The Choosing
Old ballads have plenty of advice for young men wishing to choose a bride. Let her not be a dirty foul slut, a rich gossip, a jealous widow, a cuckolding ‘fair Venus’, a babbling scold, a wench with an ash-coloured face or one with ‘round Cherry-cheeks and red hair’. Rather,
The bonny Wench with the black brow,
oh she is a good one indeed;
For she will be true to her vow,
I would we had more of her breed.1
But what if it’s the woman who does the choosing? What should she look for in a good mate?
On paper at least the Virginia Company insisted that the Jamestown brides were free to choose their marriage partners, notwithstanding the delicate matter of the bride price their husbands would be required to pay for them. We can imagine John Ferrar picking his words with care when he composed the company’s letter to the governor and council in Virginia sent with the Marmaduke maids. The company admitted that
though we are desireous that mariadge be free according to the law of nature, yett would we not have these maides deceived and married to servantes, but only to such freemen or tenn[an]tes as have meanes to manteine them: wee pray you therefore to be fathers to them in this bussines, not enforecing them to Marrie against theire willes; neither send we them to be servantes, save in case of extremitie [‘necessitie’ crossed out], for we would have theire condicon so much bettered as multitudes may be allured thereby to come unto you.2
As an added inducement, husbands who bought themselves wives would be assigned servants from the next batch sent to Virginia, as it was company policy ‘to preserve families, and to preferr married men before single p[er]sons’.
The promise of free choice for the women and future apprentices for their husbands was repeated in the company’s instructions sent with the maids who sailed on the Warwick and the Tiger, a grand total of fifty-six women dispatched as part of the maids’ magazine, or fifty-seven according to the official tally, which included Mistress Palmer’s seven-year-old daughter Priscilla. All the brides came with ‘good testimony of theire honest life and cariadge’ enclosed like a bill of sale for the satisfaction of ‘such as shall Marry them’, and the company reiterated its hope that the women would all be married to ‘honest and sufficient men, whose names will reach to p[re]sent re-payment: but if any of them shall unwarily or fondly bestow her self (for the libertie of Mariadge we dare not infrindg) uppon such as shall not be able to give p[re]sent sattisfaccon; we desire that at least as soon as abillity shalbe, they be compelled to pay the true quantitie of tobacco proporconed, and that this debt may have p[re]cedence of all others to be recovered’.3
Clearly if the women chose impecunious husbands the magazine was to become a preferred creditor, to be paid at the first opportunity. The company further expressed its hope that all the women would be received with ‘the same Christian pietie and charitie as they are sent from hence’, and that Virginia’s planters would provide them with ‘fitting services’ until they married, with the expectation that they would be reimbursed by the women’s husbands once a deal was struck. The lack of provisions continued to rankle, and the colonists would later beg the company that the ‘next Supplie of m[aids]’ might arrive with at least ‘some smale pvisione’ to tide them over ‘untill they may bee convenientlie disposed of ’.4
Wives did not come cheap, however. In the colony’s prevailing tobacco currency the required bride price of 150 pounds in weight far exceeded the 100-pound limit on permitted annual production per head which the Virginia Company had set only that July in a desperate attempt to encourage planters to diversify their crops.5 Expressed in English money, 150 pounds of best-leaf tobacco was worth as much as £22 10s., a considerable sum that would have taken a young woman working in service back home more than seven years to amass. In the colony, by contrast, where labour was desperately short, wages for independent male workers such as carpenters and bricklayers were astronomically high – as much as three to four times those established by county justices in England – which should have tipped the balance in the women’s favour. A master carpenter in Virginia could earn himself a bride by working for just 115½ days, for instance, or 150 days if his employer supplied him with meat and drink.6 A master joiner could pay for a bride even faster.
But in the colony’s early days few artisans travelled independently to the colony; most workmen came as indentured servants or company tenants. In return for their transportation, clothing and food, servants typically committed themselves to work for between four and seven years. Only on completion of their indentures could they begin to amass capital for themselves. Tenants technically fared better: their contracts generally allowed them to keep one half of the product of their labour, passing on the rest to the company or to investors in their particular plantation; but both tenants and servants were liable to exploitation by acquisitive masters, and few recent arrivals will have been affluent enough to bid for one of the brides.7
Whatever arrangements Pountis and Governor Wyatt put in place to match planters to brides, they succeeded in keeping away poorer settlers such as Thomas Niccolls (or Nicholls), who wrote a bitter letter of complaint to Sir John Wolstenholme, one of the chief investors in Martin’s Hundred. ‘Women are necessary members for the Colonye,’ declared Niccolls, ‘but the poore men are nevr the nearer for them they are so well sould.’ As a skilled surveyor, Niccolls had been released from the company’s land the previous year and was employed at Martin’s Hundred to help divide up the plots there.What he wanted was not a wife but a woman to undertake those domestic duties then considered women’s business, such as laundry, which cost Niccolls three pounds sterling a year in labour charges and soap, and caring for the sick, without which the poor tenants of Wolstenholme Town ‘dye miserablie through nastines & many dep[ar]te the World in their owne dung for want of help in their sickness’. The bitterness of his plight prompted Niccolls to call for women to be sent to Virginia under contract to serve the company ‘for certayne yeares whether they marry or no. For all that I can find that the multitude of women doe is nothing but to devoure the food of the land without dooing any dayes deed.’ By February of the following year, Niccolls himself was dead.9
Realistically, only elite settlers and established planters were likely to have sufficient capital to secure one of the brides, and the brides themselves will have wanted a mate who could provide for them materially in Virginia’s crude but thrusting society. The group most likely to provide husbands for the Jamestown brides were the ancient planters who had come to Virginia before the departure of governor Sir Thomas Duke in 1616, many as labourers or company tenants. According to the instructions given to the incoming governor Sir George Yeardley in 1618, ancient planters – men and women – were entitled to 100 acres of land each and a few other privileges, so they should have been able to afford one of the maids.10 Many also came from the same artisan class that provided the core of the Jamestown brides. Their survival proved that they had adapted to life in the New World and might be expected to marry and put down roots. As John Rolfe reported to Sir Edwin Sandys in January 1621, once they were freed many had chosen their own land, where ‘they strive and are pr[e]pared to build houses & to cleere their groundes ready to plant’.11 And it seems that many of these early settlers did indeed find themselves a wife. Of all the settlers still living in Virginia in January 1625, those who had arrived in the colony between 1607 and 1616 were more than twice as likely to be married than the average for all eligible adults – 70.3 per cent compared to 30.7.12
But the pool of eligible men was surprisingly small. Eighteen months or so before the women arrived in Virginia a census recorded just 670 able men and 119 women throughout the entire colony, a ratio of roughly six men to every woman in a total population of 928, which included Christians, non-Christians, serviceable boys and children.13 Given this huge gender imbalance, the maids should have found it easy to secure a husband from the unattached men. Yet the same census counted just 222 habitable houses, excluding barns and storehouses, which puts a rough ceiling on the number of ‘suitable’ husbands for the Jamestown brides, and a fair proportion of these men were of course already married. Servants tended to live communally or in the households of their masters, while relatively few free men lived as joint heads of households with other men. Although many more people arrived in the colony in the months that followed, most came as tenants or indentured servants, and mortality rates remained high, so the numbers of eligible men did not increase by very much.
Those planters who could afford one of the brides will undoubtedly have weighed up the economics of the transaction. Land and labour provided the key to prosperity in Virginia: land to grow tobacco and servants to tend and harvest it. As a prospective husband considering your options, the bride price of 150 pounds of tobacco would also buy you two houses and six acres of land in Charles Hundred.14 While you would expect a wife to contribute to your endeavours, these women came without land (an express condition laid down by the Virginia Company) and they were not to be treated as servants. Viewed purely as a commercial transaction, buying one of the brides was twice as expensive as buying an indentured maidservant, which would cost you £6 for the Atlantic crossing and £4 or so for clothing and provisions – and against this you could claim fifty acres of land for transporting her to Virginia. If you married a servant who had not completed her indentured term, you would expect to repay her master any outstanding costs of transportation but this was not always the case. The Jamestown court judged one Thomas Harvey not liable to pay for his wife’s passage, a serving maid, on the grounds that she had been freely given to him by her master.15
Also to their disadvantage, the fifty-six Jamestown brides who arrived in 1621 followed in the wake of the ninety-odd young women dispatched to the colony the previous year on the Jonathan, the London Merchant and perhaps the Bona Nova. We have no record of who they were, but we do know that they came at a far cheaper price: independent planters had had to pay no more than the cost of their transportation, for which they were entitled to claim fifty acres of land, while company tenants had been able to marry them for free. And it seems that the earlier brides were more successful at securing husbands. Out of nearly a hundred male ancient planters still alive in 1625, at least ten married women who had arrived in 1620 on the Jonathan, the London Merchant and the Bona Nova compared with just three who definitely married women who came the following year on the Marmaduke, the Warwick and the Tiger. Altogether a little over a third (thirty-eight) of the surviving ancient planters may have been available to marry when the Jamestown brides arrived, but eleven of these were still servants or living in the households of others in 1625. Other ancient planters – and their wives – may have died in the intervening years, but the numbers indicate how small the pool of eligible men really was.16
Virginia had its own laws regulating marriage, which required maids and maidservants to obtain permission from those who exercised authority over them, but marriage rites and customs reflected those of home.
So which of the Jamestown brides succeeded in securing that elusive husband for whom they had crossed the Atlantic? For some at least a marriage deal was quickly brokered. In its list of achievements for the year 1621 (which continued until 24 March 1622) the Virginia Company recorded the arrival of ships bringing new people to the colony, among them young maids ‘sent to make wives for the Planters, divers of which were well married before the comming away of the Ships’.17 ‘Divers’ is a slippery word that expresses multiplicity without distinguishing between ‘many’ and ‘few’, but we know of at least seven maids who found themselves husbands, even if we cannot precisely determine when or where their marriages took place.
Virginia’s first general assembly had ordered ministers to keep a record of christenings, marriages and deaths, and report annually to Virginia’s secretary.18 Since so few of the colony’s early records have survived, tracing those maids who adopted their husbands’ surnames then died within two or three years is virtually impossible, aside from fleeting appearances in court records. But crucially for this story, King James ordered a count of everyone living in Virginia in January 1625 grouped into musters or households, which also sought details of their relationships to each other and how well supplied they were in terms of food, livestock, buildings, arms and servants. Settlers were in addition asked to record the ship that had brought them to Virginia and the date of their arrival. While not everybody complied in full, we can make reasonable guesses about the identity of brides with less common Christian names who had arrived by any of the bridal ships in 1621 and were still living early in 1625.19
We should be cautious nonetheless about identifying wives by their first names and arrival ships alone, especially when arrival dates are not given. You may read that the Margaret who arrived on the Warwick – arrival date unknown – and went on to marry the Lincolnshire smith Ezekiah Raughton (or Wroughton)20 was Margaret Dauson from Suffolk, one of the Jamestown brides, brought up in Southwark by Mistress Elizabeth Stevenson. In 1625 the Raughtons were recorded as living on the College Land at Henricus, but at least one other Margaret had arrived in the colony by the same ship, ‘Mrgrett Riche’, one of several servants imported by the Kentish gentleman Thomas Crispe, who might just as easily have become Raughton’s wife.21
Of the thirteen maids who arrived on the Marmaduke, we can be reasonably confident that two married ancient planters: twenty-three-year-old Catherine Finch, originally from Herefordshire, and nineteen-year-old Audry Hoare, whose stories I pick up in later chapters. Both husbands had travelled to Virginia in 1611 in a fleet of ships under Sir Thomas Dale, Catherine’s husband Robert Fisher arriving by the Elizabeth, and Audry Hoare’s husband Thomas Harris on the Prosperous. Sailing via the Canaries and the West Indies, the ships had reached Point Comfort by 22 May 1611, bringing 300 people, supplies, horses, cattle, goats, rabbits, pigeons and poultry. The men were company servants for the most part, described as ‘honest, sufficient artificers… carpenters, smiths, coopers, fishermen, tanners, shoemakers, shipwrights, brickmen, gardeners, husbandmen and laboring men of all sorts’.22 Like other ancient planters, they gained their freedom when Sir George Yeardley returned to the colony as governor with instructions to free all company servants who had arrived before Dale’s departure in 1616.
Harder to identify by their Christian names are the multitude of Anns and Elizabeths who came to Virginia on any of the bridal ships, so I cannot positively name the third Jamestown bride to net herself an ancient planter, one of several Elizabeths who arrived on the Warwick in 1621. Like the other two husbands, John Downeman had come to Virginia in 1611, travelling by the John & Francis. In January 1625 he gave his age as thirty-three, eleven years older than his wife. Of the seven Elizabeths aboard the Warwick, the best matches in age are the gentleman’s daughter from Westminster, Elizabeth Nevill, and the plasterer’s daughter Elizabeth Pearson from Oxford, both aged nineteen at the time of their embarkation, or twenty-year-old Elizabeth Bovill (or Borrill), presented to the company by her mother, Edith Smith. We can discount Elizabeth Dag, who married William Cobb (see Chapter 14) and the widowed Elizabeth Grinley, who was surely too old. Recorded as twenty-six in 1621, Grinley would have been twenty-nine or thirty by 1625, when John Downeman’s wife was reputedly just twenty-two. The two other Warwick Elizabeths (Gervase Markham’s sixteen-year-old daughter and Elizabeth Starkey) were surely too young.
The Downemans may have married soon after Elizabeth came to the colony. By February 1624 they were living in Elizabeth City, and shortly after that Elizabeth gave birth to a daughter, Mary, who did not survive long and was buried on 23 November 1624. The following January, childless again, the Downemans were living in some comfort in a fortified house with reasonable supplies of arms, six barrels of corn, one kid goat and a sixteen-year-old servant lad called Moyses Stones.23 Fellow residents of Elizabeth City included John and Ann Laydon – formerly Ann Burras, one of the first two English women to come to Jamestown – and their four daughters, Virginia, Alice, Katherin and Margerett, all born in Virginia.
On paper, John Downeman was an ideal catch.24 A modest landowner, he patented one hundred acres across from Elizabeth City on the south side of the James River,25 which was still considered dangerous territory, as settlement had barely started there. All we know of his character is that, like many settlers, he had an explosive temper. For making ‘oprobrius speeches’ to a naturalized French Protestant settler called Nicholas Martiau he was fined ten pounds by the Jamestown court and ordered to make a public apology in church.26 Such behaviour did not prevent his appointment as a burgess for Elizabeth City, however, or as one of eight commissioners to a new monthly court established there in spring 1629.27
The Virginia Company will have thought less highly of two settlers who each married one of several Anns sailing on the Marmaduke. Both men were relatively recent arrivals: Thomas Doughtie, who came by the Marigold in 1619; and Nicholas Baly, who arrived by the Jonathan in 1620. The Balys lived for a time at West and Shirley Hundred, but by January 1625 both couples, still childless, were living at Sir George Yeardley’s old plantation of Flowerdew Hundred, which by then had been renamed Peirsey’s Hundred after its new owner, Abraham Peirsey, Virginia’s cape merchant and a hugely successful planter.28 Although Doughtie and Baly each headed his own household, neither man owned a house and they had no servants of their own. Relatively well provided with arms (the Doughties had one gun, one coat of mail, a sword, four pounds of powder and twenty pounds of lead), they had only modest food supplies: the Baly household had four barrels of corn and one hundred dry fishes, while the Doughties had less corn and only fifty dry fishes, but they did possess one pig.
Nicholas Baly sounds a particularly poor catch. Having arrived as an indentured servant just one year before his future wife, he persuaded Abraham Peirsey to buy his freedom from Sir George Yeardley, along with that of another servant called Jonas Riley. Peirsey paid Yeardley 500 pounds of tobacco for the two men’s freedom, clearly expecting the debt to be repaid, but the pair dragged their heels and in early 1625, by which time Nicholas and Ann were married, the Jamestown court ordered the two men to pay Peirsey 396 pounds of tobacco and twelve barrels of corn, or to saw 10,000 feet of boards for him.29
The Marmaduke brought at least four Anns who might have married either Doughtie or Baly. Since Ann Jackson never married (see Chapter 18) and the ages of the two wives are unknown, I cannot say for certain which of the other three married either of the two men. In her late twenties, husbandman’s daughter Ann Tanner from Chelmsford in Essex was skilled at brewing, baking, making butter and cheese, sewing, spinning and general ‘huswifery’, all useful skills in a planter’s wife.30 Gentleman’s daughter Ann Harmer from Baldock in Hertfordshire was younger, at twenty-one, and came from a family of eight children. Of a higher social status, she was raised by a seamstress and possessed rarefied though less immediately useful sewing skills, working with gold and silks. Of the third woman, Ann Buergen, we know only that she was taken on board at the Isle of Wight by Robert Newland, after the well born Mistress Joan Fletcher was ‘turned back’.
The seven brides whose husbands can be traced were surely not the only Jamestown brides to marry; others clearly adopted their husband’s surname and sank without trace. But as the women’s stories unravel, we discover that not all the maids found husbands and the obvious question is why. Were they any less handsome than their married sisters, or less obviously endowed with the skills and mettle required in a planter’s wife? Were they simply unlucky? Or were they rather more fastidious in their choice of mate and disappointed by the poor calibre of available husbands?
The brides who came from gentry families will have found it especially hard to secure husbands to match their previous station in life. Virginia’s elite had other ways of finding a wife,31 and the gentlemen adventurers who came over in large numbers in the colony’s early years had for the most part proved unsuited to the hardships of frontier life. Captain John Smith castigated them as useless parasites, ignorant of toil and labour and much given to melancholy when conditions proved tougher than expected.32 Most had either died or gone home, and by the early 1620s a new breed of gentlemen colonists either had wives back home, like Captain George Thorpe, or had brought their wives and children with them, like Captain John Woodlief, Thorpe’s associate in the plantation of Berkeley Hundred.33
Aside from the company’s instructions to the governor and council to be as fathers to the women in the matter of choosing a husband, we know little about the mechanics of how the matches were made. It is reasonable to suppose that eligible men – those without wives and with reasonable prospects of paying the tobacco price required – were called to Jamestown, much like the burgesses required to attend the colony’s periodic general assemblies held in the church. This is how the Virginian novelist Mary Johnston imagined it would happen in her wildly popular novel To Have and to Hold, which borrowed the central idea of the Virginia Company’s importation and sale of brides in the colony’s early years. First serialized in the Atlantic Monthly and published in book form in 1900, Johnston’s novel (her second) brought her fame and fortune and was turned into two silent films in 1916 and 1922, both now presumed lost.34
Johnston’s atmospheric novel starts with the hero, Ralph Percy, sailing down a deserted James River in reluctant pursuit of a bride, having heard about the women’s arrival from his friend Master John Rolfe. As he steps ashore at Jamestown, he hears the ringing of the newly installed church bells and sees the women emerging from their houses to gather in the market square, where the Reverend Bucke and Master Wickham of Henricus are waiting for them.
These were not the first women to come to Jamestown, as Johnston rightly implies. Once the native population was removed from the reckoning, this ‘natural Eden’ had boasted several thousand Adams and but some three score Eves, for the most part ‘either portly and bustling or withered and shrewish housewives, of age and experience to defy the serpent’. These new arrivals were very different, however: ‘Ninety slender figures decked in all the bravery they could assume; ninety comely faces, pink and white, or clear brown with the rich blood showing through; ninety pair of eyes, laughing and alluring, or downcast with long fringes sweeping rounded cheeks; ninety pair of ripe red lips.’35
Women and colonists crowd into Jamestown’s small church to hear a long service of praise and thanksgiving. Towards the end Percy catches sight of the woman who will become his wife. She is clothed Puritan-style in a dark woollen dress, severe and unadorned, close ruff and prim white coif, beyond her ‘a row of milkmaid beauties, red of cheek, free of eye, deep-bosomed, and beribboned like Maypoles’.
From the church the congregation disgorges to a ‘fair green meadow’ where four ministers have established pulpits of turf and set themselves up for business. Scorned by the women for his workaday dress, Percy stays aloof, a silent spectator to their courting, watching a ‘shepherdess from Arcadia’ as she waves back ‘a dozen importunate gallants’ then tosses her knot of blue ribbon into their midst before marching off with the wearer of her favour. Tall Jack Pride courts a milliner’s apprentice, the pair endlessly bobbing and bowing to each other. A pastoral maid quizzes her beau about his wealth and material possessions. ‘I’ll take you,’ she says promptly on discovering that he is the proud possessor of two cows, three acres of tobacco, a dozen hens, two cocks, three beds, one chest, one trunk, one leather carpet, six calfskin chairs and two or three of rush, five pairs of sheets, eighteen coarse linen napkins and six alchemy spoons.
Is that how it was? I imagine that most negotiations were more protracted than Johnston suggests, as each party weighed up the suitability of the other. Prospective husbands will have inspected the women’s particulars listing their skills and provenance, although not all the men could read, as we shall see. The carefully annotated lists should have steered the men towards women who were skilled at sewing or the mysteries of housewifery, women who could bake and brew and supply the ‘good drinke’ for which the colony pined, ‘wine beinge too deere’ and Virginia’s climate too hot to make malt from barley.36 Virginian farmers might also be expected to favour the daughters of gardeners or husbandmen, who would be used to working the land, even if they came without any knowledge of growing tobacco.
The women for their part would want to assess the men’s present and future prospects, measured not by English coin but by land acreage and tobacco yield and by the extent of their homestead: the precise number of houses, boats, pieces of armour, storehouses, tobacco houses, barrels of corn and other produce, dry fish, wet fish, biscuits and bacon flitches, cattle and swine and other livestock, poultry, and all the material possessions, many imported from the home country, that brought civility to the frontier. We may hope that the colony’s leaders took their parental responsibilities seriously and helped to guide the women in their choices, as family and friends would have done at home.
Determined to protect property interests by regulating marriage, especially among the servant population, Virginia’s first general assembly of 1619 had decreed that any maid or maidservant wishing to marry must obtain permission from those who exercised power over her: parents, masters and mistresses, or both the magistrate and minister of the place where she lived.37 The Jamestown brides came expressly with their parents’ or their relatives’ blessing and were not to be treated as servants, but this requirement allowed the colony’s political leaders to veto unsuitable husbands, if they chose. Once a marriage was approved, we can safely assume that one of Virginia’s several ministers will have conducted a short ceremony before the congregation assembled at church in Jamestown or elsewhere, followed by a sermon or communion.
In seventeenth-century England the giving of rings was common, as a token of love and commitment and a mark of ownership of the woman by the man.38 Fragments of braided and gold rings from the colony’s early years have survived at Jordan’s Journey, where the former Catherine Finch settled with her husband, and also at Flowerdew Hundred, home to two of the Marmaduke Anns. The Flowerdew collection at the Alderman Library in Charlottesville boasts a charming gold posy ring inscribed, ‘Grace mee with acceptance’39 but the brides shipped out by the Virginia Company were surely married off without the niceties of a betrothal ritual. They did, however, arrive with another traditional bridal gift: white lamb gloves supplied by London perfumer William Piddock, the one touch of luxury among the clothing provided by the Virginia Company.40
After the marriage ceremony in church came riotous feasting and drinking, in England at least, accompanied by music, dancing and much ribaldry until the newly weds were finally bedded and left to themselves. January and February were lean months in Virginia’s agricultural cycle and the dearth of good liquor often lamented, so any marriages that took place immediately were unlikely to match the wedding feast for more than a hundred guests provided in Bermuda for one of Pocahontas’s attendant Indian maids.41 Marriage was nonetheless an occasion to be celebrated, and for the pranksters among Virginia’s population English ballads provided plenty of ribald source material, none better than ‘A Market for Young Men’, which told of ‘pretty young Women and Maids’ – widows too – to be offered at reasonable rates by public sale:
At Maidenhead-court, I well can report,
There’s one which no Gallant e’re enter’d her Fort,
Drest in a Nightrail, with a train to her tail,
This Lady she will be exposed to sale
For Clip’d Money.42
