American History Hit - British Brides for American Tobacco: A Tudor Trade

Episode Date: September 2, 2024

In 1621 the Virginia Company of London put out a call for young, handsome and honestly educated women to become wives for the planters in its new colony in Jamestown. Hopeful husbands were supposed to pay for their English brides in best leaf tobacco. But who were the women who made the Atlantic crossing? And what became of them when they arrived in America? In this episode of our sister History Hit podcast, Not Just the Tudors, Professor Suzannah Lipscomb meets author Jennifer Potter to find out more about the lives of these extraordinary women.***Warning: This podcast includes references to slaughter and hostage taking.This episode was produced by Rob Weinberg.Enjoy unlimited access to award-winning original documentaries that are released weekly and AD-FREE podcasts. Get a subscription for $1 per month for 3 months with code AMERICANHISTORY sign up at https://historyhit.com/subscription/ You can take part in our listener survey here. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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is one small corner of this British Isle. Of elsewhere, what is out there beyond the oceans, beyond the forests, up the flowing rivers. Well, we've heard stories of disease, of war, of starvation. Everything elsewhere is blind danger. But for 56 women, this is about to change. The Virginia Company of London has put out the call for educated handsome young women to become wives for the planters of Jamestown Colony.

Those men will pay for their new wives with 150 pounds of tobacco, steeply valued at 25 pounds sterling. As the women board the ship to cross the wide Atlantic, we can only wish them good luck. God only knows what will become of them in their new lives, in that strange new world. In this episode of our sister podcast, Not Just the Tudors,

Suzanne Lipscomb speaks to author Jennifer Potter and finds out. Jennifer, welcome to Not Just the Tudors. Susanna, brilliant to be here. So your story starts in 1621 and we're tracing the lives of 56 English women recruited as brides for planters in Jamestown in the colony of Virginia. But could we do a bit of context setting first?

Could you tell us a bit about Jamestown and the Virginia Company? James Town as a colony started only in 1607, and the Virginia Company of London was given a charter to found a colony there. The initial aim was profit to make as much money as possible, to really take the resources of the country and bring them back. There was also the idea that they would civilise the native. But that was fairly low down the list of priorities. And so in 1607, the first men, and they were all men, landed in Virginia.

And they chose Jamestown as the place where they would start a colony. It was actually a terribly bad choice. It's in Virginia, it's up the James River. And it's at the point where the saltwater of the lower James meets the freshwater of the upper James, so it's on the borderline. So not very good for water supply. And the wells became contaminated very quickly. And summer was a deadly time. And there was terrible sickness in the colony. It was a really hard place to survive. It's notable that in that first decade, the Virginia Company were really struggling in its mission. The colonists were in decline. What are the other reasons for this?

There are all sorts of reasons, but they chose the wrong place. There were also problems with the indigenous population. And I think there's no doubt that the Native Americans were very helpful a lot of the time in the very early days. But the English were rapacious in their desire for land. And so they kept expanding the colony. and relations with the native population became really terrible because of the way the English were behaving. Now, you've said that it was all men by this point. So tell me about how you came across the women and something of the process you went through to recover the fragments of their lives.

By the time the Jamestown Brides went over to Virginia, 1621, so the colonies, about 14 years old. There were then one woman to every six men. And Sir Edwin Sanders had just taken over in 1619 as the leader of the Virginia Company. And he's determined to increase the population and particularly to increase the number of women because Jamestown was a very dangerous place or the colony because by then the colony was wider than just Jamestown Island. And it was mainly a place where young men went to make money, a single man, and then returned to England. So Sanders wanted to root these rootless men with wives and children. So he decided that one way to do this was to send over shiploads of women.

And in 1620, he sent over a shipload of about 90 women. We don't know who they were because at this. point, the colony was still apparently just about financially okay. These women were to be sent over. If they married tenants of the Virginia company, they were provided free. And if they married other people who weren't Virginia company tenants, then their husbands would only have to pay for the cost of transportation, which was then about £6. By then, the Virginia companies really sold serious source of income was from a series of lotteries that went around the country to raise money to colonise Virginia. And there were all sorts of complaints about the lottery.

First of all, that they were sucking money out of local economy. There was a suggestion that there was certain amount of corruption involved, but they weren't popular. They were very popular for the people who were hoping that they would make a fortune through the lottery. And King James was always rather ambivalent about Virginia,

partly because by then its principal crop was tobacco and King James hated tobacco. He referred to the vile custom of smoking tobacco, if he called this vile custom, loathsome to the eye, hateful to the nose, harmful to the brain, dangerous to the lungs. Actually, he was quite advanced for his time. And in the black and stinking fume thereof, nearest resembling the horrible Stygian smoke of the pit that is bottomless. Okay, King James I of England, 6th of Scotland, really doesn't like smoking. And there were complaints about the lottery in Parliament, and James decided that the Virginia lotteries had to stop,

and he stopped them virtually overnight. So suddenly, the Virginia company was virtually bankrupt. It had no money coming in because there was no other investment, really, no serious investment apart from the lotteries. So what Sir Edmund Sanders decided to do was to set up four trades, that would attract individual investment from investors that would solve the financial problems of the company. And it was a trade in making glass beads, a trade in furs, a trade in general supplies, which

the colony really needed. And then the fourth trade was a trade in a hundred maids to be made wives. So the Virginia company actually set up a trade in women and it hoped that this trade would be a huge success. So it needed to attract really good women who were, it said, young, handsome and honestly educated. We don't know if they were handsome, but the company kept lists of who the women were. So what biographical details do we have about the women who went to Jamestown? The lists are completely fascinating for any historian of the times, even if they're not looking at these women. It's a complete picture of female society at a time when you really don't get this sort of information.

We're told the women's names, their age, who their parents were, father's trade and occupation. and they also had to come recommended to the company they had to be vouched for. So certainly in the very early days, the Virginia company was putting together its shipment of brides very quickly because it was desperate to get the women over there so that it could sell the women, but the lists are completely fascinating.

I'm interested to understand how families and the women were enticed to give a daughter to an investment opportunity to where a man they'd not yet met on the other side of the world. I mean, did they apply a certain amount of spin? I think the company absolutely would not have been honest or completely transparent about how dangerous life was in Virginia. I think there's no doubt about that. It promised the women a free choice of husband although at the same time there were complaints from poorer tenants over in Virginia that if they didn't have enough money to put up the bride price, they were kept away from the women.

The way the Virginia Company got most of its young men was to put up posters advertising the fact that it wanted all sorts of tradesmen. And of course, not everyone could read in those days and certainly not very few women would have been able to read unless they were highly educated. So these broadsides would be put up in marketplaces and people who could read would read them out for other people. But I don't think that's how it found these women.

I think one of the main ways, and we know this from the guarantors who are in these lists, that it asked that a lot of Virginia company officials and investors put forward their family, even Sir Edwin Sanders, a relative of his, a woman called Sicily Bray, who was the daughter of gentlefolk of good esteem, and she was described as being of kin to Sir Edwin Sands. So he put her forward. Another Catherine Finch, whose brother was crossbow maker to the king. And I worked out that he probably knew quite a lot of people within the Virginia company.

Sometimes it was lowly people within the Virginia Company. One of the women, who's Virginia in life I follow, was recommended by Robert the Porter. And I actually found Robert Peasley, I think he was called, who was a porter for the Virginia Company, who got his job when the previous incumbent as Porter was caught taking tobacco out of one of the warehouses, stuffed up his trousers. It is extraordinary, the small details that you can find in these very dust. documents that every now and then would make me laugh. But I think that is the main way the company drew in these women. Also, a number were recommended by what I would call the great and good of the City of London. The two lists give me the names of 56 women. And about half of the women,

by the time they left for Virginia, although they'd come from all around, mainly Southern England, more than half were living in London. Either they were London born or they were living in service with people in London. And that was a natural stage in a girl's life between mid to late teenage years to when they got married. But your question, you're asking as to why families would recommend them

or why the women themselves would want to go At the time, early 1620s, England was suffering an economic crisis. There'd been a crisis in the wool industry, and people were generally feeling really very poor. Now, as a woman, you were expected to marry. Whatever you wanted for yourself, that was really the only way you could get your place in society. And at the time, there was a great hike in Dari. So families would have found it very hard to raise enough money for the dowry. But it was particularly difficult to find a husband in London

because, let's say, one in six of the women from the 56 that I look at for gentlefolk or related to gentry, the dowries for those women would have been really quite high. For what I call the middling women, I would say the bulk of these 56 had male relatives who were in respectable trades like bakers and there was a fustian dresser and vintners and crossbow makers. The young men in London whom they would have hoped to marry would have served long apprenticeships that would last about seven years when they weren't allowed to marry. and at the end of their apprenticeship, the young men, many of them aspired to marry either the master's daughter, which would help set them up in a trade, or they wanted to marry widows who would again help them to set up. Another of my sources for understanding what it would be like for these women were ballads.

And there are some wonderful maiden's lament about the difficulties of finding a husband. So once these women had been volunteered and chosen, how were they prepared and provisioned for their new lives? I mean, even the prospect of the journey, the voyage across the Atlantic would have taken months. It took them about three months. And they set off end of August, beginning of September. so they were setting off at the worst possible time for winter storms. It would have been absolute nightmare. The Virginia Company had to get them ready very quickly.

They were sent with clothes. They were sent with a petticoat, a waistcoat, two pairs of stockings, a pair of garters, two smocks, an apron, two pairs of shoes, a towel, two quaffes and crosscloth that you wear over your head, as well as Worcester wool for Darning and yarn for knitting stockings. It's interesting, they weren't sent with coats. Virginian winters are really cold. So they would have been wearing everything else at once, I imagine. Yes.

And one or two of them, from the lists, one of the highest born of the women, took a trunk. And if you took belongings with you on the boats, you then said, signed a manifest. And she was called Joan Edgerton. She was actually a widow. And she came from a very high-born family. I think she was related even to a chancellor. And interestingly, she traveled by the ship called the Marmaduke, which left from the Isle of Wight. And she got to the Isle of White. And she was the only one out of 20 men and women who signed the manifest, who could sign her own name. None of the men, and there was one other of the Jamestown Brides, she was the youngest of the lot, she was aged just 15, took a small packet of linen, and she could only sign her mark.

But Joan Fletcher then never actually travels to Virginia. I think she possibly took fright. She got as far as the Isle of Wight, but then for reasons unknown, she never travelled further, so other people had to be found in her place. I'll be right back after this short break. Meantime, if you'd like us to cover anything specifically, if you have any ideas of subject matter we should be looking at, send us an email at a H-H at historyhit.com. We'd love to hear from you.

The thought of these women's arrival in James Town is mind-boggling. You know, they're arriving somewhere that's very different to a world that they've known before. They knew they were meant to marry, but they weren't free women because if a man wanted, a wife, presumably he had to pay the price. So I wonder if you can imagine for us the arrival and how these women settled. One way that I tried to imagine what life would be like was to replicate the journey up the James River, because you cross the Atlantic and then you see this wide

Chesapeake Bay, and it would have taken them another couple of days to slowly tack up the James River, And they're arriving now in winter. And there would be a few sites of settlements, but not many. And then they catch their first site of Jamestown Island. They've left London three months ago, thriving city of about 200,000 souls, bustling, noisy, stinking, yes, all that. And they've reached this place in the middle of a wilderness. What they would have seen was there was a triangular fort at Jamestown. There's a wooden church.

There's one or two larger wooden buildings, storehouses, less than two dozen houses, a palisade fence, and a wooden landing stage which was in terrible disrepair if it was even standing at all. Imagine how they must have felt they've travelled. this way, dreadful crossing. And then they've got to face the whole business of finding a husband in this six men to one woman sort of situation. You can imagine how they felt when they got onto land. Now, the Virginia Company was always optimistic and it said that divers of the women were married before the ships left James Town again. Divers is one of those words that can

mean a few and it can mean many. We don't know how many. I think it's pretty clear that most of the women will not have found a husband straight away. I think the authorities in Jamestown would have summoned to Jamestown, likely husbands, i.e. husbands who actually had the cash to pay for them. Jamesdown Island itself is too small to have accommodated all the women because one of the stipulations from the company was that until they got married, they had to be housed in household. where there was a wife, because you couldn't just let them loose in this wild society. So they were dispersed two settlements around the James River, because by then the colony was growing slowly. And we know that some of them definitely did marry, although it is really

tricky trying to find out what happened to women in the colony, because women changed their surname when they married, and most of the early records of Virginia were burnt in the Civil War. So although there would have been registers of births, marriages and deaths, all those have gone. We have to rely on censuses, and it is very tricky tracking what happened to women with common first names. More than half the 56 women I looked at were called Ila, Elizabeth, Elizabeth Anne, Alice or Mary. In 1622, just weeks after their arrival tragedy struck, can you tell me what happened? Yes, 22 March, 1622.

The day began as normal with Native Americans coming into the settlements as usual. then what happened was it's now called the Great Indian Attack. It was a concerted attempt by Opa Chankanau, who was then the leader of the Algonquin speaking tribes to drive the English out of Virginia. And early in the morning, the attack happened. And between a third and a quarter of the English, colony was wiped out, men, women and children, including a lot of the women. There were lists of the living in the dead after the attack. The English were taken completely by surprise.

They were slaughtered often with their own tools and there have been archaeological digs that have revealed what happened to some of the bodies. There were eyewitness descriptions of really terrible things happening during the slaughter. And one of the settlements that was worst hit was Martin's Hundred, which is where one of the Jamestown Brides, whose story I look at in some detail, a young woman called Anne Jackson, who was going to join her brother, who was a bricklayer, actually, in the Martin's Hundred. And she had travelled out on the Marmaduke, and she must have felt more confident than a lot of the other brides, because she wasn't quite going into the unknown. She was going to join family, who would presumably help her find

a husband. And it was thought she was killed during the Great Indian attack, but just under seven years later, she suddenly turns up in the records again. She hadn't been killed. She had been taken captive by the Pamunki Indian tribe. It's not clear if she was held captive for the whole six years. I think she probably was. About 15 English women from the whole of the colony were taken prisoner and four men. Now the men were put to death. This is the men in captivity. At least one or two, probably more, were returned within about a year. But I think Anne was. are captive for very much longer and she suddenly appears in the court records for James Town where it says that in it was January 1629 and Jackson which came from the Indians.

To me that suggests she's recently been returned from the Indians that her brother should look after her until she can be sent back to England. And if you think of the number of culture shocks she's gone through, she's left Westminster, she's traveled across the Atlantic, she's come to this Martin's Hundred, this bustling new settlement on the James River, and she'd gone through the trauma of the Indian attack. She'd then, having already had to get used to life in the wilderness of the colony,

she then had to get used to life living with the Native Americans. And as the months and the years wore on, she would have had to lose her very modest dress. And she would have had no option but to adopt Indian dress. And she'd have to get used to washing in cold water. The English really didn't wash much then, if at all. the Indians considered the English were really rather smelly. But just to try and imagine, women captives, they were not right, but they were worked very hard.

They were worked as slave labour. And the idea was that they would eventually be ransomed, whether or not a ransom was paid for her. We don't know. But it is quite possible, this is speculative, that her six or seven years with the Indians, She'd discovered that the relationships between Native American men and women were very much kinder and gentler than the kind of relationships between men and women in Jacobi and Virginia, where women were the property of men,

and they did what they were told. They obeyed their fathers, their brothers. And relations were very different between the two societies. and then she suddenly returned to the loud, quarrelsome English and is sent back to England. I was unable to say if she ever got here or how long she lived because although I looked in all the records, the name Anne Jackson is a common one.

I found several Anne Jackson's who died in Westminster, which I imagine is where she went back to. Now, there were three other women that you managed to trace in some depth beyond Anne Jackson, Catherine Finch, Audrey Hoare and Bridget Croft. I don't feel sure that it's because they weren't called Elizabeth or Anne. Could you tell us perhaps about one of these women? Because they seem to have been rather extraordinary. They adapted and they prospered and showed great spirit.

Yes, I have enormous admiration for them. Let me take Catherine Finch. She's the sister of the crossbow maker to the king, and she's an orphan by the time she leaves for Virginia. She has three brothers in England, two of them are cross-bomakers, and the other is for Goldsmith, and all three brothers take her to the Virginia Company. Now, whether they wanted to get rid of her or what, I don't know,

but anyway, she's handed over to the Virginia Company, and she marries a carpenter. He's called Robert Fisher. He was what was called an ancient planter. which means that he'd arrived in the colony before 1616. In fact, Robert arrived back in 1611, and we don't know exactly where they were at the time of the great Indian attack. But pretty soon after, in 1624 and 1625,

they are living in a settlement called Jordan's Journey. She was living with Robert. Now, Robert was a skill carpenter, before the Indian attack, he had actually been commissioned by a man called George Thorpe to construct a house for Opa Chankanel. He's the man who led the Indian attack, and Robert Fisher constructs the house. Opa Chankano is said to have been so delighted with the house, especially with its lock and key, that he would let himself into and out of his house a hundred times a day. We know that in early 1625 of Robert and Catherine are living in this very small community.

There are just 15 households at Jordan's journey where they're living. They have a daughter called Cisly. There's a maid servant. And they're reasonably well provisioned because this is the crucial censor. It was called the muster, which gave the names, including the Christian names, of settlers, so including the women. And it also listed what ship they came by and the year. And it recorded their wealth in a way, how many houses they had, what sort of armour they had. Because the English settlers took their coats of armour and chain mail and helmets with them to

Virginia and foodstuffs. And so husband Robert, Catherine and daughter, Sicily. I reckon they were about number four in the pecking order of households. So she's done really well for herself. She landed with nothing. Then the really sad thing is that from 1625, they just disappear from the records. There's no land claim. It's possible they moved elsewhere, but you had to get permission to move away from the colony. And I suspect they simply succumbed to illness, a partially good story. There was just very briefly, another of the women was called Audrey Hall. She was a shoemaker's daughter from Aylesbury. She goes over and she married someone called Captain Thomas Harris. He was an ancient planter. He arrived not as a gentleman,

but he was one of those really thrusting, successful men who ended up as a mind. Virginia's elite. And I have met one of over in Virginia, she was known as Andrea. So she becomes Andrea Harris. She had a daughter and then a son called William. And I met one of William's direct descendants. We had coffee at the British Library. And she's called Virginia. And I asked her if she felt very proud to be connected to the women. And she said, that's not really how she looks on it, but being connected to one of the very early settlers did give her a real sense of belonging and of belonging to two cultures as well. And it is extraordinary when you go over to Virginia, people know who they are related to, people who have descended from the original settlers.

And there is the Jamestown Society that has very strict membership rules. And a criterion for membership is that your ancestors must have arrived before 1625. That entitles you to belong to the society. And presumably, if you're a Native American, you can join as well. In closing, then, because I know this is a question you wrestle with. So I'm not asking for a final answer, but I'd like it if you could share your thoughts. Do you think the Jamestown brides were victims of a patriarchal society,

or were they adventurers willing to risk? their lives in expanding their horizons? The answer has to lie somewhere in between. I remember being completely shocked that the Virginia Company and officials and investors never expressed a tiny bit of regret at sending so many of these women over to their deaths. And remember, Cicely Bray, the relative of Sir Edwin Sanders,

she was slaughtered in the Great Indian attack. She died at a settlement called Powell Brook. I think the company was not entirely honest in the way they painted Virginia as a place to go. They wanted the colony to thrive. They wanted good women to go there. So in that sense, I think a lot of the women would have been persuaded to go without the real facts.

but then you come across those who survived and put down roots and did really well. At a time when back in England it was often very hard to find a husband. And I remember giving a talk in James Town to what used to be called the Virginia Historical Society and ending up by saying that I look on these women, they have every right to be called the founding mothers of America. We hear about the founding fathers, but some of these really are the founding mothers, although I suspect not many of them survived long enough,

but I look on them with huge admiration. Well, thank you so much for sharing something of their stories with us today. and those who've had their interest piqued should pick up a copy of Jennifer Potter's book, James Town Brides, The Battered Women of the New World, to find out more. But for today, thank you so very much for coming on.

It's been a great pleasure reliving some of their lives. Hello, folks. Thanks for listening to American History Hit. Each week, we release new episodes, two new episodes dropping Mondays and Thursdays. All kinds of great content, like mysterious missing colonies to powerful political movements, to some of the biggest battles across the centuries. Don't miss an episode. By hitting like and follow, you help us out, which is great,

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