Thoughts on The Jamestown Brides

 In early November, my daughter's class took a four-day field trip to Colonial Williamsburg, Jamestown, and Yorktown (along with an evening at Busch Gardens--both I and my daughter dig roller coasters, so that was a fun stop). Being a history nerd, I was more than happy to accompany the group. It was a very interesting trip, and I learned things at each stop. Of course, no stop was complete without a visit to the book section in the gift shop. 

One book that caught my eye was Jennifer Potter's work, The Jamestown Brides, published by Oxford University Press. 

This book was quite interesting on a number of levels. I'd long found it fascinating that men in early Virginia could purchase brides for the cost of 150 lbs. worth of tobacco. This might seem like a small expense, but each pound of tobacco was worth 3 shillings, so this was more than £20, which at the time was no small expense.

This was a well-reasearched book, and it was fairly amazing that Potter was able to craft such an engaging narrative on such a narrow base of information. Most of the brides who came to the New World in this scheme had few better options in England, which was a major reason for their willingness to cross the pond (or the encouragment they received to do so). Most show up only sporadically before seemingly falling off the face of the earth. The date or reason of their deaths were frequently unknown. Whether some ever married was unclear. Of course, there is the occasional record that shows a maid found a mate and had a child. 

These facts show the difficulty inherent in researching and writing about the pre-modern era, especially when looking at people from the lower or middling sort. A baptismal record at a local parish, an occasional court case, a marriage record, and a probate record at death might be all that's available to trace the lives of most people. From the social and cultural milieu surrounding such lives, a narrative can emerge. 

This differs from the "big" people in history. For example, I remember having to write a short paper from the Letters and Papers, Foreign and Domestic, of the Reign of Henry VIII in my master's program. This particular source included many volumes on microfilm. Today, most, if not all, of those records are available online. 

One has to wonder how much will be available regarding many of our lives in four hundred years. Will anyone care to look? 

The Oldest English Church in North America

While looking at another blog today, I saw a link to an excavation that has been underway in Jamestown (Virginia, not North Dakota).  In 1607 the Virginia Company started the first permanent English colony in the New World at what became known as Jamestown (after King James I, the king who had the Bible translated).

This colony has often been described as unruly, individualist, communist, and all sorts of other things.  The religious sentiments of the settlers has often been downplayed by arguments that wealth was the only concern.  There cannot be any doubt that obtaining wealth was an important reason for the colony's founding in light of massive Spanish extraction of gold and silver from Central and South America.  I've read some conservatives slam the colony for their communistic tendencies because everyone expected to share in the food stock.  However, with everyone looking for gold, it seems a bit more greedy than a communist utopia.  The settlers did not really concern themselves with food or shelter because of this thirst for gold.  However, their religion was still a big deal to them.

The current excavation involves the Fort's church, which housed the wedding of John Rolfe and Pocahontas.  The church, according to the article, was built in 1608.  The outline of the structure that the archaeologists have uncovered was about 24 x 64, which would be a massive structure in comparison to the rest of the structures in the early fort.  This indicates the importance of the Christianity of these earliest English settlers.  As I've recently mentioned in a recent post on Perry Miller's Errand into the Wilderness, the Virginia settlers were not completely worldly-minded as many would have us think.  Of course, they weren't on the same level as Puritans in New England, either.