Life in 1700s Virginia is explained by two of the four British folkways transmitted in major immigration streams that established persistent cultural expressions even with subsequent settlements in “Albion’s Seed”. Life in the Church of England parish in colonial Virginia is described in “A Blessed Company, and the religious practices of the gentry are explained in “A Cheerful and Comfortable Faith”.
“Prodigy Houses of Virginia” describes not only twenty-five landmarks of the gentry, but women’s agency in the design, construction and furnishing of them. “Brabbling Women” demonstrates the effectiveness in some of the unauthorized speech and court cases brought by rebellious women. “Within Her Power” outlines the economic independence of women owning property in colonial Virginia.
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Albion’s Seed
David Hackett Fischer wrote Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America (1989). It is now available online new in paperback and on MP3 CD.
Virginia was the direct beneficiary of two of Fisher’s four British folkways. One of those was the second, related to immigrants from the southern and southwestern England from the 1640s to the 1670s in the Tidewater, comprised of a few cavaliers and many indentured servants. The other was the fourth, related to immigrants from the borders of North Britain and Ulster into the Appalachian backcountry between 1675 and 1700.
Though all four shared the English language, Protestant religion and a British sense of liberty, the Puritans of East Anglia sought an ordered liberty, the cavaliers of Wessex an hierarchal, hegemonic liberty, the Quakers of the North Midlands a reciprocal liberty and the Presbyterians of the borders a natural liberty.
Not only were their intellectual traditions distinctive, their family ways, food ways and death ways were different, as were their buildings, dress and speech. Fisher posits a connection between the slaveholding traditions of ancient Wessex and the introduction of African slavery in the Tidewater following the in-migration of the cavaliers.
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A Blessed Company
John K. Nelson wrote A Blessed Company: Parishes, Parsons, and Parishioners in Anglican Virginia, 1690–1776 in 2001. It is now available from the University of North Carolina Press, on Kindle and online new and used.
In colonial Virginia there was a comparable religiosity to the contemporary communities of Puritans and Quakers. Virginian settlers adapted the institutions of the Church of England to a dispersed population that embraced various dissenters; as many as half were active participants. Vestries had greater administrative control in their congregations than in the mother country, and these included lay readers conducting services among the two to eight congregations in each parish whom the parson served in rotation. The sermon as a vehicle to preach the biblical gospel was central to congregational worship.
The Church of England institutions of the parish-county governance mixed today’s categories of “civil” and “religious”. County court jurisdiction extended to ecclesiastical matters. Vestries provided for the poor, bound out orphans, and recruited labor for maintaining the roads, as well as appointed tobacco inspectors and processed the boundaries of landowner farms every four years. All freed inhabitants were enrolled in each Anglican parish, all heads of household paid the substantial parish levy twice that of county taxes, including all resident dissenters, and all free Virginians were married in the Anglican church.
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*Rozbicki, Michal J. The Complete Colonial Gentleman: Cultural Legitimacy in Plantation America (1998). It is out of print but available online new and used. Learn more to buy “Complete Colonial Gentleman” from Amazon.com.
A Cheerful and Comfortable Faith
Lauren F. Winner wrote A Cheerful and Comfortable Faith: Anglican Religious Practice in the Elite Households of Eighteenth-Century Virginia in 2010. It is now available at the Yale University Press and online new and used.
Winner blends religious and material culture studies with 1700s Virginia history, focusing on the Byrd, Carter, Washington, Mason and Randolph families. The religious faith of the gentry was comforting and cheering, largely assuring and optimistic, assuming an afterlife without speculation about personal destruction in hell. Its rituals were polite and decorous, but Winner documents acts of defiance among the expressions of women’s faith.
Family faith was practiced in the homes of the gentry of these wealthy, intermarried slave holders as well in neighborhood churches. Parsons accommodated the elite with in-home baptisms, marriages and burials at family plots. There was a confluence of religious ceremony, family lineage and worldly status, such as the use of a silver monteith bowl emblazoned with the family crest and monogrammed with GM for George Mason. It was used for both chilling wine goblets and family baptisms.
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*Davis, Richard Beale. Intellectual Life in the Colonial South, 1585–1763, 3 vols. (1978). It is out of print but available online new and used. Learn more to buy “Intellectual Life” from Amazon.com.
Prodigy Houses of Virginia
Barbara Burlison Mooney wrote Prodigy Houses of Virginia: Architecture and the Native Elite in 2008. It is now available from the University of Virginia Press and online new and used.
This book studies a group of twenty-five “prodigy houses” built in the extravagant Elizabethan manner between 1720 and 1770, many as surviving structures, some as archeological digs. Wealthy planters invested in homes marked by architectural distinction to maintain the prestige that they had secured in offices, titles and privileges. Wealth and kinship provided access to transatlantic trends in design and ornamentation.
Mooney also explores the female agency born of family use of the dowries that privileged eighteenth century women brought into their marriages. They influenced and directed financing, designing, building and furnishing elite houses of dynastic unions. In an era of fragmentary architectural drawings, the partnership between patron and skilled slave artisan was crucial.
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Brabbling Women
Terri L. Snyder wrote Brabbling Women: Disorderly Speech and the Law in Early Virginia in 2003. It is now available on Kindle and online new in paperback.
Some women of the 1600s sought an empowered place in the political community and family by use of ungoverned, unauthorized speech in public and in court to challenge patriarchal power and social conventions. There were sometimes surprisingly effective, both at contributing to the 1676 Bacon’s Rebellion and the 1682 Tobacco Cutting Riots and at revealing domestic abuses and vindicating their honor.
Snyder extends her discussion into the 1700s by noting that women generally became less outspoken than their forbearers, but they remained a “nettlesome presence” in the private spheres of parlor and household. The scope of this study encompasses not only the wealthy, but also middling status women, widows, the poor and the lowly slaves and free blacks. These women included both servants and slaves in the colonial household.
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Within Her Power
Linda L. Sturtz wrote Within Her Power: Propertied Women in Colonial Virginia in 2002. It is now available on Kindle and online new in paperback.
It is an examination of women’s legal status in colonial Virginia. In the New World, the English Common Law of Blackstone was not uniformly enforced. Virginia women had extensive involvement in family businesses including 500-acre farms and warehousing, especially related to the Atlantic trade networks.
Virginia colonial women had access to cash, commerce and the courts. They protected inheritance for their children when deserted. They acquired power of attorney and in widowhood ran taverns. The Virginian equity courts were significant in maintaining legal protections for women that were not afforded them in New England. Nevertheless in the predominant patriarchal colonial structures, the Virginia woman was more a means to transfer property than an agent in control of property. Two legislative efforts by the Virginia Assembly to increase women’s economic privileges were vetoed by the king’s Privy Council.
Learn more to buy “Within Her Power” from Amazon.com.
Note: Insights for these reviews are include those taken from articles in the Virginia Magazine of History and Biography, the Journal of Southern History and the Journal of American History.