The Cordwainer’s Daughter
You need perseverance today to find Neck of Land in Charles City, Virginia, more commonly known as Bermuda Hundred, where Audry Hoare settled after her marriage to ancient planter Thomas Harris. Take Highway 10 heading north from Hopewell, come off at North Enon Church Road then turn east along Bermuda Hundred Road, past the rather desolate Bermuda Memorial Park and several sprawling industrial complexes interspersed with trees and occasional swamps. When you feel you have lost your way, continue along the narrow ‘no-issue’ road that dog-legs past the First Baptist church (defeat is not an option) down to the James River and a view across to Shirley Plantation on the other side, which is closer than you might expect.
Here a rough-hewn stone tablet erected by the Daughters of the American Revolution tells you that Sir Thomas Dale established Bermuda Hundred in 1613, the year before it became Virginia’s first incorporated town. Pocahontas’s husband John Rolfe lived here for a time, and the Reverend Alexander Whitaker ministered here, but the Daughters then leapfrog three centuries to 1938 and the construction of Richmond’s early port. So you learn nothing about the mid-1620s when this particular Neck of Land was home to a thriving, jostling, bickering but relatively rooted community of English settlers, much like villages back home.1
As we saw in Chapter 1, Audry Hoare was two years younger than the age she gave to the Virginia Company, travelling out to Virginia when she had barely turned seventeen. Both still alive, her parents lived in Aylesbury, Buckinghamshire, although Audry herself may have lodged in Blackfriars, London, with a married sister. We know from his will that Audry’s father Thomas was a cordwainer, a maker of new shoes from fine leather rather than a cobbler who repaired old ones.2 While Captain John Smith is sometimes wrongly labelled a cordwainer, he nevertheless recognized the value to colonists of stout footwear, telling the Company of Cordwainers that ‘for want of Shooes among the Oyster Bankes wee tore our hatts and Clothes and those being worne, wee tied Barkes of trees about our Feete to keepe them from being Cutt by the shelles amongst which wee must goe or starve’.3
Originally from the lace-making town of Aylesbury in Buckinghamshire, Audry Hoare brought refined needlework skills to Virginia, like many of the Jamestown brides.
Like Catherine Finch, Audry Hoare married an ancient planter, in her case Thomas Harris, who had come to Virginia in 1611. Although Harris would later earn the title of Captain, he appears in early Virginian records without the courtesy Mister before his name, which implies that his origins were relatively humble, like those of Catherine’s husband, Robert Fisher.4 While we cannot know for certain where Audry and Thomas Harris spent the first months of their married life, the couple had settled in Neck of Land Charles City by February 1624,5 probably arriving early in 1623 after the Indian attack.6 In the 1625 muster Harris’s wife is identified as Adria – a variant of Audry and the name by which she was commonly known in Virginia – who had arrived by the Marmaduke in 1621. Living with them was a seven-year-old kinswoman, Ann Woodlase, possibly John Woodlief ’s daughter from Berkeley Hundred,7 and a fifteen-year-old servant, Elizabeth (surname not recorded), who had come to the colony as a girl of ten or eleven in 1620. As a family, they were relatively well provisioned, owning two houses, a boat and a quantity of foodstuffs, including seven and a half bushels of corn and one of peas. Their livestock was particularly plentiful: eleven cattle ‘yong and old’ and thirty hens, which would have been Adria’s responsibility. Thomas Harris possessed the military equipment one would expect of an aspiring captain, including three fixed guns, a quantity of powder and lead, one sword, a complete suit of armour and a coat of mail. Although the couple had as yet no children of their own, their daughter Mary must have been born shortly afterwards, and they also had a son called William, born around 1629. Both children survived into adulthood.8
To create an English settlement on the promontory where the James and the Appomattox Rivers meet, deputy governor Sir Thomas Dale had first expelled the Appamattuck Indians from their scattered village and the cornfields they had so conveniently cleared. To safeguard livestock and deter Indian attacks, Dale constructed a two-mile palisade between the two rivers, securing some eight miles of land, ‘the most part champion, and exceeding good Corne ground’.9 John Rolfe noted how the river wound around a good circuit of land and how the fence running across the neck of land turned it into an island. ‘The houses and dwellings of the people are sett round about by the ryver, and all along the pale [fence] so farr distant one from the other, that upon anie All-arme they can second and succor one the other.’
Although many of Dale’s plantations were abandoned soon after he left the colony in May 1616, Bermuda Hundred endured and prospered, identified variously as Charles and Nether Hundred and Neck of Land Charles City, its population fluctuating from around 119 settlers on Dale’s departure to as many as 184 in 1620, when numbers were swollen by refugees from Captain Christopher Lawne’s ailing plantation close to Bennett’s Welcome.10 Its defences proved effective in the Indian attack of March 1622 since no settlers at Bermuda Hundred were reported killed, although several died at neighbouring settlements. It seems likely, however, that the plantation was abandoned in the general mayhem and the colonists either brought back to Jamestown under the command of Captain Roger Smith or dispersed to nearby strongholds such as Jordan’s Journey.11
By February 1624 a still childless Adria and her husband Thomas Harris were among the forty or so settlers who had returned to live at Neck of Land Charles City, which may have extended beyond Dale’s original palisade. The ratio of men to women in this small community was far more balanced than in Virginia as a whole. Altogether, twelve married couples lived here in 1624, three of them with infant children. Thanks to the ‘good and wholesome’ air of the upper reaches of the James River,12 all twelve couples and their children were still alive the following year, and six more children had been born. The Sharps had produced two children during the year, while the Bradwayes had christened their daughter Adria, perhaps after Adria Harris, who may then have been pregnant with her first child. Three of the wives had arrived on either the Jonathan or the London Merchant in 1620 – Susan Greenleafe, Ann Coltman and Sisley Bradway – suggesting that they may have travelled with the earlier bridal shipment to Virginia. Two other wives had arrived the same year, Elizabeth Sharp and Ann Price, both by the (Francis) Bonaventure.13 Of the eleven married women who declared their ages in 1625, eight were in their twenties, one in her thirties and two in their forties, giving Adria a good choice of companions. At forty-two, the oldest was Joan Vincent, whose sharp tongue has already been noted.
As well as enjoying a better gender balance, the small community was also remarkably stable. Between 1624 and 1625 no families left and no new families arrived, although ancient planter Joshua Chard found himself a wife called Ann, who had arrived on the Bony Besse in 1623. Four individuals were no longer there: William Clements (probably dead), the boatswain Nathaniel Reeve (presumably just passing through the year before), Robert Turner (who may have gone as a servant to Jordan’s Journey) and Margaret Berman, who may have lived with Thomas and Adria Harris in 1624 but who then simply disappears.
Others have speculated that Margaret Berman was in fact Margaret Bourdman, another of the Jamestown brides who sailed on the Marmaduke with Catherine Finch and Audry Hoare.14 Had she lived with the Harrises at Neck of Land, this would have given Adria companionship and help in the household, although their differences in age and social rank would have created tensions between them. Born in Yorkshire and orphaned by the time she left England, Bourdman was four years older than Adria and higher in social status,15 claiming as her maternal uncle Sir John Gibson, knighted by King James in 1607 and later appointed sheriff of Yorkshire.16 Bourdman’s guarantors were equally impressive and tell us much about how the Virginia Company’s network of contacts succeeded in attracting women of her class: they included a seasoned Virginia hand, Captain Wood, one of Captain John Smith’s ‘ould Soldiers’; the coachman to a City dignitary, the Recorder of London (then Sir Edwin Sandys’ fellow parliamentarian Heneage Finch); and Erasmus Finch, brother of fellow Jamestown bride Catherine Fisher now living at Jordan’s Journey.17 Bourdman had lived in service with Captain Wood and the recorder’s coachman, and possibly with all three since both Master and Mistress Finch had ‘long known her’. But whether Bourdman and Berman are one and the same, and what happened to her, I cannot say. At the muster of 1625 all but two Margarets living in the colony had either been born there or had arrived by ships other than the Marmaduke.18
Virginia’s surviving records nonetheless provide tantalizing glimpses of Thomas Harris and his household, enabling us to plot his progress through life and gauge his character: assertive, calculating, determined to succeed, a leader of men apparently undamaged by his reputation as a womanizer. Like Catherine Finch’s husband, Harris was owed money from the estate of Captain George Thorpe, murdered and mutilated at the plantation of Berkeley Hundred during the Indian attack of 1622. Harris originally claimed he was owed ‘twenty five pownd lawfull money of England’, a substantial sum compared with Robert Fisher’s ninety pounds in weight of tobacco for building a house for Opechancanough.19 Altogether a dozen creditors were recorded, among them some of the colony’s political or commercial leaders such as Sir George Yeardley, merchant Abraham Peirsey, Captain Francis West, treasurer George Sandys (for two ‘Duty Boys’), Virginia Company factor Edward Blaney, and the Reverend Richard Buck from Jamestown. When Thorpe’s debts were later translated into tobacco, Harris emerged as the largest creditor, owed 333 pounds of tobacco, with 40 pounds rebated.20
However humble his origins, Harris was transforming himself into one of the community’s leading members, which may have rankled with some of the other ancient planters who had settled at Neck of Land before him. In 1624 he was one of two burgesses elected to represent Neck of Land at the general assembly in Jamestown.21 The other was Luke Boyse, whose wife Alice had reputedly sown discord between Samuel Jordan and his wife Sisley, and who would later scandalize her drinking partners at Martin’s Brandon over her ‘hustling and bustling’ in bed with Captain William Eppes. Although Harris remained a Neck of Land burgess for just one year – and was still plain Thomas Harris – other public offices soon followed: commissioner on the monthly court for the Upper Partes, to be held at either Jordan’s Journey or Shirley Hundred across the river,22 and second-in-command under Lieutenant Thomas Osborne of a military posse from Neck of Land and the College Land, instructed to ‘goe uppon the Indians & cutt downe their corne’ in a co-ordinated attack planned for 1 August 1627, their particular target being the Tanx Powhatans.23
By 1640 he had transformed himself into Captain Thomas Harris,24 a burgess for Henricus, which he represented in the general assemblies of 1639/40 and 1647/8, and commander of the Henrico militia. And as such he is remembered on a historical marker I chanced upon while meandering along State Route 5 on the north bank of the James River. The board stands by the entrance to Curles Neck Farm and usefully documents Harris’s growing landholdings, starting with a patent issued in 1635 for a 750-acre property originally called Longfield and later Curles. By the time he died, Captain Harris’s lands exceeded 2,500 acres. The sign makes no reference to a wife or to any blot on his steady progress through the ranks of Virginian society.
The source for the gossip about Thomas Harris’s supposed sexual improprieties was again Joan Vincent, who lived at Neck of Land with her husband William Vincent and had already appeared in court accused of spreading malicious rumours about Alice Boyse and Samuel Jordan. In March 1626 Harris’s reputed womanizing surfaced in the court at Jamestown. One of their neighbours, fifty-year-old ancient planter Richard Taylor, was called to give evidence before the governor concerning Harris’s behaviour. In his sworn evidence Taylor repeated Joan Vincent’s claim that ‘there was ffowerteene women in the Church, And that seven of them were Thomas Harris his whoores’ – a claim that suggests Adria’s husband had sexual relations with half the women at Neck of Land. According to Joan’s hearsay evidence, ‘Thomas Harris made faste the doore and would have layne with a woman in the Plantacione against her will’.25
One week later, Joan’s husband William Vincent procured a warrant against Thomas Harris and his wife, calling John Chambers as a witness. The Harrises and John Chambers duly turned up at court, but Vincent failed to appear so the court ordered him to pay Thomas Harris and his wife thirty pounds of tobacco ‘in lew of theire Charges and loss of tyme’ and the same amount to John Chambers.
The following year, it was Richard Taylor’s turn to take Thomas Harris to court in a land dispute that also involved William Vincent.26 When he came to Neck of Land Harris had signed an agreement with Richard Taylor, William Vincent and George Grimes that land cleared by the three men should be divided between Thomas Harris ‘& such others as were then to plant on ye said land’. Jealous of Harris’s steady rise in esteem, perhaps, Taylor complained to the Jamestown court that Harris had planted on his dividend, but Harris was able to produce in court the signed deed which upheld his claim to the land. Having failed in his suit, Taylor was ordered to pay twenty pounds of tobacco in damages to Harris. The court also backed Thomas Harris’s right to a further five acres of land granted by Governor Wyatt in January 1623 to ‘Tho: Harris & others that then intended to goe & plant uppon ye said necke of land’, supporting the view that Thomas and Adria Harris came there after the Indian attack of 1622.
Had seething resentment about land provoked Joan Vincent’s tongue and Richard Taylor’s belated attempt to claim back land he felt was rightly his? Or was sexual jealousy the root cause of bad relations in the community? As ever, we need to read between the lines of Thomas Harris’s land grants to disentangle the facts of his life.
Still to this day a working farm of several thousand acres, the main Harris lands are situated on the north bank of the James, across the river and a little to the west of Neck of Land Charles City. In Harris’s time the land was known as Longfield, a reference perhaps to the long fields of Indian corn running parallel to the river. Between 1635 and February 1639 Harris obtained four land patents of 750, 700, 700 and 820 acres.27 The last three of these clearly relate to the same piece of land in Henrico County, varying slightly in extent but called ‘Long Feild’ in all three patents, beginning at a little creek over against the land of Captain Martin, bounded to the north by the back side of the swamp, to the west by the main river, and to the south-east by another planter’s dividend. Confusingly, all three use different bases for Harris’s claim. And while the land in the first patent is placed a little to the east in Digges’ Hundred, it names the same people as one of the Longfield patents to claim the fifty-acre headrights granted to Harris for each person brought to the colony at his expense. Like other planters, Thomas Harris was clearly adept at manipulating the system to his own advantage.
Equally telling are the patents’ hidden clues to the women in his life. The second of the Longfield patents, dated 12 July 1637, reveals that 400 acres of the land was granted by the Virginia Company to another ancient planter, Edward Gurganey, and bequeathed to Harris by his widow Ann Gurganey in her will dated 11 February 1620.28 No obvious kinship exists between Thomas Harris and Ann Gurganey, so was she a friend or one of his amorous conquests? And if the latter, why did he not simply marry her, since marrying widows for their land was perfectly normal behaviour for the time? The remaining acres of this patent came to him as headrights for importing eight people whose names are not disclosed.
Two patents claim a fifty-acre headright for having imported the same thirteen named people: ten English men, one English women and two negroes, a man and a woman, who are not dignified with names.29 In each case Harris correctly claimed a further hundred acres for himself as an ancient planter but in the second of these patents, dated 25 February 1639, he claimed an additional hundred acres for the personal adventure of his first wife, ‘Adry Harris, as being Ancient Planter’. This was fraudulent on two counts. Adria Harris was not an ancient planter, and by the terms of the maids’ magazine he was not entitled to claim any land for the bride he had married. Like John Wilkins, Thomas Harris chose to ignore this stipulation, and even doubled the amount he claimed in his late wife’s name.
Perhaps the greatest surprise of all lurks in Harris’s earliest land patent for 750 acres in Digges Hundred, Henrico County, granted on 11 November 1635.30 The patent describes the land as extending southwards to the land of Edward Virgany (Gurganey), then extending northwards up to the land of Joan Harris, his wife. So Adria was dead by now – possibly quite recently – and Harris had married a woman who owned land in her own right. The only Joan known to own land in the area was Joan Vincent, by now presumably a widow and the inheritor of William Vincent’s lands at Curles, named after the curling river in its upper reaches.31 However unlikely it seems, Virginia genealogists now generally accept that Thomas Harris married the woman who had spread rumours about his sexual conquests, a woman four years his senior and more than twenty years older than his first wife, which means that she cannot have been the mother of either of the two Harris children.32
Some time after her marriage Audry Hoare settled at Bermuda Hundred (Neck of Land Charles City) with her husband Thomas Harris, who later patented land across the James River on Curls Neck.
You can follow the family down six successive generations in the latest edition of Adventurers of Purse and Person, the accepted sourcebook for tracing your ancestry back to Virginia’s early settlers.33 Mary Harris, the oldest child of Adria and Thomas Harris, was born around 1625 and her brother William some four years later. Both belonged to Virginia’s plantation elite. Mary’s eventual husband, Thomas Ligon or Lyggon, was a burgess for Henricus like his father-in-law,34 lieutenant colonel of the militia and surveyor of Henrico County until his death. Adria’s son William also served as a justice and burgess of Henricus, and was elevated from captain to major of the Charles City and Henrico militia by the Jamestown assembly of 1656.35
Adria Harris’s direct descendants are scattered across North America’s eastern seaboard and beyond. I contacted a handful with help from the Jamestowne Society, which restricts its membership to people who can prove descent from Virginia Company stockholders or settlers living in Virginia by the time of the 1625 muster, plus a few others. Among those who wrote to me was Elizabeth Ellen Jones, descended from Adria and Thomas Harris through their daughter Mary, who said she sometimes feels related to most families that settled in Virginia early in the seventeenth century.36 Her family line includes coal company managers and shipbuilders, and she now lives in Staunton, Virginia, where the American Shakespeare Center has reconstructed the Blackfriars Playhouse, neatly echoing Adria Hoare’s early life in London.
Virginia Ann Catalano, another direct descendant of Adria through her son William, told me about the Kentucky statesman Henry Clay, also descended from Thomas and Adria Harris.37 On the day of Clay’s funeral stores were closed in Springfield, Illinois, and Abraham Lincoln (not yet president) delivered the eulogy in Springfield’s Hall of Representatives. I soon get lost in multiple branching family trees – ‘Henry Clay’s grandfather was the brother of my ancestor Charles Hudson,’ Catalano tells me. ‘Their father was John Hudson, who married Elizabeth Harris, great-granddaughter of Thomas and Adria Harris’ – but I am struck by the consequences of Adria Hoare’s decision to uproot herself and start afresh in the New World. When Catalano and I finally get to meet, over coffee at the British Library in London, I ask her if she feels proud to be descended from one of America’s earliest settlers. ‘I don’t look at it that way,’ she replies. ‘Rather, I feel connected to the beginning of my country, and to the whole adventure of coming across the ocean. I feel connected to England too. I first came here at twenty, and I keep returning.’
My search for the reasons behind Adria’s decision to sail on the Marmaduke ends where it should have begun, with her father’s will lodged in Aylesbury’s Centre for Buckinghamshire Studies. Written on 31 January 1627, when Thomas Hoare, cordwainer, was ‘sicke of body but of perfect remembrance thankes bee to the Lord’, the will is brutally short and implies a family in sorry need.38
After delivering his soul into the hands of Almighty God and his body to the ground whence it came, he named just four legatees: his daughter Agnes, his daughter Audry, Audry’s unnamed daughter and his wife. To Agnes he gave just twelve pence (one shilling), which she was to receive within a month of his death. As for his youngest child, ‘I give to my daughter Awadrye [Audry] xijd [12d.] to be payde her when she doth demande it after my desease and allso to her daughter xijd [12d.].’ We can assume that his other three children had died. The rest of his ‘goods chattels lands and tenements unbequeathed’ he left to his wife, whom he named as his executrix, but these are stock phrases and in truth he probably had little to give her. He also named two trusty, well beloved friends as overseers of his will, John Fforriste and Jonas Orton, to whom he gave sixpence each for their pains.
The will was probated on 5 April 1627. Eight years later Audry was dead too, aged thirty or thirty-one at most. Whether she ever asked for the shilling her father had left her is not known.
