A Woman’s Place
A side from their Virgin Queen, women who remained obstinately single and celibate throughout their lives in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England faced a peculiar fate not shared by their married sisters. After death it was their lot to lead apes in hell, a proverb that fed on Protestant condemnations of celibacy – especially priestly celibacy – as a very Catholic evil that would dispose to debauchery and damnable defilements. Shakespeare slipped the apes into Kate’s choleric mouth in The Taming of the Shrew, while lutenist William Corkine sang of the inevitable shame that befell those choosing to live and die as virgins, ‘that dance about with bobtaile Apes in hell’. Far better, whispered Corkine seductively, to prostrate yourself to every passing peasant than undergo such shame: ‘No tongue can tell, What injury is done to Maids in hell.’ 1
The best way to escape such censure, as the Jamestown brides well understood, was to find themselves a husband and subjugate themselves to his will. Society expected all women to marry, whatever they wanted for themselves, and those who remained single and owned no property of their own were pushed to the margins, required to remain dependent as daughters, sisters, kin or servants in other men’s households.2 ‘All of them are understood either married or to bee married,’ declared the author of The Lawes Resolutions of Womens Rights of 1632.3 ‘I know no remedy,’ he added, ‘though some women can shift it well enough.’
Contemporary guides to marriage laid equal stress on a wife’s essential inferiority and her duty of obedience towards her husband. Take the eight treatises Of Domesticall Duties published by the Puritan clergyman William Gouge in 1622, the year after the Jamestown brides left for America. Gouge preached at the church of St Ann, Blackfriars, home to the maids Anne Gibbson and Elizabeth Browne, and to Audry Hoare’s sister Joane Childe. A wife should refrain from ambition and abandon any notion that she was her husband’s equal, insisted Gouge: ‘by vertue of the matrimoniall bond the husband is made head of his wife, though the husband were before mariage a very begger, and of meane parentage, and the wife very wealthy and of a noble stocke’.4 Even Gouge was forced to acknowledge that his sermons on female subservience frequently provoked a rustle of discontent among the women in his congregation.5
As for those ‘masterless’ women who remained unmarried by choice or circumstance, patriarchal society viewed them with alarm, fearing mayhem and social disorder. Successive acts of parliament regulating employment and vagrancy empowered local officials to hunt down never-married women between the ages of twelve and forty and force them into service ‘for such wages and in such reasonable sort and manner as they shall think meet’. 6 Court records for many English towns bulge with orders to masterless persons to put themselves in service, their ‘crime’ of living without masters elided with other moral failings such as slack attendance at church. Those women who persisted in living on their own could be locked up in houses of correction, commonly known as bridewells after Bridewell Hospital on the Thames, an abandoned royal palace that was quickly branded a ‘rogues’ hospital’, where the idle or disorderly poor could be confined, whipped and put to work for offences ranging from vagrancy, prostitution, adultery, swearing, dice-playing, drunkenness and slander, to running away from a master. 7
To be born a woman subjected you to a flood of popular literature that sought to control what you thought and how you behaved, and made you the butt of countless ballads, proverbs, jokes and tales. These ranged from the relatively light-hearted, like Sir Nicholas Le Strange’s origin myth collected in mid-century: ‘When man and woman were first made, they had each of them a lace given to lace their Bodyes together, the man had just enough to lace himselfe home, so he left his Tagge hanging downe; the womans proovd somewhat too short, and seeing she must leave some of her body open, in a rage she broake of her Tagge, and threw it away.’8
Far more vicious were the anti-feminist pamphlets that vented their fury on women in general, and scolding, domineering and unfaithful wives in particular. One of the most popular was The Araignment of Lewd, Idle, Froward [contrary], and unconstant women by Joseph Swetnam, a Jacobean fencing master and pamphleteer who claimed to have formed his views during thirty years of travel. Published in 1615, Swetnam’s diatribe against women was reprinted at least thirteen times during the century. He took his cue from Moses’ claim that a woman was made to be ‘a helper unto man, & so they are indeed: for she helpeth to spend and consume that which man painefully getteth’. Worse was to follow, as he described how women commonly spent ‘the most part of the forenoone painting themselves, and frizling their haires, and prying in their glasse, like Apes to prancke up themselves in their gawdies; like Poppets, or like the Spider which weaves a fine web to hang the flie’.9
If men had to marry (and Swetnam did all he could to dissuade them), then his advice was to ‘Choose not a wife too faire, nor too foule, nor too rich: for if she be faire, every one will be catching at her, and if she be too foule, a man will have no mind to love her which no body likes, & if too rich… thou shalt find her a commaunding Mistresse.’ Widows were not to be trusted either, ‘for if shee be rich, she will looke to governe, and if shee be poore, then are thou plagued both with beggery and bondage’.
The authors of broadsides and ballads were often as misogynistic as the preachers and pamphleteers. Carried around the country in pedlars’ packs, broadsides delivered news to literate and semi-literate members of society, displayed in public places, nailed to church doors and trees on commons.10 ‘Fill Gut, & Pinchbelly’, an illustrated broadside ballad of 1620, condensed society’s condemnation of women into an image of two monstrous animals, one grown fat from its exclusive diet of good men, the other pitifully thin from its meagre fare of good women. John Taylor, the water poet, supplied verses to accompany the broadside’s graphic portrayal of women as fractious, rebellious, power-hungry and discontented:
Now full bellyed Fill gut, so Fat heere in show,
Feedes on our good Men, as Women well know:
Who flocke in great numbers, all weary of lives,
Heere thus to be eaten, and rid from their Wives.
…
Heere Pinch belly starveth, for want of good meate,
for Women untoward, he no way can eate:
The good are his feeding, but hard to befound,
The worst of them living, the best underground.11
Even King James threw himself into the anti-feminist fray, commanding the Bishop of London to order his clergy to ‘inveigh vehemently and bitterly in theyre sermons against the insolencie of our women, and theyre wearing of brode brimd hats, pointed dublets, theyre haire cut short or shorne, and some of them stillettaes or poinards, and such other trinckets of like moment’.12 The clergy duly complied, and London’s pulpits thundered against ‘the insolence and impudence of women’, provoking a trio of pamphlets – all published in 1620 – on the theme of masculine women and womenish men, among them Hic Mulier: Or, The Man-Woman.13 Playwrights also took women to task, as did the ballad singers ‘so that they can come no where but theyre eares tingle’.14
Printed the year before the maids’ departure, the broadside ballad ‘Fill Gut, & Pinchbelly’ projected the misogyny of clergy and pamphleteers onto these two monstrous animals, one near starved from its diet of good women.
Society’s insistence that all women should marry nonetheless came at a price for those who conformed. As a woman, marriage created a place for you in society but it also gave your husband control over your rights at common law, notably the right to own property and sign contracts in your own name, since marriage converted your legal status from a feme sole (single woman) to a feme covert, a common-law term that lingered from Anglo-Norman and meant literally ‘covered woman’.15 All that you owned became your husband’s, and even his gifts to you remained his in law. ‘A wife how gallant soever she be, glittereth but in the riches of her husband, as the Moone hath no light, but it is the Sunnes.’ A man could beat his wife (though not so much as to cause actual bodily damage), just as he could beat an outlaw, a traitor, a pagan or his villein, all ‘dispunishable, because by the Law Common these persons can have no action’. In politics as in life, women were voiceless. ‘They make no Lawes, they consent to none, they abrogate none.’16
Whatever disadvantages marriage might bring to them personally, each of the women gathering at Gravesend and Cowes knew that to gain society’s approval their best option was to find themselves a husband. The Virginia Company’s own record of their ages, status and accomplishments contains nothing to indicate why these women should have failed to secure a husband in England. As a group, they were all of marriageable age, ranging from fifteen or sixteeen (the waterman’s daughter, Jane Dier) up to a declared age of twenty-eight, producing a median age of twenty and an average of twenty years and six months.17 Most middling women of the times married in their mid- to late twenties, while elite women tended to marry younger, as did London-born girls marrying for the first time, their families fearful perhaps of the capital’s high mortality from plague epidemics.18
While most of the Jamestown brides had several years of courtship ahead of them, those approaching thirty may have felt their chances of finding a husband were fast slipping by. Allice Burges, one of three women to give her age as twenty-eight, had plainly lied when she presented herself to the Virginia Company. Parish records show that she was in fact thirty-one, having been baptized at the parish church of Linton in Cambridgeshire on 11 January 1590.19 But why could the others not find husbands in the usual way?
Marriage statistics for the early 1600s provide a clear if unexpected answer. The women’s experiences of life and courtship will have told them what the statistics would later prove: that securing a suitable mate was becoming increasingly difficult. Among individuals of both sexes born around the turn of the century, the proportion that never married rose sharply from a steady 4 to 8 per cent to almost one in four (24 per cent) at the very time the women responded to the Virginia Company’s call.20 For women raised to believe that marriage was their only option of gaining a foothold in society, this was little short of catastrophic.
As ever, economics were largely to blame. While each woman will have experienced financial pressures in different ways, the hard times that prevailed from the 1590s to the 1620s affected them all. Population growth was one factor: between 1540 and 1600, the population of England and Wales increased by almost 45 per cent from under three million to over four million, leading to inflated grain prices and declining real wages for those who worked for a living.21 London, the city to which so many of the women had migrated, was growing especially fast, its population doubling during the sixteenth century and almost doubling again by the middle of the seventeenth.22
Depression in England’s cloth industry added to everyone’s misery, reaching disastrous proportions after the outbreak of war in Europe in 1618 and the failure of the Cockayne plan to bypass Dutch competition by changing the type of cloth exported.23 Rising food prices and declining wages favoured wealthy landowners and merchants with the resources to tide them through the bad times, yet all felt the pinch: ‘England was never generally so poore since I was borne as yt is at this present,’ wrote John Chamberlain in February 1621, the very year the women travelled to Virginia.24
Hard times will also have affected the ability of each woman’s family to contribute to her dowry or marriage portion, which all but the vagrant poor amassed in order to attract a husband. Love counted in many courtships, but approval of family and neighbours often counted even more, especially among the hard-working artisan class to which so many of the women belonged. Country gentry typically gave their daughters a dowry of between £500 and £1,000 on marriage. Between £50 and £100 was common for the daughters of prosperous yeomen, tradesmen and craftsmen, and between £10 and £50 for daughters born to the great bulk of yeomen, husbandmen and craftsmen, a group that included most of the Jamestown brides. Even the daughters of labourers expected to bring some money or goods to their marriage, although typically less than £5 in value.25
For families with small estates these were significant sums. And while wages and their purchasing power were in steady decline, dowries for all classes of women were subjected to significant and periodic hikes, especially severe for the daughters of aristocrats, but even the gentry experienced a three-fold rise in marriage portions between the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.26 This may partly explain why the handful of gentry parents chose or agreed to send their daughters overseas, thereby absolving themselves of the need to provide a dowry for them. Elizabeth Markham’s father had grown poor from his many children, remember, and the mother of Westminster-born Elizabeth Nevill may have despaired of ever amassing a portion large enough to attract a suitable suitor for her.
Losing a parent may also have contributed to the women’s decision to accept the Virginia Company’s offer and try their luck in America. This was a common enough experience among the population as a whole: throughout the Tudor and Stuart age as many as one child in three had lost one or both parents by the age of twenty-one, and evidence suggests that at least half of all young women had lost their fathers by the time they married.27 But the predominance of full or partial orphans among the Jamestown brides is nonetheless remarkable, and losing either or both parents undoubtedly made it harder for these young women to negotiate the perilous path from girlhood to the married state.
In all, just five of the fifty-six women definitely had both parents still living. The oldest of these at twenty years old was the wire drawer’s daughter Susan Binx, who travelled on the Marmaduke, together with nineteen-year-old Audry Hoare. Two more sailed on the Warwick, both aged just sixteen: Gervase Markham’s daughter Elizabeth, and tailor’s daughter Elizabeth Starkey. The fifth maid with two living parents was sixteen-year-old Elizabeth Browne, who sailed on the Tiger.28 At least twelve more women almost certainly had one or other parent still living, while eight women had definitely lost both parents by the time they sailed: three Marmaduke maids (Allice Burges, Catherine Finch and Margaret Bourdman) and five of the Warwick women (Ellen Borne, Lucy Remnant, Alse Dollinges, Christian Smyth and Elizabeth Pearson). For roughly half the women (twenty-nine out of fifty-six), including the four widows, we know nothing about their parents; the implication is that many of them were dead by the time the women sailed and no longer relevant to their daughters’ lives.
As well as contributing to their dowries, parents could help their daughters in the delicate business of securing a mate, a protracted process in which mothers were almost as likely as fathers to be involved.29 Daughters of the aristocracy and upper gentry were expected to follow their families’ wishes since issues of property, succession and family standing were judged too important to be left to a young girl’s heart. Lower down the social scale, daughters commonly conducted their own negotiations and expected to have a say in their choice of a husband,30 but without parents or close family to guide them, many of the Jamestown brides will have floundered in London’s more complicated marriage market, with its bewildering challenges and opportunities.
Altogether twenty-six out of fifty-six women came from counties outside London; fourteen were almost certainly born in London, while the other sixteen gave no details about their birthplace. Many of the incomers to London and several of those born in the capital worked in service in other people’s households. Far from implying a drop in status, service was viewed as a natural stage in a young girl’s lifecycle, usually undertaken from her mid- to late teens until the time she married, sometimes with members of her extended family or with people known to her family. By living away from home, a girl gained a measure of independence from her parents while remaining firmly under others’ control.31 Fed and housed by her employers, she learned the skills of housewifery that would serve her well in married life – typically robust ‘country’ skills in cooking, baking, malting, brewing, dairying, running a household, sewing and embroidery, plus the specialist skills of a dairy maid, malt maker, washer maid and chambermaid. And crucially for a girl’s marriage prospects, working in service allowed her to put her admittedly meagre earnings of between one and two pounds a year towards her marriage portion, a little more if she was very fortunate.32
For all but the youngest Jamestown brides, living in service in the households of others marked their expected transition from girlhood to adulthood and marriage.
But living in service had its downsides too. Servants worked long hours and some experienced ill treatment from their masters or mistresses. In early 1619 John Chamberlain wrote of a woman in Whitefriars who ‘held her maides head so long in a tubbe of water, that she drowned her’,33 while ballads sang of the dangers young women faced from the amorous advances of their masters.34 Living in service with relatives could also prove problematic. Catherine Finch’s brother Erasmus was a hot-tempered fellow who could not have been an easy man to live with let alone serve, as Catherine was required to do. His name crops up twice in the Middlesex courts for 1616, standing bail in two neighbourhood disputes involving a motley group of men from the parish, including a labourer, a shoemaker and several gentlemen, some of whom switched sides between the quarrels. In the second incident Erasmus Finch and gentleman Alan Turner – both of St Martin-in-the-Fields – stood bail for one George Harper who had wrongfully accused the courtier and musician Sir Ferdinand Heyburne of fraud (the word used in the case was cozenage). The case was discharged at Sir Ferdinand’s request, suggesting a quarrel in their cups.35 Quarrelsome to the end, Erasmus Finch – by now appointed crossbow maker to Charles I – obtained a crown lease in 1631 to common meadows beside the River Frome in the Gloucestershire villages of Fretherne and Saul, and tried to stop the rest of the parish using the meadows as common land. The attempt failed at law when the villagers successfully rebuffed his claim.36 By then of course his sister Catherine had been gone for ten years to make a new life for herself in Virginia.
Altogether, sixteen of the Jamestown brides came explicitly out of service, and it is likely that many of the others came recommended by their master or mistress, without the relationship being spelled out. Of the dozen or so Marmaduke maids, seven had definitely come out of service, plus possibly a couple more; while of the twenty-six Warwick women for whom we have information, nine had definitely come out of service, a further eleven probably came recommended by their employers, three were widows and two were sixteen-year-olds still living at home.
The young women who had migrated to London from the provinces on their own will have found life especially difficult. Good service positions were hard to come by and finding a husband was even harder. While London had a goodly pool of male apprentices, the large majority came from outside the city, and their conditions of employment enforced celibacy for the seven or eight years of their apprenticeship. By the time they were ready to marry, say between the ages of twenty-six and thirty, they favoured widows with capital or the daughters of master tradesmen who could help set them up in business or trade.37 Migrant and possibly orphaned young women were pushed to the back of the queue, especially when they served in the households of strangers.
Economic hard times, losing one or both parents, migration to London and separation from kith and kin, the near impossibility of amassing a dowry fat enough to attract a good match and the reluctance of London’s young men to marry unendowed maidens when they had the choice of richer widows or London-born girls: all these undoubtedly contributed to the decision taken by some or all of the women to gamble their future on sailing to America. A clutch of ballads published around this time underlined their plight: ‘I can, nor will no longer ly alone,’ sighs the heroine of ‘A Maydens Lamentation for a Bedfellow’ (c. 1615).38 Another ballad from a decade or so later begins:
The Maidens of London are now in despaire,
How they shall get husbands, it is all their care,
Though maidens be never so vertuous and faire,
Yet old wealthy widowes, are yong mens chiefe ware.
Oh this is a wiving age.
Oh this is a wiving age.39
Other ballads from the early 1620s echoed the maidens’ complaints, or more coarsely reiterated young men’s preference for widows over maids.40
A lifetime’s training in habits of obedience may also have rendered the women susceptible to promises made by others about their prospects in America. Often criticized for glossing over the suffering endured by its colonists, the Virginia Company had felt obliged just the previous year to publish a broadside admitting the truth of the colony’s shockingly high mortality, which ‘this last yeere hath there wrought upon the People, to the consumption of divers hundreds, and almost the utter destruction of some particular Plantations’. After hastily acknowledging the ‘just finger of Almighty God’ in such bad news, the company proceeded to outline its plans for a better future and a healthier population, ‘seing in the health of the People, consisteth the very life, strength, encrease, and prosperity of the whole generall Colony’.41
English administrator and intelligencer John Pory well understood how precarious life was in Virginia when he was offered the post of secretary there, vowing not to ‘adventure my Carkase in so dangerous a business for nothing’.42 But in its dealings with the women the company is unlikely to have dwelt on the hardships they might encounter in Virginia or their limited prospects of survival. Likewise the women’s guarantors, whether connected to the company or to London’s great and good, can hardly have painted a realistic portrait of what the maids might find in Jamestown. In truth, Virginia had little relevance to the daily lives of most Londoners. For all his gossiping, John Chamberlain writes of the colony but rarely, and Virginia makes few appearances in the tales or ballads likely to have reached the women’s ears.43 So they had little hard evidence to counter the propagandists who promised them a good life in America, or the ministers of religion who stressed their Christian duty to take part in the colonial adventure.
Since the colony’s earliest days, English pulpits ‘rang with praise of the infant colony on the banks of the James’, and throughout its life the Virginia Company continued to pay preachers to deliver sermons to shareholders and others at significant departures or events.44 Chamberlain himself commented on the rage for sermons delivered at specially convened feasts in hired halls, ‘as likewise the Virginia companie had this weeke at Grocers Hall, where there have been three or fowre of this kind within these ten dayes’.45 The date of this event is significant: 17 November 1621, by which time the last of the brides had departed for Jamestown. If the assembled company thought of them at all, the best we can hope for is that their recent dispatch was celebrated with a toast.
There is another reason why the Jamestown brides might have chosen to travel. At least one of the women (and how many more?) did so because she wanted to leave her old life behind. The evidence is indisputable. It appears in the one testimonial to survive among the Ferrar papers, for the widowed Ann Richards or Rickard, twenty-five years old and born in the parish of St Sepulchre on the western edge of London, just outside the City walls. Dated 13 December 1620, some nine months before Richards sailed from Gravesend on the Warwick, the testimonial comes from the churchwardens and parishioners of ‘St James att Clarckenwell in the countie of Middlesex’, who certified that she had lived in the parish for six years or thereabouts, during which time she had ‘demeaned herself in honest sorte & is a woman of an honest lyef & conversation duringe the tyme shee hathe lyved amounges us’.46
Richards had requested the testimonial not because she had been approached by the Virginia Company – the dates do not tally – but because she was ‘mynded & purposed to dwell elswhere’. Without such a testimonial she risked hounding by the authorities in any new place where she tried to settle. Such was the reality of life for any independently minded young woman of the times, even a respectable widow.
Would Ann Richards and the others fare any better in Virginia?
