The Planter’s Wife
Bridgett Crofte came late to the Virginia Company’s notice. Hers was the penultimate name added to the list of Warwick women by the Ferrars’ clerk Tristram Conyam: ‘Bridgett Crofte Aged 18 years borne att Burford [now Britford] in Wiltsheire her fathers name was John Crofte hee is deceased. She is commended by Robert the porter.’1
Tracing what happened to her is all the more rewarding because we know so little about her, but at least her birth record survives, which proves that she was a little older than the age she gave to the Virginia Company, turning twenty as she sailed across the Atlantic.2 Once she arrived in Virginia, she may have spent Christmas in Jamestown looking for a husband then travelled on to Edward Bennett’s new plantation on Burwell’s Bay in January or February, experiencing the full horrors of the Indian attack in March 1622. Her presence at Bennett’s Welcome can only be supposed, but the man she married was living there at the time of the attack and erroneously recorded among the dead. His name was John Wilkins. A year or two older than Bridgett, possibly more, he had come to Virginia in 1618 aboard the Mary Gould, having apparently paid his own passage; at least no record survives that would identify him as a servant or a tenant.3 Nothing is known of his early life in England: who his parents were, where he lived or whether he acquired a trade before venturing himself to Virginia. Like many settlers, he was vague about his age and may have been born any time between 1596 and 1599.4 While he could apparently afford to buy himself a wife, he was unable to read or write and had to work hard to earn the respectful title of Mister.
In the chaotic aftermath of the attack Wilkins and perhaps Bridgett would have been among the survivors from the straggling plantations of Warraskoyack rounded up and shipped back to Jamestown under the command of Captain Ralph Hamor, together with any livestock, stores and possessions they could salvage.5 But Wilkins did not stay long in Jamestown. Like others who had witnessed the harsh realities of life – and death – on the James River, he was drawn to the relative safety of Virginia’s Eastern Shore across the Chesapeake Bay, where the Accomac Indians were less hostile towards the English. Their weroance or chief, Esmy Shichans (also known as Debedeavon and the Laughing King of Accomack), had broken with Opechancanough the previous year after refusing to participate in the latter’s plans to poison English dignitaries with spotted cowbane, a plant that grows freely on the Eastern Shore, or to launch a concerted attack that would drive the foreigners from their lands. Esmy Shichans had even warned the English about the impending attack, although not apparently about the poisoning, forcing Opechancanough to postpone his planned assault for another year.6
Wilkins probably went over to the Eastern Shore in 1622. He may even have accompanied Sir George Yeardley’s mission to scout for a suitable place to seat some three to four hundred men, ordered by Governor Wyatt in late June, when the English considered moving survivors away from Jamestown.7 Yeardley’s instructions were to leave any colonists willing to ‘make a begining there for a Plantation, giving to every one of them fouer acres of land for his p[ar]ticular employment’. Wilkins was not the sort of man to be satisfied with just four acres, but he was sufficiently enterprising to grasp any opportunity that came his way.
By February 1624 he was definitely married and living on the Eastern Shore with ‘Goodwife Wilkins’, named the following year as ‘Briggett Wilkines’, aged twenty, who had arrived by the Warwick in 1621.8 The couple had no children as yet, and no servants. Land patents would later confirm her identity as ‘Bridgett Craft’, when ‘John Wilkines’ claimed fifty acres for paying her passage to the colony.9 Whether or not Wilkins ever paid the Virginia Company the required 150 pounds of tobacco for his bride, he was certainly not entitled to claim any land on her behalf, since the company had explicitly granted the maids’ headrights to investors in the maids’ magazine. This may explain why Wilkins used his wife’s maiden name and included her among a list of servants he had reputedly imported to the colony when seeking the local court’s endorsement of his headrights claim, but he had at least the grace to put her name first.10 He was sitting as a commissioner at the time, and none of his fellow commissioners disputed his claim.
The English had long turned their eyes to Virginia’s Eastern Shore, a thin, flattish peninsula on the far side of the Chesapeake Bay. Then half a day’s journey across its narrowest part, the Eastern Shore has a coastline that is scooped and indented on both ocean and bay side with innumerable coves, rivers and forking creeks. Surveyors had a hard job identifying boundaries. Land lying ‘on the northern side of the northern branch of the forked branches of the middle branch of the creek’ was how one seventeenth-century land sale attempted to locate a settler’s property.11 Rich in natural resources and visited by mighty flocks of geese, it has a gentler climate than inland Virginia, its proximity to the sea taking the edge off winters and tempering the summer heat with welcome sea breezes.
Captain John Smith came exploring here in 1608, crossing the Chesapeake Bay in an open barge of two or three tons with a mixed company of gentlemen, soldiers and sundry craftsmen: a blacksmith, a fishmonger, a fisherman and a doctor of physick. The first people they saw were two ‘grimme and stout Salvages upon Cape-Charles’ armed with bone-headed poles like javelins, who boldly demanded to know who the foreigners were and what they wanted. Apparently satisfied with the strangers’ responses, the Indians became ‘very kinde’ and took them to see their king, who struck the colonists as ‘the comliest proper civill Salvage wee incountred’ and his country ‘a pleasant fertill clay-soile’. The English nonetheless had trouble finding fresh water, and they experienced the bay’s fiercely unpredictable weather, when ‘an extreame gust of wind, raine, thunder, and lightning happened, that with great daunger we escaped the unmercifull raging of that ocean-like water’.12
Captain John Smith’s original map of Virginia, printed in 1612, recorded his explorations of Virginia’s Eastern Shore across the Chesapeake Bay, where Bridgett Crofte settled with her husband John Wilkins.
Next to visit the Eastern Shore was the kidnapper of Pocahontas, Captain Samuel Argall, who brought with him deputy governor Sir Thomas Dale in November 1612 and returned the following May to explore further.13 Argall praised the Eastern Shore’s many small rivers and good harbours for small boats and barges, and its ‘multitude of Ilands bearing good Medow ground’. It offered excellent commercial opportunities for salt manufacture and fishing, he felt, enjoying plentiful stocks of both fish and shellfish, and the native people ‘seemed very desirous of our love’.14
One of the peninsula’s greatest enthusiasts was secretary John Pory, who had heard such good reports that he believed the Eastern Shore offered ‘as good ground as any in Virginia’ and ‘such a place to live in by ye reporte of those that have bene there… ye like is skarce to be found againe in ye whole country’. Its only drawback was the mosquitoes, which Pory – ever the optimist – believed would vanish once the land was cleared, declaring himself ‘never so enamoured of any place wch I have not seene, nor shalbe satisfyed till I have seene it’.15
The English had begun to settle the Eastern Shore from around 1615, when Dale sent a small contingent of men under Lieutenant William Cradock to catch fish and to establish a salt works on Smith Island, making salt by boiling seawater. Fed and maintained by the colony, the men lived at Dale’s Gift at the bottom of the peninsula. Dale’s widow, Lady Elizabeth Dale, would later claim title to a vast estate at Old Plantation Creek on the bay side covering several thousand acres.16 In 1616 Dale’s Gift was one of only six settlements in the whole of Virginia named in a letter to King James by John Rolfe when he was visiting London with Pocahontas,17 but by 1619 the salt works had failed from lack of funds and expertise, like so many of Virginia’s early industries, its workers either dead or departed, and by March 1620 most if not all of the English had left the peninsula.18
Undeterred, other Englishmen began laying claims to land on the Eastern Shore, concentrating their plantations on two creeks a little to the north of Old Plantation Creek: King’s Creek and Cherrystone Creek. One of the first independent planters was the interpreter Thomas Savage, who had come to Virginia as a boy in 1608 and spent three years with Powhatan in exchange for an Indian boy. He became particularly close to Accomack’s Laughing King, who gave him a large tract of land above Cherrystone Creek, known to this day as Savage’s Neck. About this time the Virginia Company earmarked 500 acres south of Cherrystone Creek as company land and granted another 500 acres to support the post of secretary in Virginia. Having opted for the Eastern Shore on Governor Yeardley’s advice, John Pory settled his tenants on the neck of land between the mouths of Cherrystone and King’s Creeks. In time the Secretary’s Land developed into a thriving village community known as the Towne or Town Fields, clustered around the seat of local government. By 1634 there was even a ferry across King’s Creek, bringing people to court and to church.19
It was on King’s Creek that Wilkins established his home with Bridgett, on a highly desirable property right next door to the Secretary’s Land, which suggests that he must have staked his claim very early. With the demise of the Virginia Company, uncertainty clouded the colony’s land policy and Wilkins did not trouble to patent the 500 acres of his home place until 10 March 1638,20 although he was ‘possest of it’ by 1635 and undoubtedly very much earlier.21 The list of headrights is missing from the patent records, if it ever existed, but he sought approval for his land transactions from his fellow commissioners sitting at the Accomack court.
The man Bridgett Crofte had chosen to marry was very different from Catherine Finch’s husband, Robert Fisher. A recent arrival rather than an ancient planter, Wilkins and Bridgett started out with very little, recording just one house, one gun and seven barrels of corn in the muster of 1625 – no livestock, no wet or dry fishes, no peas, beans, English wheat, oatmeal, bacon flitches, no ammunition or shot, nothing to suggest that the couple enjoyed anything but a very basic standard of living.22 Wilkins nonetheless proved himself a man of vigour and substance, adept at manipulating the system so that his public life supported his private advancement. A busy and successful planter, he built up extensive landholdings on both sides of the bay and attained high office in the county, first as a burgess elected to represent Accomack at Virginia’s general assembly in February 1633, when he petitioned the Accomack court to pay him fourteen days’ work for attending on the burgesses at James City.23 Shortly afterwards he was named one of four new commissioners or justices appointed to the court to replace others who had died, serving almost continuously until his death.24
Membership of the court undoubtedly furthered his private ambitions by securing endorsement for his land claims despite absent or flimsy evidence, yet Wilkins remained illiterate. While other commissioners routinely signed their names to documents, he could only made his mark, signing a capital I for ‘Iohn’ with a cross hatch through the middle. And when Sir George Yeardley’s son Argoll sent him an unsealed letter about a court matter, he had to summon a servant to read it for him.25
The decade or so that Bridgett spent on the Eastern Shore marked its gradual transition from an English community that was predominantly young, single and male to one where families with small children were becoming the norm. But numbers were still very low. In 1624 just seven of its seventy-six inhabitants were women, all married and described as ‘Mistress’ or ‘Goodwife’ (or Gody), depending on their status.26 Of the two or three English children, one was apparently motherless. One year on, overall numbers had dropped to fifty-one, of whom six were wives. Gone were two married couples, and while Thomas Powell had lost his spouse, two had gained wives: the father of the motherless Margaret, Nicholas Hodgskines, now married to Temperance; and Thomas Savage, whose wife Hannah Elkington had unusually paid her own passage to Virginia, arriving on the Seaflower in 1621.27 Two of the wives (Temperance Hodgskines and Ffrancis Blore) may have come to Virginia as part of the 1620 bridal shipment, as they had sailed on the Jonathan and the London Merchant respectively. Although the English settlement now had two young children born in Virginia, it was still composed largely of single men either living alone (nine), in two-man households (four), or in all-male households of several men of undefined status, some of whom may have been servants.
Until Accomack gained its own court presided over by commissioners,28 the man charged with keeping order on the Eastern Shore was Captain William Eppes from Ashford in Kent, described by one contemporary as a ‘mad, ranting fellow’29 and arraigned for the manslaughter of a fellow settler in 1619 but soon restored to his command.30 Eppes lived with his wife Margaret and thirteen servants on the Secretary’s Land in a lavish muster that included two houses, three storehouses, sixty-five barrels of corn and two hogs. As befitted a settlement commander, his compound was properly fortified and he was particularly well provided with arms for himself and his men, possessing five guns, 120 pounds of powder and 200 pounds of lead, six suits of armour, four coats of mail and six coats of steel. He also commanded one of the colony’s two shallops (the other belonged to the governor at Jamestown), the only vessel on the Eastern Shore capable of crossing the Chesapeake Bay.31
As commander of the Eastern Shore, Eppes was given ‘full power & Authority’ to administer oaths to anyone living there ‘for ye better decidinge of any small cause (that may there arise) by way of Compremise’, to save the trouble and expense of sending witnesses to Jamestown.32 Since a number of planters were moving here from the James River, he was also ordered to review each household’s store of corn and to trade with the Indians for more corn if necessary to prevent price inflation and disorderly trading. But his own conduct on occasion brought him before the Jamestown court, notably over his relations with Alice Boyse, the same woman rumoured to have caused friction between Samuel and Sisley Jordan.
A few months after Boyse was widowed but Eppes remained very much married, the pair were accused of scandalous behaviour at Martin’s Brandon, a plantation south of the James, after a night of heavy drinking in the company of others. Several witnesses attested to Alice Boyse lying down fully clothed on the bed beside Captain Eppes, then removing her gown and upper petticoat and climbing between the sheets. All the witnesses repeated the same story: that after a time they heard ‘a great bussleing and juggling of the bed’, followed by whispering between Mrs Boyse and Captain Eppes, at which point Captain John Huddlestone rose and said ‘for shame doe not doe such thinges before soe many people’, to which Captain Eppes replied, ‘fye brother thats too plaine’.
One of the witnesses said he heard the ‘bussleing’ two or three times during the night, and after it had stopped a final time he saw Mrs Boyse rise from the bed, shake her petticoats down then go outside without putting on her gown. When she came back ‘this deponent covered himselfe over head and eares, but when he rose he saw Mrs Boise to have her gowne on’.33 More witnesses came forward at a subsequent hearing, when Sergeant John Harris told the court, ‘he is not able to say that Capt Epes was uppon the sayd Mrs Boise, but sayth that the cloathes were raised to a great hight’.
The court delivered its verdict more than a month later. Despite all the evidence to the contrary, its members concluded that ‘it is noe way proved or manifest by those depositions that Capt Epes and Mrs Boise have offended the Law but that they are cleare and guiltlesse’.34 In Virginia as elsewhere one law existed for the powerful and another for lesser mortals. Just a month before, the same court had sentenced a man found guilty of having ‘lewdly behaved himself ’ to forty lashes of the whip at James City and another forty lashes at Shirley Hundred, where the offending behaviour had taken place. The woman involved was ordered to stand in a white sheet at divine service before the congregations of the two parishes, a far gentler punishment and one that was positively benign compared with the execution of men convicted of sodomy or buggering animals.35
Captain Eppes remained on the Eastern Shore with his wife Margaret throughout much of the 1620s, patenting 450 acres of his own and producing a son, William, and a daughter, Frances.36 Bridgett Wilkins also gave birth to a daughter, Mary, while her close neighbour Hannah Savage had a son called John in the early months of 1625.37 So of the six married women present on the Eastern Shore in 1625, who had all come to Virginia since 1618, five were now living in households with children, while the sixth family, the Blores, may have lost their son John between 1624 and 1625.
Was Bridgett content with her new life and the man she had chosen to marry? John Wilkins had surely provided well for her and her daughter. She lived to see his election as a burgess and will have enjoyed the status that came from his appointment as a commissioner. During all the time they lived together he was busy trading cattle and extending his landholdings as a tobacco planter, although these would not be patented until after her death. They included the 500 acres on King’s Creek where they lived,1,300 acres across the bay in New Norfolk (now Surry) and a further 500 acres on the Eastern Shore’s sea side, later enlarged to 600, which Wilkins claimed in 1640.38 Among his claimed headrights in 1636 was ‘his Negroe’, perhaps one of the first Africans brought to the Eastern Shore, although Wilkins may have put him to work on his lands across the bay. And with his neighbour Obedience Robins he operated the first known windmill on the Eastern Shore, so he was clearly enterprising.39
But his many appearances in county court records – as commissioner, suitor and defendant – reveal him as a hot-tempered, outspoken fellow, fined for swearing in court on one occasion, along with several other commissioners.40 He was not above manipulating evidence (witness his claim for Bridgett’s headright) or hearing cases in which he had an interest. When a neighbour accused him of rebranding one of his hogs, the court delicately judged Wilkins’s actions a ‘mistake’, ordering him nonetheless to give the man a year-old heifer in compensation and pay his costs.41 He appeared many times as both creditor and debtor, and was prone to falling out with business associates and servants. But the servant who declared he wanted to ‘knock his Maister John Wilkins on the head’ and give him a ‘Kinge Henry knocke’ later became a partner and close friend, acting as a witness to his will in 1649 despite having been ordered by the court to receive thirty lashes on his bare shoulders for his ‘enormous offences’ in speaking against Commissioner Wilkins.42 Another festering business dispute was finally settled in Wilkins’s favour when four fellow commissioners attested to his good character, declaring that throughout their long acquaintance with him ‘they never see nor heare by him of any ill Carriage towards any person whatsoever’, while his opponents ‘lived very basely and suspiciously in the County’.43
Bridgett Wilkins’s one foray into Accomack’s court records tells a different story, however, and calls into question their relations as man and wife. As with so many neighbourly disputes that surfaced in the Virginian courts, the ‘evidence’ was little more than hearsay and tittle-tattle, catching Bridgett in the crossfire. The case, which came before the court on 8 September 1634, concerned a dispute between two married couples, the Drews and the Butlers. The five commissioners sitting in judgment included Wilkins’s neighbour Obedience Robins but not Wilkins himself.44
First Edward Drew petitioned the court against Joan Butler for having called his wife Marie a ‘common Carted hoare’, referring to the punishment meted out to scolds and whores – to be tied to the back of a horse and cart and whipped through the streets. The court agreed with Drew and for her slanderous statement ordered Joan Butler to be dragged across King’s Creek at the stern of a boat or canoe from one cow pen to the other (the Virginian equivalent of carting), or else to present herself before the minister at divine service on the following sabbath, between the first and second lesson, and to repeat these words: ‘I Joane Butler doe acknowledge to have called Marie Drew hoare and thereby I confesse I have done her manefest wronge, wherfor I desire befor this congregation, that ye syd Marie Drew will forgive me, and alsoe that this congregtion, will joyne, and praye with me, that God may forgive me.’
Virginia’s equivalent of the ducking stool for punishing scolds and disorderly women was to tie them to a boat and drag them across a bay.
Joan Butler’s husband Thomas then issued a counterblast, accusing Marie Drew of spreading rumours that he had committed adultery with ‘Bridgett the wife of mr. John Wilkins’. Confusingly, the slander seems to have originated with Joan Butler, since the witness called to give evidence (Joane Muns, aged about thirty) swore that while they were going down to the Old Plantation together Joan Butler had told her ‘that her husbound shewed her wher he layed the Head and heeles of Bridgett Wilkins, and that the syd Bridgett would have given him as much Cloth as would make him a shert’. How Marie Drew spread these rumours is not made clear, but the implication is that Bridgett Wilkins was offering favours in return for sex.
One week later, with John Wilkins sitting in judgment alongside Obedience Robins and several other commissioners, the court ordered Marie Drew to be punished for calling Joan Butler a carted whore and declaring to witnesses that she had seen her ‘carted in England’. Bridgett Wilkins has disappeared from the story and no mention is made of an adulterous liaison between Bridgett and Thomas Butler. Marie Drew’s punishment mirrored that meted out to Joan Butler, to beg her forgiveness in church, a clear case of tit for tat.
This is the last we see of Bridgett Wilkins, who dies soon afterwards. By early 1636 John Wilkins had married again and settled into what looks like a happy second marriage. Ann Wilkins had a temper to match her husband’s and was a ferocious beater of servants. She called a neighbour a whore and a ‘pissa bedd Jade’ for accusing her servant Walter of stealing a pot of butter, giving her a ‘slapp in the Chopps’ for good measure.45 In one particularly nasty incident she insisted on exchanging maidservants with a neighbour then ‘most unconscyonably and dangerousely Beate her’, treatment that was amply confirmed by her former servant, who complained of ‘the unchristian like and violent oppression of her Mistresse and by her continuall strikeing Beateing and abusinge her with her careless resolute Blowes’.46 But Ann Wilkins bore her husband six children (John, Argoll, Nathaniel, Lydia, Anne and Frances)47 as opposed to Bridgett’s only daughter. And he trusted her well enough to appoint her as his attorney during his second long absence from Virginia between 1643 and 1645, when he returned on business to England or perhaps continental Europe.48
A full year before his death John Wilkins wrote his final will, having resolved to take a voyage for England and ‘consideringe with myselfe that all men are mortall not knowing how things maye interveene or whether it shall please god I shall return againe or not’. He bequeathed his whole estate, real and personal, ‘unto my loveinge wife Ann Wilkins And my children (which god hath blessed me with by her)’.49 He was away for some eleven months and returned close to death. In December 1650, just before he died, he recorded a deed of gift to his son-in-law John Baldwin and Baldwin’s wife Mary, his daughter by the former Bridgett Crofte. Originally party to the gift, his wife Ann has been crossed out of the final deed, suggesting a falling-out between the young couple and Mary’s stepmother.
Wilkins gave Mary and her husband four cows, one heifer, one bull, three barrels of corn, one horse, two shoes, 150 acres of land, one bed and bolster, one rug and blanket, three pairs of sheets, one pillow-board, one tablecloth, six napkins, three towels, three pewter dishes, six spoons, one candlestick, one salt and a dramcup, one iron pot, one iron kettle and one brass kettle – a substantial gift from a man who had arrived in Virginia with nothing to his name some thirty years previously.50
Less than three months after John Wilkins’s death, Ann Wilkins married again. Her third and final husband died in 1662 and she then remained a widow until her own death in 1690, almost seventy years after Wilkins’s first wife had sailed to Virginia as a hopeful bride.
I returned twice to Virginia’s Eastern Shore, looking for traces of Bridgett and her husband, the first time with cultural anthropologist Helen Rountree.
The waters of the bay were grey and choppy as we crossed the twenty-three-mile Chesapeake Bay Bridge Tunnel, the wind as fierce and gusty as Captain John Smith had warned. The Eastern Shore feels immediately different to the James River plantations: the land flatter, the light brighter, the air distinctly breezy. You sense the sea even when you cannot see it. At Old Plantation Creek signs commemorate Esmy Shichans, the Laughing King, whose village of Accawmack (Accomack) lay scattered about the head of the creek. Even on grey days the white sands of the inlets and coves glisten sharply and the air is noticeably salty.
After Arlington we head north to Cheriton and Eastville then west towards the Atlantic coast along Indiantown Road, past the patched fields and woodlands of the former Gingaskins reservation, as the Accomac Indians were later known.
At the Virginia National Wildlife Refuge on the peninsula’s southern tip, our last stop of the day, I tell the ranger about my quest for the Jamestown brides. It has been a long day and I muddle the names, saying that I am looking for the descendants of John Downeman, who married one of the Warwick Elizabeths. The ranger shakes his head: there are no Downemans on the Eastern Shore, it seems, but he brightens immediately when I correct the name to Wilkins. Ah yes, there are still plenty of Wilkinses on the Eastern Shore. Origins matter here. For anyone born and bred in this part of Virginia, who you are is closely linked to who you once were and when your ancestors first arrived.
The winds of the Chesapeake Bay are fiercer than ever on my next visit. Halfway across the bridge part of the crossing, a tornado warning advises taking immediate shelter, allowing me just enough time to pull into the Chesapeake Grill in the middle of the bay and run for cover. No one inside the cafe-bar pays the slightest attention to the bucketing storm, which is quickly gone.
My host this time is Nancy Harwood Garrett, an authenticated descendant of Thomas Savage and of John Wilkins through his second wife Ann, who also counts Obedience Robins among her ancestors.51 A wise and generous host like Helen Rountree, she shows me a meticulously referenced monograph on John Wilkins written by her relative Elliott Wilkins, on which I have drawn heavily. We talk about whether Wilkins was a Puritan, but the evidence is slight: one reference to him affirming rather than swearing an oath, a sign of nonconformity usually associated with the later Quakers, which anyway sits uneasily with his fine for blasphemy in open court.52
After a night eating shrimp caesar and onion rings by the foot in a local bar, the next morning we take a map of early land patents and go hunting for the 500-acre plot on King’s Creek that was once home to John and Bridgett Wilkins. We find it surprisingly close to where Nancy lives now. The landscape is unremarkable: flat fields of winter grass, boundary trees in straight lines, pines mixed with broadwoods that are barely showing green. Only the street names hint at the history of these fields as we drive sedately towards King’s Creek along Townfield Drive, past Obedience Lane and on to Wilkins Drive, which today marks the boundary of his land patent.
At the Eastville Court House clerk of the court Traci L. Johnson produces for me the original record detailing the sorry tale of Bridgett Wilkins’s presumed adultery with Thomas Butler, who reputedly showed his wife where he had laid the head and heels of Bridgett, and she promised him a shirt. Aside from her name in John Wilkins’s land patents, fraudulently used to claim land to which he was not entitled, I hold in my hands the one surviving record of who she might have been, a scrap of malicious gossip dutifully recorded for posterity, nothing more.
