only persuade or dissuade the people, either by the force of good-nature and clear reasoning, or colouring things, so as to suit their prevailing passions. It is reputed merit alone, that gives them any titles of distinction above the meanest of the people.”11 Henry Timberlake, a soldier who spent some time with the Cherokee, reported, “Their government, if I may call it government, which has neither laws nor power to support it, is a mixed aristocracy and democracy, the chiefs being chose according to their merit in war, or policy at home.”12 And numerous observers among other tribes gave similar reports of Indian freedom.13
It did not appear to the English who first came to Virginia that the Indians who lived along its great rivers had much freedom. One tribe, the Pamunkeys, under the leadership of a single chief, Powhatan, had reduced about thirty other tribes, constituting perhaps 8,000 persons, into a primitive empire, occupying precisely the area where the English settled, from the James to the Potomac.14 As the English saw it, Powhatan, “a tall well proportioned man, with a sower looke,” was able to rule with a rod of iron. His word was law, and there seems to be no doubt that he exercised powers of life and death over his subjects.15
It is likely, nevertheless, that his subjects had more freedom than was apparent to the English and that his dominion differed from that of other Indian rulers mainly in its ruthless enforcement of customary practices. The English who commented on it found it neither capricious nor arbitrary. The most astute English observer, Captain John Smith, whose ways with Indians we will examine later, noted that “the lawes whereby he [Powhatan] ruleth is custome.”16 But custom can be a powerful form of law, restraining rulers as well as sheltering liberty within its dictates. And though Powhatan himself may have seemed strong enough to ignore it if he chose (“When he listeth his will is a law”), the inferior chieftains of the tribes that he had subdued, who continued to govern their peoples under him, were, according to Smith, “tyed to rule by customes.”17 Smith acknowledged that the magistrates of Indian Virginia (presumably both Powhatan and the subchiefs) “for good commanding, and their people for due subjection, and obeying, excell many places that would be counted very civill.”18 But the obedience of the subjects may well have depended on the goodness of the commanding and on its conformity to customary expectations.
Powhatan exacted a tribute from each of his subject tribes, payable in “skinnes, beades, copper, pearle, deare, turkies, wild beasts, and corne.”19 We are even told what cannot be taken seriously, that he took eight parts in ten of everything they produced, and that he had a storehouse fifty or sixty yards long in which he hoarded his alleged treasure.20 He may have had such a storehouse, but the reports doubtless exaggerated his splendor to conform to European views of how an emperor ought to live. If Powhatan actually did have such an acquisitive instinct, he was an unusual Indian and probably unlike the people over whom he exercised dominion. Robert Beverley, writing at the end of the century, tells us that the Virginia Indians “had nothing which they reckoned Riches, before the English went among them, except Peak, Roenoke, and such like trifles made out of the Cunk shell.”21 Indians did not vie with one another in conspicuous consumption. And indeed there would seem to be little likelihood of anyone storing up treasures among a people who valued leisure above worldly goods. The Indian way of life was of the kind that still generates, among those who practice it, a minimum of worldly goods and a maximum of leisure time.22
Indians did not, for example, devote much attention to housing. Powhatan, to be sure, was enchanted by the relative sturdiness of the flimsy houses that the English threw up and persuaded them to build him one.23 But other Indians showed no interest in anything so solid. Although they lived during most of the year in permanent towns or villages, their houses were simple affairs, constructed by inserting saplings in the ground and bending the tops together to make a frame like an arbor. Large frames were rectangular or oval in ground plan, small ones circular. On the frame they placed bark, hides, or mats to keep out the weather, leaving a hole at the top to release smoke and one next to the ground for an entrance. Large or small, the houses were all of a piece and offered little opportunity for display of status: “who knoweth one of them knoweth them all, even the Chief kings house yt self.” And the furniture was as simple as the house. The ground served for a floor. There were no chairs or tables, and platforms raised from the ground on forked sticks served as beds. House and furniture alike could be put together without heavy labor. Building them was women’s work.24
Men provided clothing in the form of skins taken in the hunt. But Indians, like well-to-do Englishmen, apparently regarded hunting as sport. Hunting grounds might be some distance from the village; and when hunting season came round, the whole tribe picked up and moved, the women preceding the men in order to build temporary housing. The hunt itself was a cooperative venture among the men, in which they set fire to an area, enclosing a group of deer or driving them into the water, where they could be killed from canoes.25 The men were also in charge of fishing, which they did with weirs and nets, as well as with spears and hooks.26 But the Virginia Indians did not rely on hunting or fishing for most of their food. They relied principally on the nuts and fruits they gathered and on the corn, beans, and squashes or melons that they grew. Tending the crops was also women’s work.
Indeed, nearly any activity that could be designated as work at all was left to the women. They were the principal means of production in Indian Virginia, Having acquired a wife (for whom he may have had to pay a bride price), a man counted on her to support him.27 He could make canoes, weapons, and weirs without losing his dignity, but the only other labor he ordinarily engaged in was clearing fields for planting, and the method employed made this less than arduous. Clearing consisted merely of girdling the trees and burning brush around them to hasten their death. The next year the women worked the ground between the trees, using a crooked stick as a hoe and planting corn, beans, squash, and melons all together in little hills.28
Although we do not know how long the Indians used a field before allowing it to return to forest, it seems likely that they did not have to move whenever they depleted the soil they were cultivating. The English had the impression that their villages were permanently located. Given the probable acreage under cultivation, it would have been possible to use a field for several years and then to leave it fallow for thirty or forty and still not have to move the village to find fresh land.29 It required less than an acre to grow in Indian fashion enough food to feed a person in Indian fashion for a year. Indian corn gave a yield several times greater than English wheat; and according to modern authorities “one acre in mixed planting of maize, beans, and squash, perhaps with sunflower or Chenopodium added, would indeed sustain a person for a year.”30 John Smith found the fields adjoining the villages to vary from 20 to 200 acres, which was probably roughly the size of their populations.31 At that rate, most villages could stay in one place on a tract of, say, 500 or 600 acres with a cycle of using a field for five or ten years and then leaving it for thirty or forty. Thus the labor of building permanent new houses would come only seldom, as the old ones fell down.
This form of agriculture is common among pre-industrial populations all over the world and has generally been regarded as wasteful and primitive. Recent investigators have shown, however, that it can produce more food per man-hour (or woman-hour) of labor than any other form. Growing a mixture of crops in the same field tends to prolong its fertility, and the long fallow period, allowing trees and shrubs to spring up, restores the fertility of the soil by bringing up nutrients from well below the root level of crop plants and spreading them on the surface in the form of litter.32 The system requires no manure and no animals to furnish manure. It requires no plows and no draft animals to feed and care for. It requires virtually no work on the land other than clearing, planting, and harvesting. Even weeding is minimized, because few weed seeds are present in the newly cleared land. Only when an increasing population demands a larger total product and furnishes a larger labor force to grow it do peoples turn to more intensive but more labor-consuming forms of agriculture.33
The Indians had more than enough land for their shifting agriculture: and in the course of the centuries they had lived in Virginia, they had shaped the land to their purposes, so that it also yielded foods other than those which they planted. In particular they had achieved great tracts of meadow. Their fires for turning woodland into cornfield must often have escaped; and the same was true of their fires for hunting, which were apparently set in grassy areas. The periodic large-scale incineration of young shrubs and trees tended in the long run to produce and preserve grasslands. As a result, there was probably more open land in Indian Virginia than there is in Virginia today.34 At the same time there were great and unusual forests. When the English arrived, they described the country as almost entirely wooded, and so did travelers who came there for the next two hundred years.35 But the woods, as the English found them in 1607, consisted mainly of trees too large or thick-barked to be affected by fire, and they were generally free of undergrowth. The repeated burnings prevented the forest from renewing itself, so that the large trees became widely spaced, with room for light to penetrate between them. The English noted that you could see for more than a mile through the woods, that you could ride a horse through them at a gallop, or that you could drive a coach through them.36
The effect was not only to give the landscape a more open appearance than it has today, but to make room for a much greater variety of plants and animals. The grasslands supported not only deer but also elk and buffalo, which had made their way from pasturelands similarly cleared by Indian burnings beyond the mountains. And the open glades supported fruit and nut trees that cannot be found in the dense second-growth pine forests that have replaced the Indian landscape. Hickory and black walnut were both plentiful and highly valued. Mulberries, plums, and persimmons abounded, as did wild grapes and wild strawberries.37 None of these would have grown or produced fruit in deep woods. The Indians, though without domestic animals, had by their burnings turned the country into a veritable park, abounding in game and in natural fruits, berries, and nuts, not to mention flowers. One Englishman walking out for four miles from Jamestown found his promenade the whole way “all flowing over with fair flowers of sundry colors and kinds, as though it had been in any garden or orchard in England.”38 During a large part of the year, especially during the early summer, before their corn ripened, the Indians relied heavily on this natural orchard. Since early summer was the time when Arthur Barlowe made his reconnaissance of Roanoke, he was perhaps not wholly fanciful in insisting that the earth brought forth all things in abundance without toil or labor.
Barlowe may not have realized that the abundance was not entirely natural. It did require the clearing and burning that the Indians had been carrying on for centuries. But even if Barlowe had spent longer in Virginia, he might still have been impressed by the absence of toil. In order to stay alive the Indian needed to do very little work. His women needed to do more. Smith noted how the male scorned doing anything that could be considered women’s work, with the result “that the women be verie painefull [industrious] and the men often idle.”39 But even the women may have had less to do than we might expect. Studies of modern hunting and food-gathering societies and of societies practicing long-fallow agriculture show that the amount of time spent in productive work is considerably below what is required of most people in industrial societies, averaging from two to six hours a day.40 Thomas Hariot at Roanoke estimated that the work of growing corn required no more than about twenty-four hours a year, all told, for enough to feed one person.41 There were surely plenty of other jobs for the women to do: making baskets and pots, fashioning furs and skins into clothing, pounding corn into meal, cooking, making houses, tending children. But they may have had more leisure than women in European peasant societies and a good deal more than most women in early industrial societies. No landlord or employer collected a toll from their labor. The tribute their tribe owed to Powhatan was the only drain on their efforts. They may therefore have had a good many idle hours too.
While the Indians had worked out a way of life that required a minimum of labor, especially for men, they did interrupt their leisure with lengthy ceremonies that we can now view only dimly through the eyes of their unsympathetic English observers. According to the English, Indian religion was focused on an evil deity, whom the English identified at once as the devil. This devil the people were obliged to propitiate in a variety of ceremonies, conducted by priests who served as his emissaries. The most formidable ceremony, seen in the context of other primitive cultures, appears to have been a puberty rite, in which young men were beaten and then taken to live in isolation for several months. To the English, insofar as they were allowed to observe it, this looked like human sacrifice. It is not clear that they actually saw a sacrifice performed, but they were persuaded that it took place, perhaps because they assumed that the devil would demand it. Whatever the ceremony, it seems to have occupied an important place in Indian life, as apparently did the deity who presided over it.42
The English were persuaded that the Indian deity was also, at least in some instances, behind another activity that interrupted and perhaps relieved the Indians’ habitual idleness, namely war. It is not known how extensive or frequent warfare may have been before the English came or whether the Indian god actually demanded it from time to time, as civilized deities so often did.43 The English assumed that the devil and his priests would incite people to war especially against those who were bringing the gospel. But the Indians had certainly made war among themselves before the English arrived. Powhatan apparently obtained his hegemony over the Virginia region by force of arms; and Amadas and Barlowe noted that the Indians in the Roanoke region had been wasted by warfare.44
What the actual purpose of Indian warfare may have been must remain speculative. Smith reported that “They seldome make warre for lands or goods, but for women and children, and principally for revenge.”45 It does seem unlikely that booty or plunder was a common war aim; but land may have been more involved than Smith realized. Any increase in a tribe’s population (natural or acquired) might have necessitated an increase in land, for the Indian economy required large amounts of it. Although a given tribe might have only a small acreage under cultivation at a given time, a substantial acreage had to be left in long-term fallow to renew its fertility. And much more was needed for hunting and fishing and for the gathering of nuts and fruits. What looked like unused empty forest to the English did not necessarily look that way to the Indians. Each tribe had recognized boundaries within which it carried on its activities, and any expansion of hunting or gathering activities by one tribe might bring it into conflict with another.
Warfare played a large role in Indian men’s sense of masculinity. Although Indian warriors seem to have felt it no shame to retreat in the face of superior force, they took inordinate pride in suffering torture and death without flinching if captured. And they took pleasure in inflicting pain and death on their own captives. On the other hand, they did not undertake war with the systematic rigor and discipline or even the lasting hostility that Europeans brought to it. They did not put to death the women, children, or chieftains whom they captured, but probably adopted them into the tribe, as the Iroquois did. War seems to have been in some measure ritualized, an occasion for the display of masculine virtues. Indians did not have the patience or even the desire to conduct a siege or a prolonged campaign. When they had shown how horrendous they could be in chopping a few people to bits, they were ready to call it a day and return to the easy life.46
Such were the people who awaited the English in Virginia. To the first settlers, aboard the Susan Constant, the Godspeed, and the Discovery, they must have looked as outlandish and strange as Englishmen expected non-Englishmen to be. They wore skins instead of clothes; they lived in oddly made flimsy shacks; they were armed only with hatchets and bows; they had no ships; they were covered with paint. The differences between the English and the Indian were not small, but it would be easy to exaggerate them and to overlook some similarities in their ways of life that boded no good for the colony’s future.
England, like Virginia, was ruled by a monarch who had subdued the lesser potentates of the country to his dominion. In the fabric of English life these potentates, the nobility, occupied a far stronger place than the subsidiary werowances did under Powhatan in Virginia. And the character of English government depended heavily on the curbs they placed on the king. Part of their strength lay in their private armies of “retainers,” and they often demonstrated their contempt for the king’s peace by brawling with one another in what might today be called gang wars. The king was kept uneasy by the magnitude of their powers, which he sought steadily to reduce. In order to tame them he tried to keep them as close to him as possible at his court, where he could keep an eye on them and where they could vie with one another in the richness of their clothing rather than the fierceness of their arms. Englishmen, being civil, were more fond of clothing than Indians were, and the king was able to keep many of his nobles engaged in a kind of continuous fancy dress ball at court.47
The king was not, however, strong enough to get along without them. The nobility and their retainers were, in fact, his army or the nucleus from which he built one when it was needed. And he often needed it, in order to sustain the independence of his island in a world dominated by the larger powers of the European continent. Even in peacetime he needed their help, for England, though not a large country, was too big for him to manage by himself. To rule it he relied heavily on his Parliament, an assemblage of the nobles, to which had been added a group of representatives elected by the landholders of the country. Parliament not only assisted the king by making laws, but also levied taxes for him and enabled him to collect them.
Although in England, as in Indian Virginia, custom was the principal law, with its highest embodiment in the set of judicial precedents known as common law, the king in Parliament could override custom and enact laws for the whole country. For the king to do so by himself, however, as Powhatan apparently could do in Virginia, would have been dangerous. One of the prices he had to pay for Parliament’s help in running England was to forgo any attempt to make laws or levy taxes by himself. Two kings during the seventeenth century did make the attempt; but neither got away with it: one lost only his throne, the other his head. Most kings recognized the limits of their power; they could not act upon their subjects or even tax them (except for some customary duties) without the consent of Parliament. This was the source of English liberty, of English “gentle government.” And Englishmen were proud of it.
Not many Englishmen had a hand in that government. The nobility, who sat in Parliament by virtue of their birth, amounted to only a tiny fraction of the population. There were 55 of them in 1603. By 1628 the number had increased to 126, but they were never significant by their numbers.48 A somewhat larger group of dignitaries, the gentry, also had a hand in government. Less exalted and less powerful than the nobles, they were distinguished by a variety of titles and commanded the respect of their neighbors by their wealth, especially wealth in land. They amounted to perhaps 5 percent of the adult male population. Along with the other landowners of the country, amounting to perhaps another 10 percent, they elected representatives to Parliament, the members of the House of Commons, which belied its name by the rank of those who sat in it. English gentle government was government by gentlemen.49
It was the gentry who saw that the laws of Parliament were enforced in their neighborhoods. England was divided into counties, each of which, like the tribes of Virginia, had its definite geographical boundaries. In each county the king appointed a number of gentlemen as justices of the peace to settle minor disputes among neighbors. Sitting together in county courts, the justices tried more serious cases, including criminal cases. If anyone was dissatisfied with their decision, he could appeal to a higher court, presided over by men of greater dignity, directly under the king.
Although ordinary people had no voice at all in the English government, the system gave them a security of which they could well be proud. Not only were they ruled under established laws, which not even the king could break, but in any cases involving loss of life or limb the court had to put the question of guilt to a jury composed of their peers, that is, persons from roughly the same rank in life and from the same neighborhood as the accused. Trial by jury was one of the emblems of English freedom, which Englishmen took pride in contrasting with the more authoritarian legal procedures of other countries.
In the eyes of Englishmen the superiority of their civil government was matched by the superiority of their religion and by the church in which it was embodied. England’s monarchs had broken from what they considered the tyranny of the Roman church and had established what they liked to think of as the true church of Christ on earth. At its head stood the king; and he ruled his church as he ruled his state, through a set of spiritual nobles, the bishops and archbishops, who sat in Parliament as well as in a Convocation of their own. Below them were their priests, who presided over the local units of their government, the parishes. There were several parishes in each county, and each parish church was equipped with a set of local officers, vestrymen and churchwardens, who looked after the church building and helped the priest to supervise the daily lives of his parishioners.
Churchwardens were supposed to report every breach of morals, especially sexual morals, and every sign of heresy. Church courts presided over by bishops could then reprimand or excommunicate offenders, cutting them off from all contact with their neighbors until they repented and made amends. Although neither churchwardens nor church courts were always zealous in performing their duties, they could, if they pleased, impose strict standards of belief and behavior at every turn of an Englishman’s life.50
Between the surveillance in his parish and the regular enactments of Parliament that affected him, the Englishman probably felt the force of government in his daily life far more than the Indians who endured Powhatan’s dominion. And English government, both civil and ecclesiastical, exerted itself with particular force in an area where Indians scarcely knew control. Most Englishmen worked for other Englishmen. It was a major concern not only of their employers but also of the government to keep them working.
To judge from what churchmen had to say about the matter, the harder all men worked and the harder they had to work the better. Idleness, a masculine virtue among the Indians, had always been a vice in Christian teaching. The Reformers who denounced Catholicism had been particularly emphatic on this point and had condemned as idle the lives of prayer and contemplation sanctioned by the Roman church in its monasteries and convents. God called men to work by the sweat of their brows, the Reformers believed, and a man who worked hard at the job to which God called him, however humble, was honorable in the sight of God. His disposition for hard work might even be a sign that God had singled him out for the saint’s everlasting rest in heaven (where work was apparently no longer required).51
Preachers intoned these ideas from English pulpits; and though the church courts did not ordinarily attempt to excommunicate men for not working hard enough, the members of Parliament prescribed hours of work by law that would seemingly have left little opportunity for idleness. The Statute of Artificers of 1563 (reenacting similar provisions from the Statute of Laborers of 1495) required all laborers to work from five in the morning to seven or eight at night from mid-March to mid-September, and during the remaining months of the year from daybreak to night. Time out for eating, drinking, and rest was not to exceed two and a half hours a day.52
As with all legislation, we may ask whether the provisions of this act were a description of prevailing practices or an attempt to change them. The Statute of Laborers answers the question by telling us in the preamble that laborers “waste much part of the day … in late coming unto their work, early departing therefrom, long sitting at their breakfast, at their dinner and noon-meat, and long time of sleeping after noon.”53 Whether this statute or that of 1563 (still in effect when Virginia was founded) altered the situation is not easy to determine. The records of the county courts show varying efforts to enforce other provisions of the statute of 1563, but they are almost wholly silent about this one. That their silence was a product of general compliance with the act seems unlikely for a number of reasons, reasons that may shed some light on the behavior of the first Englishmen in Virginia.
One part of the adult male population of England was not even expected to comply: gentlemen, including those who passed the act in Parliament, were not affected, except as employers, by the injunctions contained in it. The attitude of gentlemen toward work betrayed the same inconsistency that is suggested in the preachers’ praise of work as a virtue while excluding it from among the joys to be found in paradise. As far as work was concerned, gentlemen had already reached paradise. They expected those who had not yet arrived to work, but to do so themselves would have been to stop being gentlemen. A gentleman, by contemporary standards, was one who could “live idly and without manuall labour, and will beare the port, charge and countenance of a gentleman.”54 The port, charge, and countenance of a gentleman meant not merely fancy clothing and spacious housing but an entourage of servants who added to the dignity of their employer’s idleness by being as conspicuously idle as possible themselves. According to the leading authority on the English aristocracy of the period, not only were the rich and wellborn “idle almost by definition” but they kept “a huge labour force … in slothful and parasitic personal service.”55 When the members of Parliament enjoined work without respite, it was a case of “Do as I say, not as I do.”
Even for anyone inclined to obey the precept rather than the example, it was not possible to keep at work without work to do. In what are today called modern or developed countries unemployment is scarcely unknown. In underdeveloped countries both unemployment and underemployment are persistent facts of life. And England in the seventeenth century, like Virginia, was an underdeveloped country.56 Its people, that is, produced far less in the way of material goods than they were capable of producing if they had been organized and motivated for the purpose. The great majority of them, as in all underdeveloped countries, were still engaged in agriculture; and agriculture, in spite of the myths of dawn-to-dusk toil that surround it, could not employ men the year round, continuously, or usefully, at the hours prescribed in the Statute of Artificers.
In large parts of the south and east of England farmers engaged in a much more intensive kind of agriculture than the Indians of Virginia.57 They plowed and planted their land every year with wheat, rye, barley, and a variety of other crops, allowing only occasional fallow periods and maintaining fertility by the dung from their cattle and sheep. They worked hard and expected their servants to work hard whenever there was work to do, especially when planting time or harvest time came round. But even with milking cows, hedging, ditching, thatching, and a hundred other tasks, there were times when the most industrious farmer could find no good way to keep himself and the men he might employ continuously busy. Bad weather could halt most farm work. You could not plow frozen ground and should not plow if it was soggy. John Law, writing in 1705 and hypothesizing a model economy that might be established on a newly discovered island, took it for granted that the persons engaged in agriculture would be idle, for one reason or another, half the time.58 Such may have been the case in the parts of England where farmers grew grain and practiced the most intensive husbandry.
In the greater part of England and Wales, in most of the north and west and in the hilly parts of the south and east, where lands were only marginally fertile, men lived from a way of farming that occupied a good deal less than half their time. In the midst of moors and pastures and woodland they tended little gardens of an acre or two and supplemented their diets, as the Indians did, by gathering roots and nuts and berries from the wilds. In some places they shifted their gardens from time to time, like the Indians, allowing the land to return to forest or waste for a long fallow period. They did not grow enough grain even for their own bread. Their only advantage over the Indians in food production came from the domestic animals (cattle, swine, and sheep) which they kept. Turned into the woods or pastures to forage for themselves in the warmer months, the animals required only a little more care than it took to hunt deer in Virginia (hunting in England was reserved to the gentry). This was a way of life that resembled the Indians’ way more than it resembled the one prescribed in the Statute of Artificers. It offered only a hand-to-mouth existence. It meant frequent hunger and regular malnutrition. But it did not require much work.59
People who lived in this manner, though they may have constituted half the population or more, were not in good repute with their countrymen. Grain-growing farmers in the “champion” country of the south and east thought that the woodland and pasture people were no farmers at all. Precisely because their way of life required so little work, it seemed not a proper way for a farmer or a Christian or a good subject of the king. The government worried too about the unruliness of people who had too much time on their hands and too little meat in their bellies. The devil finds work for idle hands, and some of his work might threaten the state as well as the church. It was observed that “the people bred amongst woods are naturally more stubborn and uncivil than in the champion countries.” They were said to “live lawless, nobody to govern them, they care for nobody, having no dependence on anybody.”60
The problem was magnified by the explosion of England’s population. As we have seen, the numbers were growing faster than the country could find jobs for them.61 Hungry and boisterous, they swarmed the roads, looking for enough work to buy them bread but ready to steal if they could not find it. They wound up not only in jail and on the gallows but in the woodlands, eking out a living like other woodland and pasture people. In its efforts to cope with the situation the government was torn between the wish to make people work as hard as possible and the need to supply jobs for them to work at. The latter seemed the more urgent. The government could not contemplate without alarm the rising numbers of hungry, masterless men. They must be found jobs and masters to keep them under control.
The gentlemen in Parliament, considering the situation, adopted a policy that may be called the conservation of employment. They seem to have assumed that their society could pay for only a fixed amount of work. Work must therefore be rationed, so that everyone could have a little, and those with family responsibilities could have a little more.62 So that youngsters should not take work away from their elders, the Statute of Artificers made it illegal for a man to practice a trade until he had become a master through seven years of apprenticeship. Even then, until he was thirty years old or married, he was supposed to serve some other master of the trade. And the courts did enforce these provisions. In a typical example, John Pike-man of Barking, Essex, a tailor, was brought to court because he “being a singleman and not above 2 5 years of age, does take in work of tailoring and works by himself to the hindrance of other poor occupiers, contrary to the law.”63
The policy expanded employment by fostering underemployment. Employers in most trades were required to hire labor only by the year, not by the day or hour.64 The intention was not only to see that a man’s master would have control of him throughout the year but to see that more men had masters, that more men had jobs. As the justices of Essex County observed, hiring labor by the day caused “the great depauperization of other labourers.”65 But hiring by the year meant that a laborer did not have to work as hard or as long at any task as he would otherwise have had to. Work could be strung out to occupy needless amounts of time, because whether or not a master had work to occupy his servants, they had to stay with him and he had to keep them. The records show many instances of masters attempting to turn away a servant or apprentice before the stipulated term was up, only to have him sent back by the courts with orders that the master “entertain” him for the full period. We even have the extraordinary spectacle of the runaway master, the man who illegally fled from his servants and thus evaded his responsibility to employ and support them.66
In pursuit of its policy of fostering employment in the face of an expanding population, the government often had to create jobs in cases where society offered none. Sometimes men were obliged to take on a poor boy as a servant whether they needed one or not. The parish might lighten the burden of the appointed master by paying a fee, but it might also fine a man who refused to take a boy assigned to him.67 To provide for men and women who could not be foisted off on unwilling employers, the government established houses of correction in every county, where the inmates toiled at turning wool, flax, and hemp into thread or yarn, receiving nothing but their food and lodging for their efforts. By all these means the government probably did succeed in spreading employment, but they spread it thin. In the long run their policies tended to depress wages and to diminish the amount of work expected from any one man. The division of labor, which economists have customarily regarded as a means of increasing productivity, could be instead a source of idleness. A man was supposed to have only one skill and was not supposed to impinge on the jobs of others by undertaking any task outside his province. Farmers with time on their hands were not to take up handicrafts on the side (though some did) because “for one man to be both an husbandman and an Artificer is a gatheringe of divers mens livinges into one mans hand.”68 And even on the farm different tasks became the special province of men claiming a special skill in them. Such specialization increased the number of jobs; but unless an employer could time his jobs carefully, he might have some of his laborers idle, waiting for others to perform an operation necessary to their continued work. Plowing, for example, seems to have been a special skill—a plowman was paid at a higher rate than ordinary farm workers. But the ordinary laborer’s work might have to wait upon the plowing of a field, and a whole crew of men might be kept idle by a plowman’s failure to get his job done at the right time. For an ordinary laborer to have attempted the job himself would have been presumptuous and antisocial if not illegal.
Laborers who learned to work under these conditions learned to work not very hard. On top of everything else, they were underpaid and underfed, caught in the vicious circle frequently found in underdeveloped countries, whereby low wages beget low productivity which in turn justifies low wages.69 Laborers were the despair of everyone who employed them, large or small. Robert Loder, an ambitious yeoman farmer in Berkshire, striving to expand his income, kept close track of the labor costs on his farm year by year and always found reason to bewail the shiftlessness of the men who worked for him. There was no telling how much or how little to expect of them. One year two men in fifteen days threshed more barley than they did in twenty-four days the year before, which led Loder to observe that “men can worke yf they list and soe they can loyter.” But on the whole he found that they much preferred to loiter and to “play legerdemaine with theyr masters and favour themselves.”70 Besides loafing and sleeping on the job, laborers were notorious for spending their small wages on drink and failing to show up for work at all. Since the Reformation had done away with the celebration of the traditional saints’ days, they took off frequent “Saint Mondays” to nurse their hangovers.71 Some, especially those who worked in coal mines, simply refused to recognize the Protestant calendar and every year continued to take more than a month’s worth of the old holidays, in addition to the irregular ones they took when the spirits moved them.72
Rather than hire such help, men with capital preferred to invest in enterprises that required a minimum of labor. Large landowners, including the nobility, avoided the labor problem by renting out their land in small parcels instead of hiring men to work it for them.73 Or they turned their arable land into pasture and enclosed it with fences where sheep could graze unattended. The result was fewer jobs, contrary to the aims of the government—and there were complaints that sheep were eating up the livelihood of men. But sheep at least went about cropping grass and growing wool more dependably than hired men would plow and plant.
Manufactures in this economy remained what the word itself implies: things made by hand. Labor was the principal cost in nearly every manufactured article. Employers engaged in manufacturing countered the shiftlessness of their workmen by paying starvation wages. They could get the cheapest labor in the woodland and pasture areas where the country’s hungry drifters trended. Here too was the wood needed for such varied enterprises as smelting and shipbuilding, the bark for tanning, and the cattle for hides to tan. Hence industries, such as they were, grew up mainly in the areas where cheap, irresponsible, hungry (and thirsty) labor guaranteed a low level of productivity.74
A possible exception was the woolen industry, the only industry that England supported on a large scale and the only one that furnished her with exports sizable enough to pay for the things like oil and pitch that she had to buy from other countries. Wool was spun and woven everywhere, perhaps more in the woodlands and pasture lands than elsewhere, but also in large-scale establishments in cities and towns. But the finer, more exacting processes of finishing and dyeing the cloth were beyond the skill of England’s listless laborers. Most English cloth was shipped abroad in an unfinished state, leaving the last, most lucrative stages of the business to foreigners.75
England’s mercantile dependence on this single export product had made her peculiarly vulnerable to economic depression. During the last half of the sixteenth century farsighted men had begun to see that one way to overcome the problem and to increase the number of jobs available for the growing population would be to increase the variety of the country’s exports. They introduced (with the assistance of Flemish artisans) new, lighter kinds of cloth for sale in warmer countries. They tried, not very successfully at first, to teach their laborers to finish the cloth. They expanded the production of coal and iron. They began to make glass, paper, brass, and gunpowder on a large scale. They brought in skilled foreigners to make things that Englishmen did not know how to make.76 And they thought about acquiring colonies in America filled with loving native peoples and abounding in exotic natural products that all the world would crave as well as less exotic ones that England could not do without. In 1607 the Virginia Company was intent on presenting such a colony to England.
Under the spur of imaginative patriots like the Hakluyts, men with capital had already for several decades been investing in overseas trading ventures, to the Levant, to the East Indies, to Russia (above which they had hoped to find a shorter route to the East); and many of the same men joined in the Virginia Company, which was also a trading venture. But in order to produce profits, Virginia could not be a mere trading post, like those which Englishmen were establishing in other parts of the world, where it was necessary only to unload English goods and take on native ones. Virginia would have to be an expansion of England itself, but with improvements. Englishmen would have to live there and themselves produce articles of trade that they could not or would not produce at home. The natives were expected to help, but first they would have to be shown how.
The men, then, who sailed up the James River in the spring of 1607 bore a heavy burden of expectation. They were to create a biracial society that would remedy England’s deficiencies. In Virginia they faced a people who had some of the same shortcomings, as well as—from the English point of view at least—a few of their own. The Virginia Company had sent the idle to teach the idle. And they had sent, as it turned out, a quarrelsome band of gentlemen and servants to bring freedom to the free. It was a formula for disaster.
1 Philip L. Barbour, ed., The Jamestown Voyages under the First Charter, 1606–1609, Works issued by the Hakluyt Society, 2nd ser., CXXXVI, CXXXVII (Cambridge, 1969), I, 24–34; Alexander Brown, The Genesis of the United States (Boston, 1890), 46–63.
2 The authoritative work on the Virginia Company is W. F. Craven, The Dissolution of the Virginia Company (New York, 1932). A briefer treatment with more attention to the company’s early years is his The Virginia Company of London, 1606–1624, Jamestown 350th Anniversary Historical Booklet No. 5 (Williamsburg, 1957). See also his Southern Colonies in the Seventeenth Century (Baton Rouge, La., 1949), 82–92.
3 The details of the enterprise were not set down and perhaps not fully worked out until 1609, when the company received a new charter (see below). It is not clear who or how many were the initial investors, apart from those named in the charter. It was probably not until 1609 that the company began selling shares to the public.
4 Barbour, Jamestown Voyages, I, 25.
5 Ibid., I, 43.
6 Quinn, Roanoke Voyages, I, 272–75, 284; II, 523.
7 Barbour, Jamestown Voyages, I, 50.
8 [Robert Johnson], Nova Britannia: Offering Most Excellent Fruits by Planting in Virginia (London, 1609; New York, 1867), sig. C, fols. 1–2.
9 Ibid.; Alexander Whitaker, Good Newes from Virginia (London, 1613), 24; William Strachey, The Historie of Travell into Virginia Britania, L. B. Wright and Virginia Freund, eds., Works issued by the Hakluyt Society, 2nd ser., CIII (London, 1953), 24.
10 RVC, 11,527.
11 James Adair, The History of the American Indians (London, 1775), 428.
12 Henry Timberlake, The Memoirs of Lieut. Henry Timberlake (London, 1765), 70.
13 For example, Robert Rogers on the Iroquois: “… the great and fundamental principles of their policy are, that every man is naturally free and independent, that no one … on earth has any right to deprive him of his freedom and independency, and that nothing can be a compensation for the loss of it.” Robert Rogers, A Concise Account of North America (London, 1765), 233. For other examples see E. S. Morgan, “The American Indian: Incorrigible Individualist,” in The Mirror of the Indian (Providence, R.I., 1958), 5–19.
14 Maurice A. Mook, “The Aboriginal Population of Tidewater Vir ginia,” American Anthropologist, n.s., XLVI (1944), 193–208; Nancy O. Lurie, “Indian Cultural Adjustment to European Civilization,” in James M. Smith, ed., Seventeenth-Century America: Essays in Colonial History (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1959), 33–60. Virtually everything now known about the Indians of the Virginia region, apart from the meager archeological evidence, is derived from five accounts: Captain John Smith’s writings in Travels and Works, Edward Arber, ed. (Edinburgh, 1910), (Smith’s early writings, in a more reliable transcript, are in Barbour, Jamestown Voyages); a brief account by Henry Spelman, printed in the introduction to Smith, Travels and Works, I, ci-cxiv; William Strachey, Historie of Travell; Thomas Hariot’s Briefe and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia (Quinn, Roanoke Voyages, I, 314–87); and Robert Beverley, The History and Present State of Virginia, Louis B. Wright, ed. (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1947). Beverley wrote in 1705 and thus knew the Indians only after they had had generations of contact with the English. Hariot, of course, was familiar only with the Indians south of the Chesapeake, and therefore not all of what he says is applicable. Strachey copied large sections of his work from Smith, but added details of his own (some of which do not appear wholly plausible). There are also a few useful observations in a letter of the Reverend John Clayton, printed in David I. Bushnell, “Virginia from Early Records,” American Anthropologist, IX (1907), 41–44, and in an anonymous “Account of the Indians in Virginia,” dated 1689, Stanley Pargellis, ed., WMQ, 3rd ser., XVI (1959), 228–43.
15 Barbour, Jamestown Voyages, II, 369–72; Smith, Travels and Works, I, cx–cxi, 79–82, 375–78.
16 Barbour, Jamestown Voyages, II, 371; Arber has garbled this passage (Smith, Travels and Works, I, 81).
17 Barbour, Jamestown Voyages, II, 371.
18 Ibid., II, 369.
19 Ibid., II, 371.
20 Strachey, Historie of Travell, 62, 87.
21 Beverley, History and Present State of Virginia, 227. Beverley refers to the beads, used as a medium of exchange, made from clamshells.
22 See in general Marshall Sahlins, Stone Age Economics (Chicago, 1972). On the lack of acquisitiveness of Indians, see Morgan, “American Indian,” 16–17.
23 Smith, Travels and Works, I, 130; Barbour, Jamestown Voyages, II, 421. It appears from a later account that Powhatan’s brother and successor, Opechancanough, was also entranced with English houses and that George Thorpe had one built for him. RVC, III, 552.
24 Smith, Travels and Works, 67, 362; Barbour, Jamestown Voyages, II, 356; Strachey, Historie of Travell, 78–79; Beverley, History and Present State, 174–77; Quinn, Roanoke Voyages, I, 370.
25 Smith, Travels and Works, cvi–cvii, 60–70, 365–66; Barbour, James town Voyages, II, 359; Strachey, Historie of Travell, 82–84; Beverley, History and Present State, 154–56. The Indians on the Eastern Shore were evidently still hunting in this manner in 1655, when a settler collected damages from the king of the Machepungo for burning part of a fence “in his hunting Exercyse.” Northampton V, 151.
26 Smith, Travels and Works, 69, 365; Barbour. Jamestown Voyages, II, 358; Strachey, Historie of Travell, 75, 82; Beverley, History and Present State, 148–49.
27 The Virginia Indians were polygamous, but it would appear that few men other than chiefs managed to obtain more than one wife. On marriage customs Smith tells us little. See Strachey, Historie of Travell, 112; Beverley, History and Present State, 170.
28 Smith, Travels and Works, cxi–cxii, 61–62, 357–58; Barbour, Jamestown Voyages, II, 351; Strachey, Historie of Travell, 118; Quinn, Roanoke Voyages, I, 337–43. Indian agriculture is discussed, largely on the basis of these sources, in John R. Swanton, The Indians of the Southeastern United States, Smithsonian Institution Bureau of American Ethnology, Bulletin 137 (Washington, D.C., 1946), 304–10; and in Charles C. Willoughby, “The Virginia Indians of the Seventeenth Century,” American Anthropologist, n.s., IX (1907), 82–84.
29 The evidence of Indians abandoning fields after a time is mostly indirect. The observers cited in the preceding note describe the process of clearing new fields, which probably implies the abandonment of old ones. John Pory, writing in 1619, noted that there were “many grounds here cleared by the Indians to our handes, which being much worne out, will beare no more of their corne.” L. G. Tyler, ed., Narratives of Early Virginia, 1606–1625 (New York, 1907), 283–84. The Indians’ loose attachment to particular plots is suggested also by the episode (see below, chap. 4) in which one Indian warned John Smith that the Indians could plant anywhere and could do away with the English simply by abandoning their fields and moving to new ones’ in the interior.
30 Quinn, Roanoke Voyages, I, 343; Carl O. Sauer, Sixteenth Century North America: The Land and People as Seen by the Europeans (Berkeley, Calif., 1971), 295.
31 Smith, Travels and Works, I, 67, 363; Barbour, Jamestown Voyages, II, 356.
32 Carl O. Sauer, “The Agency of Man on the Earth,” in W. L. Thomas, ed., Man’s Role in Changing the Face of the Earth (Chicago, 1955), 49–69, esp. 56–67.
33 Ester Boserup, The Conditions of Agricultural Growth: The Economics of Agrarian Change under Population Pressure (Chicago, 1965); Brian Spooner, ed., Population Growth: Anthropological Implications (Cambridge, Mass., 1972); Harold E. Conklin, The Study of Shifting Cultivation, Pan American Union, Studies and Monographs, VI (Washington, D.C., 1963).
34 For examples of contemporary observations of open land: Smith, Travels and Works, I, li, cvi, 18, 32; Barbour, Jamestown Voyages, I, 85; Brown, Genesis, I, 156, 157, 164, 409; Ralph Hamor, A True Discourse of the Present Estate of Virginia (London, 1615), 32; Louis B. Wright, ed., A Voyage to Virginia in 1609 (Charlottesville, 1964), 68; Edward Williams, Virginia: More Especially the South Part Thereof, Richly and Truly Valued (London, 1650), in Peter Force, ed., Tracts and Other Papers Relating Principally to the Origin, Settlement, and Progress of the Colonies in North America (Washington, D.C., 1836–46), III, No. II, p. 13. A perceptive discussion, which assembles much of the evidence, is Hu Maxwell, “The Use and Abuse of Forests by the Virginia Indians,” WMQ, 1st ser., XIX (1910), 73–103.
35 Brown, Genesis, I, 164, 335; Force, Tracts, II, No. 8, pp. 10, 14; Sloane Mss. 1008, ff.334–35, British Museum; J. F. D. Smyth, A Tour in the United States of America (London, 1784), I, 15.
36 Smith, Travels and Works, I, 34; Barbour, Jamestown Voyages, II, 356; Clayton C. Hall, ed., Narratives of Early Maryland (New York, 1910), 40; William Bullock, Virginia Impartially Examined (London, 1649), 3.
37 Smith, Travels and Works, I, 56–59, 352–55; Barbour, Jamestown Voyages, II, 101, 345–47; Strachey, Historie of Travell, 119–23; Hamor, True Discourse, 22–23; George Percy, Observations Gathered out of a Discourse of the Plantation of the Southern Colony in Virginia by the English, 1606, David B. Quinn, ed. (Charlottesville, 1967), 19–20.
38 Percy, Observations, 17.
39 Smith, Travels and Works, I, 67; Barbour, Jamestown Voyages, II, 357.
40 Boserup, Conditions of Agricultural Growth, 44–48; Sahlins, Stone Age Economics, 14–28.
41 Quinn, Roanoke Voyages, I, 343.
42 Smith, Travels and Works, I, civ–cv, 74–79, 370–75; Barbour, James town Voyages, II, 364–69; Strachey, Historie of Travell, 88–103; Quinn, Roanoke Voyages, I, 372–75; Pargellis, “Account of the Indians,” 234–35.
43 Arthur Barlowe had reported of the Roanoke Indians that “when they go to warres, they carry with them their Idoll, of whome they aske counsell, as the Romanes were woont of the Oracle of Apollo” (Quinn, Roanoke Voyages, I, 112). Smith says that in preparing for war, “the Werowances usually have the advice of their Priests and Conjurers, and their Allies and ancient friends, but chiefely the Priestes determine their resolution” (Travels and Works, I, 71; Barbour, Jamestown Voyages, II, 360).
44 Quinn, Roanoke Voyages, I, 113.
45 Travels and Works, I, 71; Barbour, Jamestown Voyages, II, 360.
46 Although Smith has a great deal to say about his own exploits in defeating Indian attacks or planned attacks, he tells us surprisingly little about Indian methods of warfare. Barbour, Jamestown Voyages, II, 360–62. The fullest account I know of warfare among the Indians of the southeast, from a later period, is Adair, History of the American Indians, 378–99. On Iroquois adoption, see Cadwallader Colden, The History of the Five Indian Nations (Ithaca, N.Y., 1958), 8.
47 Lawrence Stone, The Crisis of the Aristocracy, 1558–1641 (New York, 1965), 199–270; W. H. Dunham, Lord Hastings’ Indentured Retainers, 1461–1483, Connecticut Academy of Arts and Sciences, Transactions, XXXIX (New Haven, 1955).
48 Stone, Crisis of the Aristocracy, 758.
49 Any estimate of the percentage of landowners at the end of the sixteenth century must remain rough. Of those qualified to vote by possession of a “forty-shilling freehold,” a total of 15 percent of adult males is probably generous. See J. H. Plumb, “The Growth of the Electorate in England from 1600 to 1715,” Past and Present, No. 45 (Nov., 1969), 90–116; J. P. Cooper, “The Social Distribution of Land and Men in England, 1436–1700,” Economic History Review, XX (1967), 419–40.
50 On local institutions and daily life see Wallace Notestein, The English People on the Eve of Colonization, 1603–1630 (New York, 1954), and Carl Bridenbaugh, Vexed and Troubled Englishmen (New York, 1968).
51 The classic statements are Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (London, 1930), and R. H. Tawney, Religion and the Rise of Capitalism (London, 1926). Some of the discussion of English working habits that follows is taken from my article, “The Labor Problem at Jamestown, 1607–18,” American Historical Review, LXXVI (June, 1971), 595–611.
52 R. H. Tawney and Eileen Power, eds., Tudor Economic Documents (London, 1924), I, 342.
53 II Henry VII, c. 22, sec. 4; Douglas Knoop and G. P. Jones, The Medieval Mason (Manchester, 1933), 117.
54 Sir Thomas Smith, De Republica Anglorum, L. Alston, ed. (Cambridge, 1906), 40.
55 Stone, Crisis of the Aristocracy, 331.
56 F. J. Fisher, “The Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries: The Dark Ages in English Economic History,” Economica, 2nd ser., XXIV (1957), 2–18.
57 My discussion of English farming practices is based primarily on Thirsk, ed., The Agrarian History of England and Wales, 1500–1640.
58 D. C. Coleman, “Labour in the English Economy of the Seventeenth Century,” Economic History Review, 2nd ser., VIII (1956), 280–95.
59 Thirsk, Agrarian History, 1–112, 396–465; Eric Kerridge, The Agricultural Revolution (New York, 1968), 24–27, 39, 106–7, 155–60.
60 Thirsk, Agrarian History, 111.
61 In general prices of provisions rose much more rapidly than wages. See chap. 2, note 21.
62 Compare Bert F. Hoselitz, Sociological Aspects of Economic Growth (Glencoe, Ill., 1960), 33–34.
63 April, 1594. Calendar of Essex Quarter Sessions Rolls (microfilmed typescript, in Yale University Library) XVI, 165. See also the indictment (1589) of four bachelors for taking up the trade of poulterer, which “hindreth other powre men.” Ibid., XV, 54. While the statute seems to allow single men and women under thirty to set up in trade provided their services are not demanded by a master, the courts, in Essex County at least (where the earliest and most extensive records are preserved), required such persons to find themselves a master.
64 Tawney and Power, Tudor Economic Documents, I, 335.
65 Calendar of Essex Quarter Sessions Rolls, IV, 128.
66 William LeHardy, ed., Hertfordshire County Records, V (Hertford, 1928), 191–92, 376, 451; E. H. Bates, ed., Quarter Sessions Records for the County of Somerset, I, Somerset Record Society, XXIII (London, 1907), 11–12, 21, 97, 193, 258, 325; B. C. Redwood, ed., Quarter Sessions Order Book, 1642–1649, Sussex Record Society, LIV (1954), 34, 44, 46, 128, 145–46, 188, 190.
67 Bates, Quarter Sessions for Somerset, 114, 300; Redwood, Order Book (Sussex), 96, 146, 194; W. L. Sachse, ed., Minutes of the Norwich Court of Mayoralty, Norfolk Record Society, XV (Norwich, 1942), 78, 216.
68 Tawney and Power, Tudor Economic Documents, I, 353. The statute of 37 Edward III, c. 6, forbade artisans to practice more than one craft.
69 W. F. Moore, Industrialization and Labor (Ithaca, N.Y., 1951), 106–13, 308.
70 G. E. Fussell, ed., Robert Loder’s Farm Accounts, 1610–1620, Camden Society, 3rd ser., LIII (London, 1936), 25, 59.
71 Edgar S. Furniss, The Position of the Laborer in a System of Nationalism: A Study in the Labor Theories of the Later English Mercantilists (Boston, 1920), 117–34; E. P. Thompson, “Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism,” Past and Present, no. 38 (1967), 56–97.
72 Lawrence Stone, “An Elizabethan Coal Mine,” Economic History Review, 2nd ser., III (1950), 97–106.
73 Stone, Crisis of the Aristocracy, 295–97; Thirsk, Agrarian History, 198.
74 Thirsk, Agrarian History, 417–29; Joan Thirsk, “Industries in the Countryside,” in F. J. Fisher, ed., Essays in the Economic and Social History of Tudor and Stuart England (London, 1961), 70–88; E. L. Jones, “Agricultural Origins of Industry,” Past and Present, No. 40 (1968), 58–71.
75 Lawrence Stone, “Elizabethan Overseas Trade,” Economic History Review, 2nd ser., II (1949), 30–58.
76 John Nef, The Conquest of the Material World (Chicago, 1964), 121–212; D. C. Coleman, “An Innovation and Its Diffusions: The New Draperies,” Economic History Review, 2nd ser., XXII (1969), 417–29.