West Country Cavaliers and their Servants to the Chesapeake, 1641-1675
As the Puritan migration came to an end, another migration began. This time to Virginia. Late in 1641, Sir William Berkeley left London for Virginia to rule as governor, which he did for the next thirty-five years. During his tenure, the colony developed in a very different manner than the Puritan settlements. William Berkeley’s station in life and his attitude about governing had a profound impact upon the development of Virginia.
Berkeley’s manners were those of a courtier, polished by years in the presence of the King. His speech was that of a scholar, with Oxford learning; and he had the bearing of a soldier, knighted on the field of honor by Charles I. This proud cavalier was given the commission of Royal Governor of Virginia. He molded Virginia in the direction he wished, which was a duplication of the privileged way of life he knew in the west country of England. Berkeley was not the eldest son of his family; and therefore, he inherited nothing when his father died. Such “second sons” of England were destined to a life in the military or clergy. They were well-educated but without property. His brother, John Lord Berkeley, introduced him to the court and the King was so impressed with him that he appointed him Gentleman of the Privy Chamber Extraordinary. In 1639 he was knighted in the field at Berwick, and two years later became Royal Governor of Virginia. As a “second son,” Berkeley fared very well indeed. Others of his station were not so fortunate, because the system of primogeniture left second sons without property or wealth in Somerset County, west of London, where Berkeley was born.
In February 1642 when Berkeley arrived in Jamestown, the colony of Virginia was a poor community of barely 8,000 people. The colony had gained a reputation “that none but those of the meanest quality and corruptest lives went there”.^ But Virginia was transformed. Berkeley played the leading role through his long years in office to build an ideal society which was an expression of his own values. He framed Virginia’s political system, writing many of the laws himself. He also shaped the process of immigration to the colony during a critical period in its history. That process defined its culture and largely determined the Virginia way of life for generations to come.
Berkeley recruited a Royalist elite to Virginia, promising to the “second sons” of the west country of England a place to be rulers of a society that they could not accomplish in England. A cavalier migration continued
through Berkeley’s tenure as Governor, 1642-1676. Much of it occurred during the decade of the 1650s, when a Puritan leadership emerged from the Civil War in England and attempted to force their beliefs on the English people. The Royalists, like the Puritans had been during their “Eleven Years of Tyranny,” now found themselves on the wrong political side in England. Some of these Royalists took refuge in Europe, but many were recruited by Sir William Berkeley of Virginia. Some had been his kinsmen and friends before they came to America. They shared his Royalist politics, his Anglican faith, and his vision for the future of the colony.
These “distressed cavaliers” founded what would later be called the First Families of Virginia, even though they were not the first colonists in Virginia. If most Yankee descendants can trace their beginnings to an immigrant to Massachusetts within five years of 1635, the beginning of most Virginia ruling families occured within ten years of the year 1655, when the important Chesapeake settlements began.
“The founder of the Carter family, for example, came over in 1649. His forebears had been rich in England; his children became still richer in Virginia. The first Culpeper also arrived in 1649; as did the first Hammond, Honywood, and Moryson. The first Digges migrated in 1650, together with the first Broadhurst, Chicheley, Custis, Page, Harrison, Isham, Skipwith, and Land- on. The first Northampton Randolph appeared circa 1651, and the first Mason in
- The first Madison was granted land in
- the first Corbin in 1654. The first Washington crossed the ocean in 1657; he was John Washington, the younger son of ‘an Oxford-trained clergyman who had been removed from his living by the Puritans. The family seat was Sulgrave Manor, a few miles north of Oxford. Also in 1657 arrived Colonel William Ball, the ancestor of George Washington’s mother, and in 1659 the first Fairfax came.^
Every year of that troubled decade brought a fresh crop of cavaliers to Virginia. Of seventy-two families in Virginia’s high elite whose dates of migration are known, two-thirds of them arrived between 1640 and 1669. A majority appeared between 1647 and 1660.
After the restoration of Charles II to the throne in 1660, Sir William Berkeley continued his recruiting campaign. In 1663 he published a pamphlet addressed to the younger sons of England’s great families:
“A small sum of money will enable a younger brother to erect a nourishing family in a new world; and add more strength^ wealth and honor to his native country, than thousands did before, that dyed forgotten and unrewarded in an unjust war… men of as good families as any subjects in England have resided there, as the Percys, the Barkleys, Chiche- lys, Moldsworths, Morrisons, Kemps, and hundreds of others which I forbear to name, lest I should misherald them in this catalogue.”^
Sir William Berkeley’s recruiting campaign was very successful. Nearly all of Virginia’s ruling families were founded by younger sons of eminent English families during his governorship. The founders of Virginia were able to construct from Virginia the cultural system they were denied at home in England.
But you don’t establish a ruling class in England or America without workers; and Berkeley’s plan was to import workers to Virginia, without much regard for their station in life. Indentured servants were to be the primary work force for the elites who were bent on recreating an English Royalist society in America. Just as was done in the west country of England, the distressed cavaliers needed a large population of servants to plant, work, and harvest the fields and perform all other tasks that needed to be done. To encourage workers
to come to the Virginia plantations, the ruling class offered grants of land to the servants — but not until the immigrant had completed a period of servitude to the une who had paid his passage to Virginia. In most cases, the servant was compelled to serve a period of seven years to the master. The land deeds recorded in the counties of Virginia and Maryland are full of references to the indentured servants coming from England to the plantations — an important genealogical source. What is not surprising is that the servants mostly came from the same area of England where the ruling families had lived.
The development of plantations in Maryland occurred simultaneously to those of Virginia; and the proprietory governor. Lord Baltimore, applied similar processes employed by William Berkeley. The exception in colonial Maryland was that it was founded by a Catholic, and Lord Baltimore allowed more religious tolerance than the other colonies of America. (That tolerance ended in 1692 when Catholics were purged from any political office and discouraged from immigration.) The plantations of Maryland progressed in the same manner as those of Virginia, and during the first few decades, the working class was primarily indentured servants rather than black slaves.
An indentured servant usually had a right to 50 acres of land which would be recorded in the county courthouse upon his arrival. The servant’s right to land was incidental to the land owners, since the primary purpose of this system was an incentive to the land owners to increase the number of people immigrating to the colony as workers. Workers who were punished for misdeeds were often penalized with longer terms of servitude. The master received a number pf acres “per head” for each person for whom he had paid passage to Virginia or Maryland. As a result, these land grants were called “headgrants.”
Other court records during this era show that headgrants were often bought and sold.
A ship’s captain might come to Annapolis or Jamestown with servants as an investment for profit. As the one providing for the servants’ passage, he would be granted a certain-number of acres of land per head, which he would then sell to planters soon after their arrival in Virginia or Maryland. Rights to land remained with the servant until he had completed his contract period of servitude. His contract could also be sold — and records exist for the early county records of Virginia and Maryland showing that servants were traded like slaves back and forth.
Black slavery came to Virginia and Maryland only after the importation of indentured servants could not keep up with the demand of the cavaliers to increase their holdings and as new lands were opened for planting. For example, in 1650 there were more slaves in Massachusetts than there were in either Virginia or Maryland. But by the late 1600s, the importation of African slaves had become the primary method of acquiring a work force for the plantations.
Unlike the village life being established in Massachusetts, the plantations of Virginia and Maryland were scattered, most of them at least 1,000 acres in size. A “great house” was the main feature of the plantation, surrounded by many out-buildings, and was a center for one basic family unit along with the servants’ quarters. The preference for rural living was not something invented in Virginia or Maryland. It was transplanted from a particular area of England.
The Origins of the Virginia and Maryland Immigrants
The origins of Virginia and Maryland immigrants can be traced from virtually every county of England. But a majority of its ruling class and indentured servants came from only a few counties of England.
A case in point was the population that settled in Virginia’s Isle of Wight County. A local historian found that “the early Isle of
Transplanted Cultures
The ruling families of Virginia were mostly Royalists and adherents to the established Church of England. The parishes that were created to serve their religious communities followed the English system exactly, with a vestry appointed among church leaders to manage social and civil affairs. All landowners were taxed through their church parish to provide for the poor, the orphans, and the insane. In fact, the everyday lives of the first citizens of Virginia and Maryland were more under the scrutiny of the Anglican Church vestry than they were from the civil court system. The jurisdictional boundaries of Virginia counties and parishes were often the same. Therefore, genealogists will find that any surviving parish records are important sources. (The General Court of Virginia in Richmond, which was in the early years the same as Virginia’s colonial legislature, was burned during the Civil War in 1865, and most of the civil records created during the early colonial period no longer exist. But since church records were maintained at the local level, many of the parish records have survived.)
The early Virginia and Maryland settlers had a different method of naming their children than was done in Massachusetts. Where the Puritans would rarely name a child after a king or any name not in the Bible, the Virginians followed a practice that had long existed in the west country of England. The same practices were followed by the ruling families and servants alike. Special favorites were the names of Teutonic warriors, Frankish Knights, and English Kings, such as William, Robert, Richard, Edward, George, and Charles — choices rarely made in Massachussets. The daughters of Virginians often received names of Christian saints who did not appear in the Bible and also traditional English folk names, such as Margaret, Jane, Catherine, Frances, and Alice — as well as the traditional favorites of Mary, Elizabeth,
Anne, and Sarah. This pattern of naming was not invented in Virginia or Maryland. It was the practice followed in the west country of England where the immigrants lived prior to coming to the Chesapeake.
One study of naming patterns in Middlesex County, Virginia finds that only 27 percent of eldest sons and 19 percent of first-born daughters were given the first names of their parents, compared with 67 percent in Massachusetts. But 60 percent of eldest sons in Virginia received their grandparents’ names, compared with 37 percent in Massachusetts.^ As a general rule, the first son was named after the father’s father; the first daughter was named after the mother’s mother. The second son was named after the father; the second daughter was named after the mother. By tracing families through several generations, a naming rhythm emerges in which every third generation repeats the same first names. Naming patterns observed in genealogies from the English counties where the Virginia immigrants came from are identical to those used in Virginia.^
It would be dangerous for genealogists to make assumptions since the naming practice
was not followed 100 percent. However, when reoccurring first names appear in a pedigree .in every third generation, it is an important clue to the common naming practices of colonial Virginia for that family line. Other closely related families, or other families living in the same area probably followed the same practice.
Early colonial Virginia and Maryland wills confirm the practice of primogeniture as the system of inheritance. An oldest son usually inherited his father’s estate entirely. In the case of intestate files, where a man died without a will, the courts followed this practice nearly every time. However, a Virginia will could deviate from the practice of primogentiure and often did. Unlike the Puritans, Virginians were known for including bequests in their wills for people not necessarily part of their immediate family. Nieces, nephews, cousins, and even close friends may be mentioned in a colonial Virginia will (and unfortunately, not often telling the reader what their relationship was to the desceased). This practice was a carryover from the west country of England where the first Virginians originally lived.