A reading edition of William Morrell's 'New England', 1625

In September I will start teaching a new course I have devised called ‘Paradise in Early Modern English Literature’. So I will on this blog occasionally look at texts that use the Garden of Eden as an idea or point of reference.

I intended to set off with an informal essay on William Morrell’s New-England. Or A briefe enarration of the ayre, earth, water, fish and fowles of that country (1625) but repeatedly found that I was stumbling over the sense of the text. No doubt a scholarly edition will have been produced by someone, but I had no access to such, nor will my students have one, so I here present a reading edition of the poem.

I have modernized spelling, made amendments as best I could where the printed text makes no obvious sense, and added some notes.

Morrell’s English version is an expansive version of his original Latin. I did spend a deal of time trying to compare the two texts, especially when trying to make sense of his English version (which sometimes or often has the stilted manner of a translation). I found this hard to do; I would need a Latinist to help me.

Things to look out for in this work are Morrell’s close attention to the native Indians (though, in his interested sympathy, he projects a lot of incipiently Christian belief onto them). His ethnographical account culminates with his description of the appearance, art, agriculture and personal politics of the Indian women. Morrell reports the Indian men mocking the Europeans for letting their women lead such leisured lives. New England (Morrell’s use of the term is actually an OED antedating) really emerges as a potential Eden. He tries to stress its natural abundance, but is too truthful to conceal either its extremes of weather or the potential danger of the native population. He represents New England as a sound business opportunity with resources which will repay “their Merchants debt and interest”.

New-England. Or A briefe enarration of the ayre, earth, water, fish and fowles of that country.[i]

Feare not poore Muse, 'cause first to sing her fame,
That’s yet scarce known, unless by Map or name;
A Grand-childe to earth’s Paradise is borne,
Well limb’d, well nerv’d, faire, rich, sweet, yet forlorn.
Thou blest director so direct my Verse,
That it may win her people, friends commerce;
Whilst her sweet air, rich soil, blest Seas, my pen
Shall blaze, and tell the natures of her men.[ii]

New-England, happy in her new true stile,
Weary of her cause she’s to sad exile
Expos’d by heirs[iii] unworthy of her Land,
Entreats with tears Great Britain to command
Her Empire, and to make her know the time,
Whose act and knowledge only makes divine.
A Royal work well worthy England’s King,
These Natives to true truth and grace to bring.
A Noble work for all these Noble Peers
Which guide this State in their superior spheres.[iv]
You holy Aarons[v] let your Censers ne’er
Cease burning, till these men Jehovah fear.
Westward a thousand leagues a spacious land,
Is made unknown to them that it command.
Of fruitful mould, and no less fruitless main[vi]
Enrich’d with springs and prey, high land and plain.

The light, well temp’red, humid air, whose breath
Fills full all concaves betwixt heaven and earth,
So that the Region of the air is blest
With what Earths mortals wish to be possest.
Great Titan darts on her his heavenly rays,
Whereby extremes he quells, and oversways.
Blest is this air with what the air can bless;
Yet frequent gusts do much this place distress
Here unseen gusts do instant onset give,
As heaven and earth they would together drive.
An instant power doth surprise their rage,
In their vast prison, and their force assuage.[vii]
Thus in exchange a day or two is spent,
In smiles and frowns: in great yet no content.

The earth grand-parent to all things on earth,
Cold, dry, and heavy, and the next beneath
The air by Natures arm with low descents,
Is as it were entrencht; again ascents
Mount up to heaven by Jove’s omnipotence,
Whose looming greenness joys the Seaman’s sense.
Invites him to a land if he can see,
Worthy the Thrones of stately sovereignty.[viii]
The fruitful and well watered earth doth glad
All hearts; when Flora with her spangles clad,
And yields an hundred fold for one,
To feed the Bee and to invite the drone.[ix]

O happy Planter[x] if you knew the height
Of Planter’s honours where there’s such delight;
There Nature’s bounties though not planted are,[xi]
Great store and sorts of berries great and faire:
The Filbert, Cherry, and the fruitful Vine,
Which cheers the heart and makes it more divine.
Earths spangled beauties pleasing smell and sight;
Objects for gallant choice and chief delight.

A ground-Nut there runs on a grassy thread,
Along the shallow earth, as in a bed,
Yellow without, thin, film’d, sweet, lily white,
Of strength to feed and cheer the appetite. [xii]
From these our natures may have great content,
And good subsistence when our means is spent.
With these the Natives do their strength maintain
The Winter season, which time they retain
Their pleasant virtue, but if once the Spring
Return, they are not worth the gathering.[xiii]

All ore that Maine the Vernant[xiv] trees abound,
Where Cedar, Cypress, Spruce, and Beech are found.
Ash, Oak, and Walnut, Pines and Juniper;
The Hazel, Palm, and hundred more are there.
There’s grass and herbs contenting man and beast,
On which both Dear, and Bears, and Wolves do feast.
Foxes both gray and black, (though black I never
Beheld,[xv]) with Muscats[xvi], Lynxs, Otter, Beaver;
With many other which I here omit,
Fit for to warm us, and to feed us fit.

The Fowls that in those Bays and Harbours breed,
Though in their seasons they do else-where breed,
Are Swans and Geese, Herne, Pheasants, Duck & Crane,
Culvers and Divers all along the Maine:
The Turtle, Eagle, Partridge, and the Quail,
Knot, Plover, Pigeons, which do never fail,
Till Summer’s heat commands them to retire,
And Winter’s cold begets their old desire.[xvii]
With these sweet dainties man is sweetly fed,
With these rich feathers Ladies plume their head;
Here’s flesh and feathers both for use and ease,
To feed, adorn, and rest thee if thou please.[xviii]

The treasures got, on earth, by Titan’s beams,
They best may search that have best art and means.[xix]

The air and earth if good, are blessings rare,
But when with these the waters blessed are,
The place is complete, here each pleasant spring,
Is like those fountains where the Muses sing.
The easy channels gliding to the East,
Unless oreflowed, then post to be releas’d,
The Ponds and places where the waters stay,
Content the Fowler with all pleasant prey.
Thus air and earth and water give content,
And highly honour this rich Continent.

As Nature hath this Soil blest, so each port
Abounds with bliss, abounding all report.
The careful Naucleare[xx] may a-far descry
The land by smell, as’t looms below the sky.

The prudent Master there his Ship may moor,
Past wind and weather, then his God adore,
Man forth each Shallop with three men to Sea,
Which oft return with wondrous store of prey;
As Oysters, Crayfish, Crab, and Lobsters great,
In great abundance when the Seas retreat:
Tortoise[xxi], and Herring, Turbot, Hake and Bass,
With other small fish, and fresh bleeding Plaice;
The mighty Whale doth in these Harbours lye,
Whose Oil the careful Merchant dear will buy.
Besides all these and others in this Maine:
The costly Cod doth march with his rich train:
With which the Sea-man fraughts his merry Ship:
With which the Merchant doth much riches get:
With which Plantations richly may subsist,
And pay their Merchants debt and interest.

Thus air and earth, both land and Sea yields store
Of Nature’s dainties both to rich and poor;
To whom if heavens a holy Viceroy give,
The state and people may most richly live:[xxii]
And there erect a Pyramy of estate,
Which only sin and Heaven can ruinate.[xxiii]
Let deep discretion this great work attend,
What’s well begun for’th’most part well doth end:
So may our people peace and plenty find,
And kill the Dragon that would kill mankind.[xxiv]

Those well seen Natives in grave Nature’s hests,
All close designs conceal in their deep breasts:
What strange attempts so ere they do intend,
Are fairly usher’d in, till their last end.[xxv]
Their well advised talk evenly conveys
Their acts to their intents, and ne’er displays
Their secret projects, by high words or light,[xxvi]
Till they conclude their end by fraud or might.
No former friendship they in mind retain,
If you offend once, or your love detain:[xxvii]
They’re wondrous cruel, strangely base and vile,
Quickly displeas’d, and hardly reconcil’d;
Stately and great, as read in Rules of state:
Incens’d, not caring what they perpetrate.
Whose hair is cut with greeces[xxviii], yet a lock
Is left; the left side bound up in a knot:

Their males small labour but great pleasure know,
Who nimbly and expertly draw the bow;[xxix]
Train’d up to suffer cruel heat and cold,
Or what attempt so ere may make them bold;
Of body straight, tall, strong, mantled in skin
Of Deer or Beaver, with the hair-side in:
An Otter skin their right arms doth keep warm,
To keep them fit for use, and free from harm·
A Girdle set with forms of birds or beasts,
Begirts their waste, which gently gives them ease.
Each one doth modestly bind up his shame,
And Deer-skin Start-ups reach up to the same;[xxx]
A kind of Pinsen[xxxi] keeps their feet from cold,
Which after travels they put off, up-fold,
Themselves they warm, their ungirt limbs they rest
In straw, and houses, like to sties: distressed
With Winter’s cruel blasts, a hotter clime
They quickly march to, when that extreme time
Is over, then contented they retire
To their old homes, burning up all with fire.
Thus they their ground from all things quickly clear,
And make it apt great store of Corn to bear.

Each people[xxxii] hath his[xxxiii] orders, state, and head,
By which they’re rul’d, taught, ordered, and lead.
The first is by descent their Lord and King,
Pleas’d in his name likewise and governing:
The consort of his bed must be of blood
Coequal, when an off-spring comes as good,
And highly bred in all high parts of state,
As their Commanders of whom they’re prognate[xxxiv].
If they unequal loves at Hymen’s hand
Should take, that vulgar seed would ne’er command
In such high dread, great state and deep decrees
Their Kingdoms, as their Kings of high degrees:
Their Kings give laws, rewards to those they give,
That in good order, and high service live.
The aged Widow and the Orphans all,
Their Kings maintain, and strangers when they call,
They entertain with kind salute for which,
In homage, they have part of what's most rich.[xxxv]
These heads are guarded with their stoutest men,
By whose advice and skill, how, where, and when,
They enterprise all acts of consequence,
Whether offensive or for safe defence.
These Potents do invite all once a year,
To give a kind of tribute to their peer.[xxxvi]

And here observe thou how each childe[xxxvii] is train’d,
To make him fit for Arms he is constrain’d
To drink a potion made of herbs most bitter,
Till turn’d to blood with casting, whence he’s fitter,
Enduring that to undergo the worst
Of hard attempts, or what may hurt him most.[xxxviii]
The next in order are their well seen men
In herbs and roots, and plants, for medicine,
With which by touch, with clamors, tears, and sweat,
With their curst Magic, as themselves they beat,
They quickly ease: but when they cannot save,
But are by death surpris’d, then with the grave
The devil tells them he could not dispence;
For God hath kill’d them for some great offence.[xxxix]

The lowest people are as servants are,
Which do themselves for each command prepare:
They may not marry nor Tobacco use,
Till certain years, least they themselves abuse.
At which years to each one is granted leave,
A wife, or two, or more, for to receive; [xl]

By having many wives, two things they have,
First, children, which before all things to save
They covet, 'cause by them their Kingdoms fill’d,
When as by fate or Arms their lives are spill’d.
Whose death as all that die they sore lament,
And fill the skies with cries: impatient
Of nothing more then pale and fearful death,
Which old and young bereaves of vital breath;
Their dead wrapt up in Mats to th’grave they give,
Upright from th’knees, with goods whilst they did live,
Which they best lov’d: their eyes turn’d to the East,
To which after much time, to be releas’t
They all must March, where all shall all things have
That heart can wish, or they themselves can crave.[xli]
A second profit which by many wives
They have, is Corn, the staff of all their lives.
All are great eaters, he’s most rich whose bed
Affords him children, profit, pleasure, bread.
But if fierce Mars, begins his bow to bend,
Each King stands on his guard, seeks to defend
Himself, and his, and therefore hides his grain
In earth’s close concaves, to be fetch’d again
If he survives: thus saving of himself,
He acts much mischief, and retains his wealth.
By this deep wile, the Irish long withstood
The English power, whilst they kept their food,[xlii]
Their strength of life their Corn; that lost, they long
Could not withstand this Nation, wise, stout, strong.
By this one Art, these Natives oft survive
Their great’st opponents, and in honour thrive.

Besides, their women, which for th’most part are
Of comely forms, not black, nor very fair:
Whose beauty is a beauteous black laid on
Their paler cheek, which they most dote upon.[xliii]
For they by Nature are both fair and white,
Enricht with graceful presence, and delight;
Deriding laughter, and all prattling, and
Of sober aspect, graced with grave command:
Of man-like courage, stature tall and straight,
Well nerv’d, with hands and fingers small and right.
Their slender fingers of a grassie twine,
Make well form’d Baskets wrought with art and line;
A kind of Arras, or Straw-hangings, wrought
With divers forms, and colours, all about.
These gentle pleasures, their fine fingers fit,
Which Nature seem’d to frame rather to sit.
Rare Stories, Princes, people, Kingdoms, Towers,
In curious finger-work, or Parchment flowers:
Yet are these hands to labours all intent,
And what so ere without doors, give content.
These hands do dig the earth, and in it lay
Their faire choice Corn, and take the weeds away
As they do grow, raising with earth each hill,
As Ceres prospers to support it still.
Thus all work women do, whilst men in play,
In hunting, Arms, and pleasures, end the day.
The Indians whilst our Englishmen they see
In all things servile exercis’d to be:
And all our women freed, from labour all
Unless what’s easy: us much fools they call,
'Cause men do all things; but our women live
In that content which God to man did give:[xliv]
Each female likewise long retains deep wrath,
And’s ne’er appeas’d till wrongs reveng’d she hath:
For they when foreign Princes Arms up take
Against their Liege, quickly themselves betake
To th’adverse Army, where they’re entertain’d
With kind salutes, and presently are dain’d
Worthy faire Hymen’s favours: thus offence
Obtains by them an equal recompense.[xlv]

Lastly, though they no lines, nor Altars know,
Yet to an unknown God these people bow;[xlvi]
All fear some God, some God they worship all,
On whom in trouble and distress they call;
To whom of all things they give sacrifice,
Filling the air with their shrill shrieks and cries.
The knowledge of this God they say they have
From their forefathers, wondrous wise and grave;
Who told them of one God, which did create
All things at first, himself though increate:
He our first parents made, yet made but two,
One man one woman, from which stock did grow
Royal mankind,[xlvii] of whom they also came
And took beginning, being, form and frame:
Who gave them holy laws, for aye to last,
Which each must teach his childe till time be past:
Their gross fed bodies yet no Letters know,
No bonds nor bills they value, but their vow.
Thus without Art’s bright lamp, by Nature’s eye,
They keep just promise, and love equity.
But if once discord his fierce ensign wear,
Expect no promise unless’t be for fear:
And, though these men no Letters know, yet their
Pan’s harsher numbers we may somewhere hear:
And vocal odes which us affect with grief;
Though to their minds perchance they give relief.
Besides these rude insights in Nature’s breast,[xlviii]
Each man by some means is with sense possess’t
Of heaven’s great lights, bright stars and influence,
But chiefly those of great experience:
Yet they no feasts (that I can learn) observe,
Besides their Ceres, which doth them preserve.[xlix]
No days by them discern’d from other days,
For holy certain service kept always.[l]

Yet they when extreme heat doth kill their Corn,
Afflict themselves some days, as men forlorn.
Their times they count not by the year as we,
But by the Moon their times distinguish’t be.
Not by bright Phoebus, or his glorious light,
But by his Phoebe and her shadowed night.[li]
They now accustom’d are two Gods to serve,
One good, which gives all good, and doth preserve;
This they for love adore: the other bad,
Which hurts and wounds, yet they for fear are glad
To worship him:[lii] see here a people who
Are full of knowledge, yet do nothing know
Of God aright; yet say his Laws are good
All, except one, whereby their will’s withstood.
In having many wives, if they but one
Must have, what must they do when they have none.
O how far short comes Nature of true grace,[liii]
Grace sees God here; hereafter face to face:
But Nature quite enerv’d[liv] of all such right,
Retains not one poor sparkle of true light.
And now what soul dissolves not into tears,
That hell must have ten thousand thousand heirs,
Which have no true light of that truth divine,
Or sacred wisdome of th’Eternal Trine.[lv]

O blessed England far beyond all sense,
That knows and loves this Trine’s omnipotence.

In brief survey here water, earth, and air,
A people proud, and what their orders are.
The fragrant flowers, and the Vernant Groves,
The merry Shores, and Storm-affronting Coves.
In brief, a brief of what may make man blest,
If man’s content abroad can be possessed.[lvi]

If these poor lines may win this Country love,
Or kind compassion in the English move;
Persuade our mighty and renowned State,
This poor-blind people to commiserate;
Or painful men to this good Land invite,
Whose holy works these Natives may inlight:[lvii]
If Heavens grant these, to see here built I trust;
An English Kingdome from this Indian dust.

FINIS.

Excuse this Postscript, perchance more profitable than the Prescript. It may be a necessary Caveat for many who too familiarly do Serò sapere[lviii]. The discreet artificer is not only happy to understand what may fairly and infallibly further his duly considered designs and determinations: but to discover and remove what obstacle soever may oppose his well-advised purposes, and probable conclusions. I therefore, desiring that every man may be a Promethius, not an Epimethius, have here underwritten such impediments as I have observed wonderfully offensive to all Plantations[lix]; Quae prodesse quant & delectare legentem.[lx]

First therefore I conceive that far distance of plantations produce many inconveniences and disabilities of planters, when as several Colonies consist but of twenty, or thirty, or about that number, which in a vast uncommanded Continent, makes them liable to many and miserable exigents[lxi], which weakens all union, and leaves them difficultly to be assisted against a potent or daily enemy, and dangerously to be commanded; when as some one Bay well fortified would maintain and enrich some thousands of persons, if it be planted with men, able, ingenious, and laborious, being well furnished with all provisions and necessaries for plantations. Besides, if one Bay be well peopled, it’s easily defended, surveyed, disciplined, and commanded, be the seasons never so unseasonable, and all their Forces in few hours ready in Arms, either offensively to pursue, or defensively to subsist convenient numbers ever at sea, and sufficient ever at home for all service, intelligence and discovery.

Secondly, Ignorance of seasons, servants, situation, want of people, provisions, supplies, with resolution, courage and patience, in and against all opposition, distress, and affliction. Vincit patientia durum[lxii]. Fishermen, manual artificers, engineers, and good fowlers are excellent servants, and only fit for plantations. Let not Gentlemen or Citizens once imagine that I prejudize their reputations, for I speak no word beyond truth, for they are too high, or not patient of such service: though they may be very necessary for Martial discipline, or excellent, (if pious) for example to the seditious and inconsiderate multitude.[lxiii]

Boats with all their furniture, as sails, hooks, and lines, and other appendences, afford the paineful planter both variety of comfort, and a sufficient competent, and an happy estate. Good mastiffs are singular defences to plantations, in the terrifying or pursuing of the light-footed Natives.[lxiv] Hogs and Goats are easy, present, and abundant profit, living and feeding on the Islands almost without any care or cost.

Plantations cannot possibly, profitably subsist without chattels and boats, which are the only means for surveying and conveying both our persons and provisions to the well advised situation. Without these, plantations may with much patience, and well fortified resolution endure but difficultly, though with much time flourish and contentedly subsist. For when men are landed upon an unknown shore, per adventure weak in number and natural powers, for want of boats and carriages, are compelled to stay where they are first landed, having no means to remove themselves or their goods, be the place never so fruitless or inconvenient for planting, building houses, boats, or stages, or the harbours never so unfit for fishing, fowling, or mooring their boats[lxv]. Of all which, and many other things necessary for plantation, I purpose to inform thee hereafter.[lxvi] Wishing thee in the interim all furtherance, all fortunateness.

Farewell.

---

[i] This is 1625: OED does not record ‘New England’ before 1638. See line 2, which implies a wider circulation of the term. ‘Enarration’, used in English between 1570 and the early 19^th century meant ‘A description, detailed story or narrative’ (OED).

[ii] Morrell will praise the land first, then simply ‘tell’ ‘the natures of her men’.

[iii] ‘heirs’ - ‘her’s’ in the 1625 text may be a misprint. New England, personified, begs Great Britain to take charge of governing her empire because ‘heirs’ unworthy of her are making her exile sad (?). This would seem to apply to the native peoples, as King James is then asked to undertake the worthy royal work of bringing the ‘natives’ ‘to true truth and grace’ – Christianity.

[iv] The Privy Council

[v] Aarons: churchmen

[vi] Via a contorted double negative, Morrell says that the ‘maine’, the sea, is there as fruitful as the ‘mould’, the soil.

[vii] Morrell starts on the air of New England, a typical early modern priority about the healthiness of a place. The air is good, but prone to sudden violent gusts of wind. But these sudden tempests are just as quickly stilled by an ‘instant power’ (Morrell implies a heavenly providence), which re-imprisons the air in its heavenly vault, and so any bad weather is over in a day or two. An alternation between great ‘content’ and unsatisfactory absence of ‘content’ seems to be intended.

[viii] Morrell now turns to the earth which, by nature’s power lies beneath the air, low as if entrenched. But then again, hills, ‘ascents’ reach up towards heaven; and the sea-farer sees these first.

[ix] The fruitful soil has many ‘spangles’ (flowers), and yields 100 grains for one seed grain planted. Morrell is thinking about corn.

[x] ‘Planter’ meant one who cultivated the soil, and then from 1587 onwards, a colonist.

[xi] Morrell says that New England has the Edenic quality of displaying nature’s bounty without crops having to be sowed.

[xii] Morrell’s use of ‘ground nut’ antedates the OED’s first recorded usage, which is from 1636. His reference is not to the peanut, but Apios Americana:

http://www.hort.purdue.edu/newcrop/proceedings1990/V1-436.html

“When European explorers first visited the New World they found the naives eating the seeds and tubers of Apios Americana.”

[xiii] See prior footnote - “The succulent vine is killed by freezing temperatures and will deteriorate during the winter.”

[xiv] Morrell’s Latin uses the same word, meaning ‘flourishing’, but ‘vernant’ itself was used in English c1440-1660.

[xv] Morrell’s Latin does not seem to specify two types of foxes, nor include the reservation that he didn’t himself witness a black fox. They would probably have been the same animals viewed from different angles. A black fox is also called a ‘silver’ fox because of white-tipped hairs on the rump. See

http://www.thefoxwebsite.org/ecology/ecologyfacts.html

“in North America, black foxes are relatively common”.

[xvi] ‘muscat’ means the musk cat or civet (which secretes musk).

[xvii] Morrell notes seasonal changes in the bird population. ‘Hernes’ are herons, ‘culvers’ doves or pigeons.

[xviii] i.e., feathers for feather beds.

[xix] Morrell refers to veins of gold, which was believed to be produced by the influence of the sun. He lets one infer that none have been found, but that a search by experienced prospectors has yet to be made.

[xx] Not in the OED, the word may relate to an ancient Greek word meaning ‘shipowner’. The detail of it being possible to smell the land before it comes into view (from a ship) does not seem to be in the Latin version.

[xxi] A large and heavy-shelled shell fish. The OED cites R. Eden, 1555, Decades of New World, “In Cuba, are founde great Tortoyses (which are certeyne shell fysshes) of such byggenesse that tenne or fyfteene men are scarsely able to lyfte one of them owt of the water.”

[xxii] New England requires only an appointed Viceroy to govern it.

[xxiii] And with a viceroy set in charge, New England will become a state as long lasting as the pyramids. Aware of the fragility of the North American colonies, Morrell says that it can last unless brought to ruin by sin or heaven (i.e., the latter punishing the former).

[xxiv] i.e., may the settlers enjoy an Eden, but here destroy Satan.

[xxv] Morrell has just reflected that such a fair beginning promises a good outcome for the colony. He now turns to the native Americans, who also seem promising, ‘well seen’ as he puts it, in appearance. But they conceal motives that end in fraud or violence.

[xxvi] The natives will appear neither angry (with ‘high’ words spoken) or merry (speaking ‘light’ words)

[xxvii] The native people will turn on you if you detain your former love from them, or offend them.

[xxviii] Morrell seems to be saying that their hair is cut in steps, ‘greeces’, apart from the longer lock on the left side.

[xxix] Morrell will pointedly contrast the way that in native cultures, the women do all the hard work, with the ease enjoyed by European women, in which culture men do all the physical labour. Perhaps because hunting was seen as a sport, Morrell does not credit the hunting carried out by male natives as work.

[xxx] ‘start-ups’ here seems to mean gaiters, leg bindings.

[xxxi] A ‘pinsen’ was a shoe without a heel or pump: Morrell is of course describing moccasins.

[xxxii] Morrell recognises different tribes.

[xxxiii] We would say, each tribe has its upper ranks.

[xxxiv] The text reads ‘they’rs prognate’. ‘Prognate’ (cited from here in the OED) means offspring, descendents. The offspring of a marriage between two high status individuals are accepted as leaders in their turn.

[xxxv] The kings, in return for entertaining visitors from other nations, receive gifts from them.

[xxxvi] Morrell notes annual ceremonies of homage.

[xxxvii] I have not modernized to ‘child’: Morrell seems to mean, ‘youth approaching manhood’, so I have retained the spelling with a final e, latterly used to distinguish from ‘child’.

[xxxviii] An initiation rite at which emetic herbs are drunk. From this ordeal, the brave emerges better able to face the hardships of battle, etc.

[xxxix] Medicine: their doctors are ‘well seen’ in arts that blend from knowledge of herbs 

into devil-inspired magic. When cures fail, the devil informs the patient 

(via the shamanic doctor) that he or she must die for some sin they have 

committed. There is possibly a faint memory here of Cornelius speaking to 

Faustus at the start of Marlowe’s play: “The miracles that magic will perform 

/ Will make thee vow to study nothing else. / He that is grounded in astrology, 

Enrich'd with tongues, well seen in minerals, / Hath all the principles magic doth require.”

[xl] Morrell asserts the willingness of the lowest orders to be given their orders. He seems to say that such people (and only such) may not marry till they have reached a certain age, nor may they smoke tobacco. Morrell may be reporting facts, but he may also be thinking of truculent English lower classes, apprentices who could not marry till they were out of their apprenticeships, and King James’s attempts to restrict tobacco taking.

[xli] Burial rites, and belief in a paradisal afterlife located in the East. Again, Morrell’s report of the native peoples may be tinged by Christian beliefs in a heavenly Jerusalem, etc.

[xlii] Morrell jumps from native American to native Irish practices of hoarding grain underground in times of war.

[xliii] So Morrell comes to the native Eve’s of this Eden. He tries to express the beauty of darker eyebrows and eye lashes against a skin of pale brown coloration. He is impressed by the taciturnity they share with their menfolk, and by their ‘well nerved’ (muscular) bodies. Their artistic basketwork comes next. I read ‘of a grassy twine’, the 1625 text reads ‘on a grassie twyne’. The wall hangings are both decorative and draft-excluding, like the European ‘arras’ (tapestries). Finally, their agriculture, growing corn, and tending the crop as it grows. He observes again that they do all the work, while the men merely hunt and fight.

[xliv] An interesting passage: there were not many women in the first American colonies, and it is hard to imagine that they enjoyed much leisure. The native men mock the European men for doing so much work; European women are seen as still enjoying the paradise of leisure God first gave to Adam.

[xlv] The women as politically independent: a wrong done to them and (perhaps) not dealt with adequately by their king will cause women to switch sides when war comes.

[xlvi] ‘Lines’ (‘lynes’ in the 1625 text) perhaps means any written sacred text. “Yet to an unknown God these people bow” – Morrell’s Latin text does not correspond to this. He probably puts ‘an unknown God’ as object of their devotion to bring to his reader’s mind St Paul in Acts 17:23: ‘For as I passed by, and beheld your devotions, I found an altar with this inscription, TO THE UNKNOWN GOD. Whom therefore ye ignorantly worship, him declare I unto you.’

[xlvii] Morrell (in his English text) insinuates a creation story of a male creator God (himself uncreated), who brought to life an Adam and an Eve, parents of all humankind; a God who gave laws that must be followed. In the case of the native Americans, these beliefs are orally transmitted. Like More’s Utopians, they are represented as incipient Christians, lacking a revealed gospel, but by the light of nature alone, deriving basic religious truths.

[xlviii] Their ‘insights’ in (‘into’) Nature’s secrets. They are aware of what a 17^th century astrologer would have called the ‘greater luminaries’, particularly their most experienced observers.

[xlix] They observe no regular feast days apart from a ‘Cerealia’ (as the Latin version has it), a feast in honour of the harvest, Ceres being the goddess of the harvest.

[l] They observe no Sabbath day.

[li] Their calendar is lunar, not solar.

[lii] Here, the native Americans are represented as dualists, with two Gods, one good, one evil: susceptible to the basic Christian heresy.

[liii] Morrell seems to imply that the native people are quite receptive to initial conversion attempts, but that they cannot contemplate an end to polygamy. Again, the native Americans may be accurately described, but there is also a hint of More’s Utopia, where the Utopians, acting by human reason alone, allow divorce and remarriage.

[liv] The text has either ‘encru’d’ or ‘eneru’d’. I have emended to ‘enerved’, to suggest ‘deprived of the strength of revelation’.

[lv] Morrell laments that all these people will go to hell, being unaware of such things as the knowledge of the Holy Trinity, a truth loved in England, though it is in itself ‘far beyond all sense’.

[lvi] Morrell starts his peroration with a summary.

[lvii] He hopes his verses may move ‘painful’ (painstaking) men to sail to America and enlighten the native people. Like Samuel Sewall would be after him (see Richard Francis’ excellent Judge Sewall’s Apology (2005), Morrell is an optimistic promoter of the possibility of mass conversion. Sewall was ready to believe that the Indians were descended from the lost tribes of Israel, that they ‘fear God, and are true believers’. Francis explains how the ‘praying Indians’ would be few in number, and be quite cynically neglected as the colony developed.

[lviii] ‘too late come to be wise’

[lix] Morrell will use his proscript to pass on what he observes colonies use, so that each colonist may be a ‘Prometheus’, a benign giver of fire to the benefit of mankind, rather than an ‘Epimetheus’, an opener of a Pandora’s box of evils.

[lx] ‘to profit and please the readers’

[lxi] exigencies, hardships, bad circumstances.

[lxii] ‘patience conquers adversities’

[lxiii] As ever with the English colonies, the need is for people accustomed to hard work, with useful skills, not people accustomed to leisure. Morrell specifies.

[lxiv] Morrell, so interested and indeed sympathetic to the native people in his poem suggests the utility of mastiffs to let loose upon them.

[lxv] Counter to ever suggestion made in his poem of what a Paradise New England (almost) is, Morrell here observes the utility to colonists of wagons and small boats for mobility, for shifting to better sites.

[lxvi] No such further work by Morrell has survived (if it was ever carried out).

The mutable James Howell

I had meant to read James Howell’s Dendrologia Dodona’s grove, or, The vocall forest (for a few talking and ambulant trees) as a follow up to my last post, but I rebounded and digressed to another work by the same writer, Therologia, The parly of beasts, or, Morphandra, queen of the inchanted iland wherein men were found, who being transmuted to beasts, though proffer’d to be dis-inchanted, and to becom men again, yet, in regard of the crying sins and rebellious humors of the times, they prefer the life of a brute animal before that of a rational creture ... : with reflexes upon the present state of most countries in Christendom (1660).

The narrative line here is simple. A voyaging prince, Pererius, has reached an idyllic island ruled by the enchantress ‘Morphandra’, who emphatically explains that she is not a witch, but has transformed certain humans into animal shape. He may talk with them, for she can re-imbue them with the power of speech, and, if he can persuade them to give up their animal form, he may sail away with them - and repatriate them should he wish.

So, in the immediate background is Spenser’s ‘Bower of Bliss’ and its enchantress Acrasia, and those concluding stanzas in which Gryll, transformed back from pig to man, repines, and announces that he wishes to remain a pig: ‘Let Gryll be Gryll, and have his hoggish mind’, concludes Guyon’s Palmer (his Reason), and they leave him there. However, Howell’s satiric point involves an inversion of Spenser’s fable: in this version, the human state is far more corrupt than the animal, so not heading back for home and human society is the more moral choice. As Howell’s full title explains, Pererius fails again and again, until finally a hive of bees collectively assent to become once more a nunnery full of nuns – which is curious, as they have just been praised as a model of a perfect commonwealth, intolerant of idleness. If Howell was thinking about this (for he does seem to fall foul of the active life /contemplative life divide), one can suppose that a nunnery constitutes a human community separated from the vices of the world. Howell’s more than slightly odd work ends with the bees intoning a church gradual hymn of praise to God. They might do this better if they waited till they were nuns again. But if your fable has bees that can talk, why not have them singing too?

There’s a lot of fun to be had on the way. The first interviewee is an Otter, who was when formerly human one of those amphibious neither-sea-nor-land Dutch folk. He condemns the human body: human excrement, symptomatically, even smells worse than any other creature’s: “ther is none whose excrements are more faetid, and stinking; the fewmets of a Deer, the lesses of a Fox, the crotells of a Hare, the dung of a Horse, and the spraints that I use to void backward, are nothing so foetid”.

“Well, let’s give over these impertinent altercations pro & con…” says Pererius later in the work, having haggled with a former Venetian courtesan, in her new shape as a white hind with a black spotted ‘shingle’ (her tail). Argument for and against was one way Howell, like so many others of his time, showed his wit. The otter produces a fulminating attack on his former nation, so Pererius conversely praises the Dutch, in terms that make you think of Vermeer’s paintings and all those neat Dutch interiors:

“How much are they to be commended for their neatness? Go to their Ships, they may be said to be as cleanly as a milking-pail; in their Kitchins, the outside of their Utensils are as bright as the inside; ther’s never a room in their house, where so much dust may be found as to draw the name of Slutt upon it.” I like that suggestion of domestic practice: that if you found a dusty surface, maybe it was acceptable to indicate with a finger-tip scrawl what you thought of the maid’s deficient standards.

The ape refuses re-transformation in these terms, as Howell vents his sense of how bad things have become: “Man! Truly Sir, I am sorry the shape I now bear resembleth Man so much, I could wish it were far more unlike, for the horrid and unheard-of sacrileges and perjuries of my own Nation makes me abhor the very name of Man, much more his nature”. Into the ape’s testimony he inserts a Dantean vision of hell. Hell is extensively re-equipped with new instruments for the perpetual torment of the malefactors of the civil war and instigators of the execution of King Charles, both male and female:

“My good Spirit answered, All these, except Ixion’s wheel, are new torments appointed for Gherionian Sectaries, who had destroyed from top to bottom all Government both of Church and State, And as their brains turn’d round upon earth after every wind of Doctrine, so their souls turn here in perpetuall torments of rotation … Couches of Toads, Scorpions, Asps, and Serpents were in a corner hard by; I asked for whom they were prepared, I was answered, for som Evangelizing Gherionian Ladies, which did egg on their husbands to War.”

‘Gherionian’ is Howell’s name for England, and he says it means a ‘land of wool’. Howell had begun his whole work with a couplet addressing the reader “If you will ope this Work with ease, / You must from Greece go fetch your Keys”, but fortunately he had relented, and supplied ‘An Etymologicall Derivation of som Words and Anagrams in the Parly of Beasts, according to the ALPHABET.’

Perhaps the best part of the work comes in the dialogue with the hind, formerly a cortigiana onesta in Venice. They debate views of women, and the hind, though she will refuse to resume her former shape, is smartly feminist. She is keen to assert a woman’s equal part in conception, and takes a swipe at Sir Thomas Browne. Pererius, agreeing with her, has just argued that mules are clear evidence of how both male and female contribute to the mixed nature of offspring. She continues “You may well add hereunto that the child oftentimes resembleth the mother, therfore she must also be an active principle in the formation; If it be so, what a wrong is it to the justice and rules of nature that Women shold be held but little better than Slaves? how comes it that they shold be so vilipended and revil’d? As that foolish Naturalist or Ninny, who wish’d ther were another way to propagat Mankind than by copulation with Women.”

Pererius makes his usual offer: “I told you that Queen Morphandra is willing, at my intercession, to restore you unto your former nature, and I have a lusty Galeon in port to convey you to Marcopolis, that renowned and rare City”. But she says that while she would like, if possible, to retain the power of speech, she would prefer to stay in her form as hind. Deer, she explains, have a blessedly short mating season, and their act of sexual congress itself is quickly over. They are temperate and clean (she testifies, like Marvell’s nymph, to the sweetness of a deer’s breath). Best of all, they do not menstruate:

“But, Sir, touching my former nature, truly I wold desire nothing of it again but the faculty of speech that I might talk somtimes; In all other things I prefer by many degrees this species wherin I am now invested by Queen Morphandra, which is far more chaste and temperat, far more healthfull and longer-liv’d: Touching the first, Ther's no creture whose season of carnall copulation is shorter, for the Rutting-time lasts but from the midst of September to the end of October, nor is there any other creture whose enjoyment of plesure is shorter in the act; moreover when we are full, we never after keep company with the male for eight months; Concerning the second, viz. our temperatnes, we never use to overcharge or cloy nature with excesse, besides our food is simple, those green leafs and grasse you see are our nutriment, which our common mother the Earth affords us so gently, we require no variety of Viands, which makes that our breath is sweeter than the fairest Ladies in Marcopolis, and our fewmishes with what else comes from within us is nothing so unsavoury; Nor need we that monthly purgation which is so improperly called Flowers, it being such rank poyson that it will crack a tru crystall glass; Nay 'tis observed, that if a menstruous woman come near an alveary or hive of Bees, they forsake their food all the while, finding the aire to be infected.”

Howell’s work is full of points sustained by such unlikely yarns. But he was, among his other activities as a man of letters, a collector of proverbs, and these help prevent his work from becoming intolerably verbose: “Well, I find here two Proverbs verified, the one is a homely one, viz. Chanter a un Asne, il vous donnera un pet, Sing to an Asse and he will give you a Bum-crack.”

Actually, he did intolerably verbose pretty well: the ass counter-attacks from the charge of braying with a long account of what laughing does to the human form divine:

“the eyes extenuat, they half shut themselfs, and grow humid, the nose crumples up, and growes sharp, the lipps retire and lengthen, ther is an ill-favor’d kind of gaping, and discovery of the teeth, the cheeks lift up themselfs and grow more stiff, they have pitts digg’d in them during the time, the mouth is forc’d to open, and discovers the tremblings of the suspended toung, it thrusts out an obstreperous interrupted sound, and oftentimes ther is a stopping of breath, the neck swells and shortens it self, all the veins grow greter, and extended, an extraordinary hue disperseth it self over all the face, which grows reddish, the brest is impetuously agitated, and with sudden reiterated shakes, that it hinders respiration, the perfect use of speech is lost, and it is impossible to swallow during the fit, a pain rises in the flanck, the whole body bends … The hands becom feeble, the leggs cannot support themselves, and the body is constrained to fall, and tumble, nay it causeth sometimes dangerous syncopes in the heart, and so brings death.”

After this particular dialogue, Morphandra twits the prince about his success in bandying arguments with the ass: “I saw you somwhat earnest in banding arguments with that Asse, but how have you sped? doth he desire to be disasinated, and becom Man again, as I promised he should be, provided his will concurred therunto?” I love that nonce-word, ‘disasinated’.

Therologia was a fable about mutations. In my favourite passage from his letters, Epistolae Ho-elianae, Howell reflects on a less obvious form of mutation, on how we mutate into ourselves. He is in Venice, and is prompted to reflect by seeing the Doge’s state barge, the Bucentore. Like Lord Nelson’s H.M.S. Victory at Southampton, it exists as a continuous reconstruction of itself, or as a reproduction of itself. This makes Howell reflect on himself, brilliantly: is he really continuous with his former self, or has his bodily selfhood completely changed?

“I fell, I say, to consider whither our bodies may be said to be of like condition with this Bucentore; which though it be reputed still the same Vessell, yet I beleeve ther’s not a foot of that Timber remaining which it had upon the first Dock, having bin as they tell me, so often plank’d and ribb’d, caulk’d and peec’d: In like manner our bodies may be said to be daily repaired by new sustenance, which begets new bloud, and consequently new spirits, new humours, and I may say new flesh, the old by continuall deperdition and insensible transpirations evaporating still out of us, and giving way to fresh; so that I make a question, whither by reason of these perpetuall reparations, and accretions, the body of man may be said to be the same numericall body in his old age that he had in his manhood, or the same in his manhood, that he had in his youth, the same in his youth that he carried about him in his childhood, or the same in his childhood which he wore first in the Womb: I make a doubt, whither I had the same identicall, individually numericall body, when I carried a Calf-Leather Sachell to School in Hereford, as when I woar a Lamskin Hood in Oxford, or whither I have the same masse of bloud in my Veins, and the same Flesh now in Venice which I carried about me three yeers since, up and down London streets, having in lieu of Beer and Ale, drunk Wine all this while, and fed upon different Viands; now the stomach is like a crusible, for it hath a chymicall kind of vertue to transmute one body into another, to transubstantiat Fish and Fruits into Flesh within, and about us; but though it be questionable, whither I wear the same Flesh which is fluxible, I am sure my Hair is not the same, for you may remember I went flaxen-hair’d out of England, but you shall find me return’d with a very dark Brown, which I impute not onely to the heat and ayr of those hot Countries I have eat my bread in, but to the quality and difference of food; but you will say, that hair is but an excrementitious thing, and makes not to this purpose; moreover, me thinks I hear you say, that this may be true, onely in the bloud and spirits, or such fluid parts, not in the solid and heterogeneall parts: But I will presse no further at this time this Philosophical notion which the sight of Bucentore infus’d into me, for it hath already made me exceed the bounds of a Letter.”

“The same identicall, individually numericall body…” Are we ‘individually numerical’, can we be counted just the once, was he the unique James Howell, or is he in effect a sequence of ‘fluxible’ James Howells? He sees his selfhood as a series of processes. Nor does he jump to the soul as a reassuring answer. In Therologia, none of the mutated humans worry about being soulless (as animals), indeed the otter refers to the Turks believing that “we also sensitive Cretures have a better World provided for us after we have run out our cours here”: that animals have souls (and that they obey divine laws, rather than transgress them).

Therologia reads as hyperbolised satire, a rhetorical display of condemnation. But it may also hint, alongside the passage about his own mutating body, at a deeper philosophical gloom in Howell.

(Throughout this post, I have retained Howell’s own spelling. Usually, I lightly modernise my early texts, but Howell was a spelling-reformer, who believed that English would only spread beyond its narrow use in the world if it were made easier for other nationalities to learn, so it should be spelled as it sounds, without confusing superfluous letters. His printers did not always heed his dictates, but the spelling is his own as given.

My images are of Howell himself, communing with a tree, and the illustration of Morphandra, the Prince, and his animal interlocutors from 'Therologia')

Meetings with remarkable early modern trees

I recently bought a copy of Gillian Tindall’s The Man Who Drew London: Wenceslaus Hollar in reality and imagination (2002). An odd book, a composite of a biography and a Tracey Chevalier style narrative. In many of Tindall’s fictionalised passages, she tries to give a voice to the women in Hollar’s life. I suppose that one could agree that women were an important subject for Hollar, and that he treats them with great sympathy, never pruriently (not even when illustrating Juvenal). The author must have been tempted to try to bring to life the women Hollar knew.

But I was most interested by her small illustration (on p.124) of the Hollow Tree on Hampstead Heath. It took me a while to find it, as it doesn’t seem to be in the apparently comprehensive (and undeniably excellent) University of Toronto Hollar Digital Collection:

http://link.library.utoronto.ca/hollar/browse.cfm?Main=All

I traced it finally in Robert Codrington’s single sheet (double-sided), The dimension of the hollow tree of Hampsted (1653). EEBO does us proud here, with a transcript of the text, the page images, and all the minor contributors to the publication indexed.

As we are having a meeting with a remarkable early modern tree, let’s have the statistics of the tree itself first. It was an elm tree: “The Bottom above ground in Compass is 28 foot; The Breadth of the door is 2 foot; The Compass of the turret on the Top is 34 foot; The Door in Height to go in is 6 foot 2 Inches; The Height to the Turret is 33 foot; The Lights into the Tree is 16; The Steps to go up is 42; The Seat above the Steps, Six may Sit on, and round about room for fourteen more. All the way you go up within the Hollow Tree.”

This isn’t as hyperbolic in size as Codrington’s verses make it sound. The ‘lights into the tree’ are the windows for the spiral staircase cut inside the trunk.

Codrington’s poem is charmingly of its time. It’s cast, largely, in a vein of high compliment to the tree, treated as a ‘wooden majesty’. From the top of this quasi-royal tree he looks to the forlorn royal palaces, now uninhabited. It’s loco-descriptive, as Codrington enjoys the view from the top in the manner of Denham, especially the section about the distant Thames, and it makes one remember Marvell:

‘Of the height and hollowness of the great Elm at Hampstead.’

What shall I call thee who so great and high,
Present’st thy self unto my wondring eye?
Thou Travellers 'fence, and guide, the Enterlude
O’th ranting storms, and giant of the wood!
How in thy summer’s robes doest thou appear,
The Sylvans’ joy, and honour of the year?
How the bold winds play with thy lofty locks!
How doest thou scorn, and makest them but thy mocks,
Deaf to their sighs, and whispers! Let me here
(So please thy Wooden Majesty) draw near
To thy first door, and looking up discry
Where Hall, where Parlor, how thy Chambers lie.
Essex’ Broad-Oak (which twenty miles we see
And more) is but a twig compar’d to thee;
So vast a compass doth thy might command,
That a whole Grove within thy self might stand,
And spread and flourish, and may fruitful add
To thee a growing progeny: which had
No doubt been so, but that thou thought’st not good
To leave out Men, to entertain a Wood.
Art here, and Order do in one engage
To make this Round complete, their Equipage
Extols thy greatness, in less room I find
With all his trusty Knights King Arthur din’d.
As yet more high upon the stairs I rise,
What are these windows which enrich mine eyes?
Happy you lights, whose air so pure and thin
The morning courts to let the Sun come in,
And drink it, to refresh his heavy head
Sick with the vapours of moist Thetis’ Bed;
For which (not staying) he with all his wealth,
Gilds this blest place, and thanks it for his health.
Now is my progress finish’d, to the height
Of all thy Turret I am come, and straight
Here on the world’s Redeemer think, when he
(Set on the Temple’s Pinnacle) did see
All Kingdoms of the earth at once, so stand
The Towns now subject to my eyes command,
Which to repeat the Muse forbears, for why?
The Towns would often give the verse the lye,
Whose names as Churlish as themselves are known,
And will endure no Numbers but their own.
Six neighbouring Counties do on tip-toe all
Gaze on thy mighty limbs, and seem to call
Unto thy patient Greatness, when to wait
To pay thee homage for thy nobler height,
But only Harrow on the Hill plays Rex,
And will have none more high in Middlesex.
And yonder the familiar Thames (the more
To grace thy prospect) rolls along the shore
Her Crystal treasures, and doth seem to me
Softly to murmur 'cause so far from thee.
See how the Ships in numerous array.
Dance on her waves, and their proud wings display
More white then Snow, as now the Thames did carry
A moving wood i’th’midst of January.
Not all Meander’s Swans, nor those on Po,
Join’d with her own, make half so fair a show:
Nor all the beauteous Ladies that have been
These twice three summers on thy Turrets seen.
But what amongst these various objects, what
Is that which so much takes my eyes? 'tis not
Thy leavy Antlers, nor thy shoulders, high,
Though one would brush, and th’other bore the sky;
Nor thy five hundred Arms by which we see
Briareus only was a type of thee,
Arms which vain winds doe twist in every storm
And fain would put them in akimbo form.
Tis not thy ample body, though it be
So full of pleasure, and humanity,
That as to the quick a Palace would be found,
So to the dead their Coffins, and surround
Their loose and crumbling dusts. Tis not thy feet,
To cover which so many Acres meet:
Tis not those stately structures where the Court
Had late their mansions, when our Kings would sport;
Of whom depriv’d they mourn, and desolate
Like Widows look on their forlorn estate.
Tis not smooth Richmond’s streams, nor Acton’s Mill,
Nor Windsor’s Castle, nor yet Shooters hill.
Nor groves nor plains which further off do stand,
Like Landskips portray’d by some happy hand:
But a swift view which most delightful shows,
And doth them all, and all at once enclose.


Codrington dates his poem 24^th July 1653. Then there follows a set of distiches by four other visitors, who also date their poems to the same day. I just give the English version of each poem, but each one has a Latin version of itself (again, like Marvell sometimes does). English couplets, moralising and making religious reflections, mixed with Latinity takes us a bit closer to what was going on here among these early modern Hampstead intellectuals:

Upon Hampstead Elm.

Although the heart of this fair Tree be out,
Yet it doth spread its branches round about.

(Roger Coleman)

Upon Hampstead Elm.

As in this Tree we go through dark to light,
So Saints ascend through death to heaven bright.

(John Lee)

Upon Hampstead Elm. Psalm 52. 13. 14.

God’s Tree and this do differ in one thing,
That shall not, this will cease fruit forth to bring.

(Moses Browne)

In Ulmum Hampstedensem.

Here all may see this stately Elm to bear
An Apple strange, which it brings ev’ry year.

T. W.

These writers scarcely experience the tree directly: what they see and do is related to their religious inner life. John Lee finds a symbol, Moses Browne is reminded of the cross, T.W. somehow finds an apple (an elm rarely fruits, and the fruit body is small and papery). We had at the start of the ascent a set of ‘Verses on the DOOR.’ These are part-Herrick, part Herbert – or rather, Herbert will be clearer at the top. So it’s a climb from a sinful world to a greater proximity to heaven (and divine scrutiny):

Civil people, you welcome be,
That come to view this Hollow Tree.
Debaucht Drunkard, Ranting Whore,
Come no such within this Door:
Wanton Boys and ranting Rigs,
Cut no Bowes, break no Sprigs.

‘Verses on the Top of the TREE in the TURRET.’

Now you are ascended up on high,
Think here upon Eternity.
Take heed what you do morn or ev’n,
The Son will see’t and tell’t in Heaven:
What ever you think, or speak, or say,
You answer must at Judgement-Day.

I think that the ‘verses on’ simply meant, as usual, ‘verses on the subject of’. But it is also possible that the poems provided might have been transcribed on placards for visitors like the lady visitors Codrington’s verses mention. This whole production was ‘Printed by E. Cotes for M. S. at the Blue Bible in Green Arbour, and are to be given or sold on the Hollow Tree at Hampsted.’ ‘M.S.’ was Michael Sparke, the bookseller. So the work was a promotional flyer, but one that has, as we might say, its own agenda too.

Now hollow trees, if you trace them through early modern literature, are places in which people hide (after the model of Aeneas in his flight from Troy), or hide letters (in romances), and they were where early ornithologists and poets like Carew thought cuckoos over-wintered. But a large tree could shelter a religious meeting. Hollow trees are mentioned being used this way in satire (because of the ludicrous cuckoo associations, I think), as in the title Some small and simple reasons delivered in a hollow-tree in Waltham Forrest in a lecture on the 33. of March last by Aminadab Blower a devout bellowsmender of Pimlico; shewing the causes in generall and particular wherefore thay doe, might, would, should, or ought, except against and quite refuse the liturgy or Book of Common-Prayer (1643).

Codrington has another set of verses, in a Procul, O procul este profane mode: we learn in them that this is ‘an elm that’s orthodox’:

‘The Elm it self, to some of the new Religion that would make a Preachment under his reverend shade.’

How numerous and extravagant are these
Thus buzz about me like a swarm of Bees?
Remove your station friends, I’m not so fickle,
To cast a shade for such a Conventicle:
You talk to me of Slaney, How, and Cox,
Why do you vex an Elm that’s Orthodox?
To sort with your complexions, I profess
There are no Elms in all my Diocese;
If only such are for your purpose, know,
You must as far as unto Bordeaux go.

‘How’ would be Samuel How, author of The sufficiencie of the spirits teaching, without humane-learning (1640 and eds.) - the title alone says enough. Now if it’s a surprise to see the old radical bookseller Michael Sparke mixed in with such men as Codrington busily praising orthodoxy, perhaps the connection is respect for learning. For besides orthodoxy in religion at this elm, there’s a lot of instruction going on. In the next verses, Michael Sparke himself, signing his piece as ‘Scintilla’, praises ‘Domino Auriga’ (the name means charioteer), who has delivered a cartload of books to this place. Sparke himself (who would die in December of 1653) lived in Hampstead, and here he seems to be proprietorial, writing about ‘my arbour’:

‘Amico meo fidelissimo Domino Auriga.’

Welcome most learned Waggoner, welcome to me,
That bring’st such loading, to this hollow Tree;
What is thy carriage? Learning, Virtue, Wit.
Here then unlade, this Elm for thee is fit.
This is the Tree, on which such fruit doth spring,
Which made the Muses dance, to laugh and sing:
Such carriage, thou hast brought to this my Arbour,
As never richer Ship came loaden into Harbour.
Twelve virtuous Plants, this exile tutor’d so
Upon this Tree, the like let England show.
Drive on see the youngest Branch so flourish,
That Air, and Hill, and Well, and School may cherish:
And when thy wheels do off thy Wagon go,
In spite of death, thy Plants will fairly grow;
And though by him thou wrapped art in Lead,
Yet Time in spight of Death thy seeds will spread.

Sparke also contributes ‘The Close’:

Blush England, blush, a shame it is to see
An Exile here, to teach civility,
More then some Natives, and for pious care
To train up youth, his pains he doth not spare;
For he on top of all (this Tree) above the shade,
His Scholars taught, where they such Verses made
As spread his honour, and do blaze the fame
Of Hampstead Schoole, I’ll trumpet up the same:
Johannes A Comenius thy Countryman so rare,
For Arts and Parts thou mayst with him compare.
Exile drive on thy Wagon, here take rest,
And all thy carriage be for ever blest.

I think we finally get some chance to understand the set up at the Hampstead Elm. Michael Spark was probably its owner or keeper. Codrington’s verses seem to say that the elm had been equipped with its winding interior stair and platform for six years by 1653. In the very near vicinity, an exiled scholar kept a school, perhaps in the buildings seen behind the tree in Hollar’s etching, which the unworldly and over-worked Hollar perhaps contributed to assist a fellow exile. I think the teacher must have been a follower of the educationalist Johannes Comenius. Comenius gets mentioned by Sparke: he had been in England at Samuel Hartlib’s invitation in 1641, some of his educational writings had been published in England by Sparke, and the Moravian scholar might have established Chelsea College as a Baconian research institute, a ‘universal college of the learned’. The same ideals seem to inform the teaching of this unknown subsequent exile: the tree itself might have been carpentered to meet imagery derived from Comenius, to symbolise an instructive ascent via a Baconian winding stair through darkness to illumination, a Comenian Via Lucis. If the platform on top of the Hampstead Elm was designed as an arboreal classroom, this would have been an idea Comenius would have warmly endorsed, for instruction was in his pedagogic theory always meant to be enjoyed.

And who wouldn’t? Thomas Pakenham, 8^th Earl of Longford, a remarkable early modern tree for you!

Two early modern royal souvenirs

Well, royalty is the theme of the day, so I thought I'd post two early modern royal images, or (at a stretch) souvenirs. My first is this quite astonishing portrait miniature in silk, from the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art's collection. They don't have it on show, and one imagines its colours are most probably kept from the light of day in a black velvet-lined box. But their web exhibit is very good, here:
http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/works-of-art/39.13.7,29.23.8


As they rightly say about it, "this embroidered portrait miniature ... is one of the most beautifully executed examples of professional embroidery from the seventeenth century". It is all worked in stitching: "All of the elements, from the lace collar and medallion of the Order of the Garter worn by the king, to the highlights in his eyes and hair, are rendered in minute stitches of silk and metal thread." The Met's website gives magnified close ups so you can appreciate the work that went into it:

The image of the martyr-king is after Wencelas Hollar, and before him, of course, Van Dyck. The same image is used as the frontispiece for the 1651 Reliquiae Sacrae Carolae. The execution of the portrait is a work of extreme skill, and reverence too: this level of work could only be paralleled in vestments or copes (which sometimes have pictorial elements). The Met site says that "a number of similar portraits survive in public and private collections". Someone bought a late example at this sale for £3,400:
http://www.tooveys.com/lots.asp?WEBLOTID=163601&LOTID=890

Here's the other end of the scale, from the single sheet publication of 1613, The Royall line of kings, queenes, and princes, from the vniting of the two royall houses, Yorke and Lancaster

Here are the Tudors and the Stuarts: Henry VII and Henry VIII, Edward VI, Mary and Elizabeth, James I, Prince Henry (who has just died), Anne of Denmark, the youthful Prince Charles, Princess Elizabeth and her husband, Frederick, Count Palatine, labelled 'R.B'. for Rex Bohemiae. The verses are these:

OF these, the first, is He, that did Unite,
The two sweet Roses; made Contention, Peace:
The second, He, at whose Majestique sight,
All that opposd him did recoile and cease.
The third, young Edward, of that name the sixt,
Where pious thoughts and Royal blood were mixt.

The Fourth Queen Mary; (in this steame, a staine,)
To Rome, a friend, but to the Truth, a Foe;
The Fift Eliza, in whose blessed Raigne,
Not any room was left, for Rome, to show
A wooden God, to kneele to: Truth and She.
One Septer swayed, with one cleere eye did see.

The Sixt is He, that now makes Englands Seat,
The Seat of Vertue, (that including all,
The Stock of Goodnesse) One, as Good as Great,
Before whose Shine, Clowded abuses fall:
The seaventh, that Prince, that while he here did liuv,
As Faire Hopes gave, as ere fresh youth could giue.

The Eight, Queene Anne, The Ninth, the Royall Charles:
The Tenth Elizabeth (of these) the last
Her Royall Husband: All these, Lucent Pearles
That in their Vertues, such a luster cast,
As all admire, and Love. Who to the Fame
Of these bear Envy, may they end in Shame.


The prominence of Frederick makes this a souvenir for the 1613 royal wedding.

The case of the pewter flying saucers, 1645

The John Rylands library has put up a set of page images from Nehemiah Wallington’s Great marcys continued, or yet God is good to Israel (1645), a compilation by the devout but despair-prone Wallington of a year’s worth of 52 signal mercies extended by God to England.

Wallington seems to have assembled his various collections for biblio-therapeutic purposes, to help him fight off his thoughts of suicide (these were brought on, poor man, by a mixture of doubt about whether he was among the elect, and deaths among his children). The ODNB life by P. S. Seaver, who was also author of Wallington’s world: a puritan artisan in seventeenth-century London (1985) indicates that Wallington would purchase (and transcribe) newsletters in his continued effort to find reassurance in a troubled life.

http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/28567?docPos=2

I was interested in those pages of the Great Marcys (and the John Rylands web-pages can be narrowed to the relevant nine images by a search confined to pages about witchcraft, http://enriqueta.man.ac.uk:8180/luna/servlet/view/search?q==witchcraft%20LIMIT:Manchester~91~1&sort=Reference_Number,Image_Sequence_Number,Page,Title )

in which Wallington transcribes his copy of A true relation of the araignment of thirty witches at Che[lm]sford in Essex, before Judge Conyers, fourteene whereof were hanged on Friday last, July 25. 1645. there being at this time a hundred more in severall prisons in Suffolke and Essex. Setting forth the confessions of the principall of them. Also shewing how the divell had carnall copulation with Rebecca West, a young maid, daughter to one Ann West. And how they bewitched men, women, children, and cattell to death: with many other strange things, the like was never heard of before (1645). This brief pamphlet is actually not on EEBO (yet), but a transcript of sorts can be found on the internet. It does not seem as though Wallington accessed H. F’s more authoritative A true and exact relation of the severall informations, examinations, and confessions of the late witches, arraigned and executed in the county of Essex; I suppose that he gave his limited further context to his transcription from newsletters.

The unknown author of Wallington’s source was not reliable (his “great mistake” in naming a minister’s wife as among the executed women was denounced in another pamphlet). After giving what information he could about Rebecca West, the ‘confessing witch’ among the Chelmsford accused, then about the failed attack by demonic imps upon the minister Master Long (“the power of God was above the devil”), he finally launched into a strange pair of stories. I give them in Wallington’s transcript, with the printed text reading added in square brackets when Wallington varied from his source:

“When these witches came first into ye Gaole at Colchester the Gailer lost his meat often & mistrusted that the witches had got it upon a time bought a [good] shoulder of Mutton & said he would look to the dressing of it himself, but when it was ready the witches [had got it, and all the while the witches] were at supper with it the Gaoler instead of Mutton was eating Hogwash.

After this the Gaoler desiered [desirous to see more of their feats intreated some of] them to show him a little of their cunning thinking to make himself merry for the losse of his meat Whereupon one of the witches bid him goe fetch her foure pewter dishes wherein never water came straitaway went ye gailer to a pewterer and got 4 new dishes and before he brought them to the witch he wet one of them, contrary to the witches direction nevertheless as soon as the witch had them she put her hands & her feet into the foure dishes and upon an Instant was lifted into the ayre with three 3 dishes that were dry, the fo[u]rth falling off was found in a meadow about half a mille off and brought back to prison.”

The interest here in these page-filling yarns is in the first place the suggestion of a witchcraft report veering off (as so often) in the direction of entertainment. The story of the jailer’s shoulder of mutton being magically pilfered, and consumed by the witches while he eats hogwash (without noticing?) sounds very close to the wedding banquet stolen away by magic in The Late Lancashire Witches of 1634. Then, like the conspiratorial Robin, or Doughty, frustrated by the loss of his sirloin in that play, the jailer is willing to see what the witches can do to entertain him by way of recompense for his losses: he is game to test them, maybe try to outwit them.

This transfer of what I take to be a tale of the magical transfer and exchange of food possibly remotely derived from the play into the pamphlet, reminds us that the play had pointedly dramatized the witches’ total loss of the power to cast enchantments after their arrest. But in Essex and Suffolk in 1645 and 1646, Hopkins and Sterne believed that that the women they had arrested (and were torturing) still had dangerous powers, and claimed to witness their threatening ‘imps’.

When I wrote by EMLS piece about transvection, I had not read this pamphlet, it being well off my not exactly infallible radar by not being available on EEBO. This method of flight using early modern flying saucers (well, pewter dishes), was quite new to me. Wallington avidly transcribes it all without considering for a moment the wild unlikelihood: a jailer providing the means for a captive to take flight (literally), and her act of levitation supposedly successful enough to see one of her engines of flight drop off half a mile away. Wasn’t she by then far enough away to disappear? Couldn’t Wallington pause and take stock?

Witches were supposed to sail on water in sieves, eggshells and the like, so to fly through the air on 17^th century lead-heavy pewter makes a kind of analogy, being magically held up by something utterly unlikely. Witches and water don’t go together, and hence, I suppose, the demand that the set of flying dishes be brand new and unwashed, and failure of the one rinsed lifting-unit.

Pewter was quite a political commodity and being talked about at the time. King Charles had obliged its use on all innkeepers, and for all measures, to protect the Cornish tin mines when report came of tin deposits being found in ‘Barbary’ in 1640. The solid royalism of the south-west had then kept tin from out of parliament’s hands throughout the civil war. A rumoured tax based on every householder’s pewterware was indignantly denied by parliament in 1642; aggressive selling abroad of tin by 1646 led ‘I. S. A desirer of his Countries Freedomes’ to declare on behalf of pewter-makers that “not in any City or Towne in England out of Cornewall is one block of Tinne to be bought for any Money”, and complain of the metal being “at this great price”. None of this illuminates its use in witchcraft: I suspect that pewter was just being talked about, and temporarily rare, and thus part of the fun of the story.

Wallington’s ready credulity exhibits a 17^th century witchcraft reader swallowing any unlikely story. That’s interesting in itself, for the pamphlets and other reports about the Essex and Suffolk witches were markedly anxious about what could be believed.

As James Sharpe notes, one of the few (surviving) newsletters to report the 1645 trials (and August executions), The moderate intelligencer for 4th-11th September 1645 takes an ‘equivocal stance’. It’s actually more striking than his quotation makes it sound, asking the pointed questions about just what game the devil can be up to: ‘whence is it that Devils should choose to be conversant with silly Women that know not their right hands from their left, is a great wonder … If the Devil be so wise, and wise to do evil, why should he not choose to deale with wise Men, and great Men? That were the way to make the world his, by which he may do most mischief. Assist a Prince or a Generall in a Cause against True Religion, and the True Professors of Jesus Christ, were a wiser way then to attend old women, and kill hens, Geese, Pigs, Hogs, Calves, and little Children.”

Typically, this anxiety, this perturbed response perhaps prompted by the sheer number of those condemned, is then set aside in the face of the ‘evidence’ - whatever the devil’s motive is, it all happens: “But let it not be disputed, Experience is above all: They will meddle with none but poor old Women: as appears by what we received this day from Bury [St Edmunds], 100 Indictments against such … Divers are condemned, and some executed, and more like to be”. Sharpe quotes the final comment by the London editor (John Dillingham): “Life is precious, and there’s need of great inquisition before it be taken away.”

The tone by Dillingham is exactly like the preface to H. F.’s A true and exact relation pamphlet, eloquent about how the devil has “insnared and drawne these poore silly creatures into these horrid and detestable practices … yet now when the light of the Gospel shineth so gloriously, that such a generation of poore deluded soules (and to such anumber as hath of late been discovered) should be found amongst us, is much more a matter of admiration and astonishment. I doubt not but these things may seem as incredible unto some, as they are matter of admiration unto others”.

There’s clear evidence that H. F. was worried by the witchfinding: he urges that “reasonable men be perswaded not too much (as is usuall) to swell with indignation, or to be puffed with impatience … but soberly, modestly and discreetly, so far forth be contented to pursue the triall and just way of their discoverie.”

H. F. finally comes to the question of transvection (and perhaps) bodily metamorphosis:

“The greatest doubt and question will be, whether it be in the power of the Devill to perform such asportation and locall translation of the bodies of the Witches; it seemeth in reason a thing whereunto the Devill is unable.” (‘Asportation’ means ‘carrying off’.) As usual, the Bible is cited, and Satan carrying Christ to the pinnacle; H. F. sagely concludes that all apparent instances of flight and transformation are “but seeming and juggling transmutations of the Devill”.

The Murder at the White Horse Inn, Chelmsford, 1654.

My blog here has been a stranded whale since before Christmas. Last term precluded any extras: teaching, marking and being admissions tutor took up all my time.

Still, I hope to start picking things back up a little, and my post today gives an example of laudable persistence. Prior to a pre-Easter trip into Suffolk, I have been looking at a few Suffolk-related witchcraft pamphlets, and also happened on A True relation of a horrid murder committed upon the person of Thomas Kidderminster, of Tupsley in the county of Hereford, Gent., at the White-Horse Inn in Chelmsford, in the county of Essex, in the month of April, 1654.

This pamphlet was not published until 1688, and it relates events that began in 1654, but came to light only in 1662-3. Quite why the pamphlet appears so late is a mystery, a mystery deepened by the condition of the EEBO copy, which does look like an editor or censor’s hand has gone through it, marking passages for deletion.

Thomas Kidderminster was a man who first lost all his inheritance, and then was brutally killed for the fortune he had managed to make through his own exertions. His father, who had re-married, died when Thomas was 11: Thomas’ step-mother then re-married, and proceeded to divest her first husband’s son and heir of his estate.

Kidderminster gave up on all this, and set out to make his own way: he became a steward to the Bishop of Ely, came to own land, and lent money too. Boosted by this, he married, and, spotting a bad debtor in the making up (Sir Miles Sandys, who had speculated ruinously on reclaiming fenlands) in Ely, decided that he wanted to relocate his resources elsewhere, and that he would pull out of all his Ely properties, and reclaim what debts he could from Sir Miles.

After making his local transactions, Kidderminster changed £600 of silver for gold in Cambridge. He then faced a trip to London, and, considering the main route more likely to be dangerous, opted to take what is described in the text as the by-road through Chelmsford. As he had on other occasions, he stopped at the White Horse Inn in Chelmsford (which is still there). This was at some date in April 1654. He never arrived back in London, where his pregnant wife was awaiting his return.

Mistress Anne Kidderminster gave birth in August 1654. She made inquiries about her husband, but was hardly placed to retrace his likely journey and ask around (though it is clear that there would have been plenty of local gossip if she had inquired in Chelmsford). Her husband was variously reported to be in Amsterdam, Cork, and Jamaica. She found means to have inquiry made in all these places. Nothing was to be heard of him. Obliged to fend for herself, Anne Kidderminster became a wet nurse in Gloucestershire.

What had become of her husband remained a mystery. Then, one day in 1662 or 1663, her sister was reading ‘the then News-Pamphlet’ in her company, and suddenly made the dramatic announcement ‘ Sister, here is news of your Husband’.

What had happened was that the White Horse had changed owners at the death of the Innkeeper, who had been a man called Sewell. The new owner had decided to replace a fence between his ground and his neighbours with a clay wall. During the necessary digging, what was initially taken to be a brown bowl was unearthed: this was quickly identified as a skull, with an ominous hole in its left side, and the rest of the skeleton was soon found. The body had been crammed into the grave, bent double. At a local inquest, where the surviving Mrs Sewell had been inconclusively questioned, Sir Orlando Bridgeman had decided that the only way forward, to find the identity of the victim, was to place an account in the ‘Publick Diurnal’. It was this account Mistress Kidderminster’s sister had read. The account in the newspaper apparently suggested that the victim might have been buried ten years ago.

It was put to Anne Kidderminster by her friends that she might give up her quest: but she apparently had visions of her late husband, ‘in the habit he usually wore, looking very sternly upon her; but one night, as she lay in Bed, her Husband appear’d to her in a White Sheet, with Streaks of Blood upon it’ . So she set off towards Chelmsford with a male companion. En route, they were benighted at Rumford, some 15 miles short, but there she met a Mary Mattocks, wife of a sawyer, who was there on the merest chance: she had forgotten to purchase a piece of chalk, without which her sawyer husband could not work. On this trip back to Rumford, she met Anne Kidderminster, who asked her about Chelmsford, and than about the White Horse. Mary Mattocks has plenty to say (we learn later that she had overheard the chief witness to the events describe them to her aunt): that the present Innkeeper there is a good man, but the previous one, Sewell, ought to have been hanged, ‘for there was certainly a gentleman Murder’d in the House.’. The hostler at the inn she also accuses of involvement, and he actually now lives in Rumford. But a messenger sent to him says too much, and he refuses to come to meet Mistress Kidderminster.

She is sent on to Chelmsford by her eager informant, with the suggestion that she stay with her aunt, a Mistress Shute, at the sign of the Cock: but on arrival, Mistress Shute has since died of the plague, so Mistress Kidderminster goes to the White Horse Inn, and talks to the new innkeeper, Master Turner. Turner has a good reputation, but his Inn doesn’t: for business reasons, he is keen to have this case of the unknown murder victim cleared up. He suggests that they leave the back way, and go straight to the widow Sewell’s. This they do, and the widow is at first vociferous about Turner causing trouble for her, but learning who Anne Kidderminster is, will say no more.

Mistress Kidderminster stays the night at the White Horse, in the room adjacent to the one where her husband had been murdered. She is so frightened at this prospect that she has the maid sleep in the same bed with her. Unsurprisingly, Anne alone hears ‘a great Noise in the next Room, which went out into the Gallery, where something seem’d to fall with that violence, that she thought the Room shook, and afterwards came to her Chamber-door, and lifted up the Latch’. All the landlord can say is that it has been ‘such things had been often heard before’.

In his efforts to clear the reputation of his Inn, Turner had had the local JP’s issue an arrest warrant against Sewell and his wife. Sewell died suddenly after this warrant was issued, after a spell of walking about ‘like a man who had been craz’d in his understanding’, during which he had very nearly confessed everything to an old civil war comrade (from the parliamentary army), who had warned him against saying any more, for if he said more than he had, he would be obliged to denounce him. The local word was that Sewell had been poisoned by his wife to silence him permanently.

Mistress Kidderminster now shifted her inquiries to the former hostler, and man with the splendid fenland name of Moses Drayne: when she gets to Rumford, he is pointed out to her as he stands in a glover’s shop, and she follows him to the One Bell Inn. There she confronted him about the man who left his horse behind at the White Horse Inn. Was it her husband? She speaks of the victim’s clothes, which seem to correspond, but Kidderminster’s grey satin cap did not correspond to a cap Drayne says was black. She says that her husband’s cap was black. Drayne’s face (well, why fight a cliché?) drains of colour, and he falls silent, nor will he meet her eyes. But he tells her to go to the village of Kilden, and ask for Mary Kendall, who had been a servant in the Inn ‘at the time of the Gentleman’s being there’. A warrant for Drayne’s arrest, at Mary Mattock’s evidence is issued, but forgotten about.

Mistress Kidderminster does two things: she finds out her late husband’s manservant in Ely, to have confirmation of the clothes he was wearing at the time of his journey. She then finds Mary Kendall, who has already been questioned by Justices who have bound her over: Kendall refuses to say anything. Kendall later jumps bail, and is only rediscovered by the merest chance: the coroner on the Chelmsford case is out riding near the house of Kendall’s brother, when a carrier delivers a letter from her. This enables her to be traced to the Walnut Tree in Mile-End Green. Mary is taken to Newgate, where her fellow prisoners assure her that her flight will convict her. She decides to tell all she knows.

At this point, the second plague victim in this narrative: the widow Sewell dies. But the arrest warrant on Drayne is remembered and finally carried out. In prison, he says enigmatically that ‘he fears nothing but the dyer’. Mary Kendall’s story when she tells it is dramatic, and completely true, if likely to be a bit self-serving. She was maidservant at the White Horse, and saw Kidderminster in his room, talked to him, folded him a sleeping cap from a napkin. In her presence, he (foolish man) entrusted his cloak bag with £600 in gold in it to his landlord.

She was sent by her mistress to sleep with the younger children, ‘that being not her usual Lodging’, and locked in there. Between one and two in the morning, she heard ‘a great fall of something, that it shook the Room where she lay’. When she got up the next morning, her master, mistress, and the hostler were in front of the fire drinking. Neither they nor the Sewell’s two daughters (Betty and Priss) seemed to have been to bed. She is told that the gentleman had left, leaving her a groat as a tip, but her suggestion that she should then go and tidy the room is turned down: the room, she is told, has already been set to rights. This room then stayed locked for eight to nine weeks. Eventually there came a day when her master sent her to fetch him his cloak. In his wardrobe were garments she recognised at the gentleman’s, and the cloak bag. Mary Kendall said that, taking the incriminating clothes downstairs with her, she had directly challenged her mistress, had been bloodily attacked by her, until finally her master had told her to be quiet. Quite obviously she took £20 from her master as hush money (but Kendall subsequently denied having received any money at all). Moses Drayne the hostler, Kendall asserts, took £60 from the £600 and the victim’s clothes, which he sent to a dyer in Mousam to be dyed black. The dyer had asked him why he is doing this, as the clothes were of a ‘better colour’ as they were, but Drayne asserted that he does not like the grey. The sudden prosperity of both the Sewells and Moses Drayne is recollected in detail.

Mary Mattocks in her evidence confirms Kendall’s: three women met while drying washing in the church yard, and she heard Kendall tell the whole story to her aunt Shute. This was shortly after the beating she had received from the Innkeeper’s wife. Mattocks testifies that she heard Kendall tell her aunt Shute about how her master had pulled his wife and the struggling Kendall apart, and gave the latter £20 hush money. Shute advised Kendall to give the money back, for the £20 might hang her in twenty year’s time. But clearly this was a large enough sum to purchase some kind of silence.

Brought to court, Drayne was challenged to pick up the early modern ‘Exhibit A’, Kidderminster’s battered skull: he trembles so much he can scarcely do it. A further tale is told of a boy servant at the fatal inn: Sewell had him tied to a bed post and was whipping him mercilessly when Kendall entered the room. The boy cried at this point that ‘It was well for him she came, or else his Master would have murder’s him, as they did the Gentleman, when he blooded him into the Hogs-Pail’. The boy also said ‘He had heard that the Gentleman was knock’d on the side of the Haed with a Pole-ax, and afterwards his Throat was cut by his Mistriss, with the help of her Daughter Betty’. This boy is not in court: somehow the Sewells had shipped him off to Barbados for spreading his story round town. But Mistress Kidderminster, directed by the coroner, finds the Merchant in Billingsgate to whom the boy was sold (sold? – that’s what it says).

Neighbours are brought into court, who claim they heard cries during the night of the murder, but were fobbed off by the Sewells when they went round in the morning to inquire if all was well. The local washerwoman had been asked (it is also reported), if, after the night of the murder, she had cleaned any linen from the Inn which was ‘more bloody than ordinary’ (I suppose that blood stains from preparing meat are implied. The boy’s words imply that Kidderminster’s blood was drained from his body in the same way that a pig has its throat cut and is hanged up to bleed. This could have been very messy, if done indoors). The washerwoman denied this vehemently, asserting that she had not seen any such thing, and saying that ‘she might rot alive’ if this story was in any way untrue. The generally factual narrative veers once more towards a more 16^th century sort of story of how providence, though not always seen, works out its mysterious course: ‘and so it hapned; for a little time after her Bowels began to rot away, and she became detestably loathsome till she died’.

A local farmer testifies that he had stopped at the Inn after selling barley. He had £20 on his person: he put furniture against the door of his room: and heard Sewell and Drayne come and try the door in the middle of the night…

Drayne is sentenced to death for his part in the murder. In the usual bundling together of cases in a seventeenth century court, a woman sentenced to death for having two husbands (so it says) challenges the hostler to tell the truth, and save Kendall, who has been imprisoned ‘during pleasure’: he confirms that her story was true, and that she had no part in the murder. But then his wife appears and shuts him up: he is subsequently silent even at the gallows. The two daughters of Sewell, who have both Kendall’s evidence and Drayne’s partial confession against them, were also arrested and tried, but the Grand Jury decided that there is not enough evidence to convict them.

After her success in Chelmsford, the widow Kidderminster remarried, and tried to recover her husband’s inheritance in Herefordshire on behalf of their daughter. . Here, she was less fortunate, even though between the years 1670 and 1680, she had ‘three ejectments brought at Common law, and three Bills exhibited in the High Court of Chancery’ against the surviving son of the usurping couple: he asserts that the property had been justly purchased.

The 1688 pamphlet is interesting for its date: why then, and not before? I suppose Mistress Kidderminster did her best to recover the Herefordshire properties, failed, and then found a sympathetic ear, and told her whole story. More remarkable still is the way the EEBO copy seems to have been in the hands of an editor or censor. This reader crosses out whole passages. The first encounter between Mistress Kidderminster and Mary Mattocks is crossed out, and the account of the widow hearing the bumps in the night when she stays at the White Horse. Also, he firmly deletes from the text the names of the various JP’s and Judges that the narrative mentions, as though a proper regard for the legal profession keeps the personal names of the chief officers of the law out of mere pamphlets. Conversely, a Christian name is written in, and then there are an intriguing looking set of annotations which disappear into the crease of the physical book, and so cannot possibly be read on the page image off the microfilm.

What do we learn from all this? The toughness of 17^th century women, their ramshackle legal processes, that boys could be sold, that women dried washing in churchyards, what the price of silence was (and how limited a silence could be so purchased).