The Manor

by Mac Griswold

  their Africas: The first generation of captives in America defined themselves by their specific ethnicities, even as they began to forge a new collective identity. Gomez, Exchanging Our Country Marks, 185.

  galley slave: for “just wars,” see Karen Ordahl Kupperman, Providence Island, 1630–41: The Other Puritan Colony (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 177–79; for John Smith see Gwenda Morgan, “Smith, John (bap. 1580, d. 1631)” (ODNB 2004), www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/25835; for Lewis Morgan, see Block, Ordinary Lives, 160.

  “people were forced”: Manning, Slavery and African Life, 123.

  “lubricated and disguised the flow”: Manning, Slavery and African Life, 102.

  “no Quaker could keep a slave”: From the 1758 Philadelphia Yearly Meeting deliberations to censure slaveholders. In his journal for 1758, the Quaker abolitionist John Woolman, in describing Quakers who participated in the French and Indian War (1754–63), warned that “a carnal mind is gaining upon us,” and at the 1758 meeting he exhorted Friends to “set aside all self-interest” regarding slaveholders, lest “God may by terrible things in righteousness answer us in this matter.” Woolman’s appeal had “had little to do with the evil results of slavery,” but was focused on the slaveholder’s soul: if he felt discomfort at holding people in bondage, the foremost reason for freeing them was to “give him inward peace.” Quaker religious decisions are made by consensus; finally, in 1778 the Yearly Meeting declared Quaker slaveholders were to be disowned by their meetings. Thomas, Slave Trade, 460; The Journal of John Woolman (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1871), chaps. 5–7, https://play.google.com/store/books/details?id=T8MOAAAAYAAJ&rdid=book-T8MOAAAAYAAJ&rdot=1; Howard H. Brinton, Friends for 350 Years, 127, 151.

  6. BEFORE THE WHIRLWIND

  dusty metal button: “Sylvester Manor Artifact Descriptions,” #3.

  “suite and cloak”: Harleian Manuscripts, MS 1576, folio 642, quoted in Prudence Leith-Ross, The John Tradescants: Gardeners to the Rose and Lily Queen (London: Peter Owen), 77.

  twelve children: Of the twelve, ten survived childhood; the four who came to America were Anne (c.1626–1708), Francis (1632–1711), Grizzell (1636–after 1687), and William (1647–after 1685). Mary (b. 1633) married Peter Sylvester, Nathaniel’s brother, in 1656, then married Joseph Denham after Peter’s death in 1657, and remained in England, as did Patience (b. c.1628), Rose (b. before 1630), Thomas (1634–1672), Elizabeth (b. 1637), and another son for whom there is only circumstantial evidence.

  eighteenth-century church: The original 1144 Augustinian nunnery church, St. Mary de fonte (after the fonte, or springs, which gave the “Clerks’ well” its name), was adjacent to the Knights Hospitallers’ priory of St. John Clerkenwell. Barney Sloane and Gordon Malcolm, Excavations at the priory of the Order of Hospital of St. John of Jerusalem, Clerkenwell, City of London (London: Museum of London Archaeology Service, 2004), 24–25, 272.

  Henry VIII: Following King Henry’s break with the Roman Catholic church in 1534, he dissolved more than 800 monasteries and nunneries before 1540.

  fortresslike gate: Sloane and Malcolm, Excavations, 169–72.

  Knights Hospitaller: The Order of the Knights of the Hospital of St. John of Jerusalem, built the priory at Clerkenwell in 1144. Sloane and Malcolm, Excavations, 1–3, 24–25.

  aristocratic club: Sloane and Malcolm, Excavations, 225.

  William Cavendish: Lynn Hulse, “Cavendish, William, first duke of Newcastle upon Tyne (bap. 1593, d. 1676)” (ODNB, 2004), http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/4946?docPos=5.

  Gothic cloister: Walter Thornbury, Old and New London: A Narrative of Its History, Its People and Its Places (London: Cassell, Petter, Galpin, 1881), 329, http://play.google.com/books/reader?id=KZQNAAAAIAAJ&printsec=frontcover&output=reader&authuser=0&hl=en&pg=GBS.PR1.

  “the Fleet”: For “the Rules of the Fleet,” see Sloane and Malcolm, Excavations, 275; Thornbury, Old and New London, 404–16.

  The noble Berkeley family: George, 8th Baron Berkeley (1601–1658), who owned the house (1629–47) when the Brinleys lived next door, inherited it from his father, who had purchased it from Sir Maurice Berkeley of Bruton (1508–1581). The Berkeley connections extended to Datchet, Bucks., home of Anne Wase Brinley’s family and of Royal Auditor Richard Budd, for whom Thomas Brinley clerked. Andrew Warmington, “Berkeley, George, eighth Baron Berkeley (1601–58)” (ODNB, 2004), http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/2208?docPos=1; Janet Kennish, Datchet Past (Chichester, England: Phillimore, 1999), 28–31.

  a map of 1676: John Ogilby and William Morgan, “Large and Accurate Map of the City of London,” etc., survey 1676, published 1677, http://www.british-history.ac.uk/lmap.aspx?compid=18979&pubid=61.

  “a Dwelling house”: E-mail from Colin Thom, Senior Historian, Survey of London, English Heritage, to Gordon Brindley and Yvonne Brindley Long, July 8, 2003; Sloane and Malcolm, Excavations, 274.

  fallow deer: Sloane and Malcolm, Excavations, 270–71.

  “The Best and Surest Herbe”: John, Parkinson, Paradisi in Sole, Paradisus Terrestris; or, A Garden of All Sorts of Pleasant Flowers Which Oure English Ayre Will Permitt to Be Noursed, etc. (London: Humphrey Lownes and Robert Young, 1629, reprinted as A Garden of Pleasant Flowers, New York: Dover Publications, 1991), 6.

  Clipped specimens: John Schofield, “City of London Gardens, 1500–c.1620,” in Garden History: The Journal of the Garden History Society 27, no. 1 (Summer 1999): 79; John Harvey, Medieval Gardens (Beaverton, OR: Timber Press, 1981), 125.

  Buxus sempervirens: Records suggest that until the 1500s, Buxus sempervirens was used for edging, clipped to about twelve inches.

  strains of box: Jan Woudstra, “What Is Edging Box? Towards Greater Authenticity in Garden Conservation Projects,” Garden History 35, no. 2 (Winter 2007): 229–42.

  “French or Dutch Boxe”: Parkinson, Paradisi in Sole, 6.

  organic compound: Takatoshi Tominaga and Denis Dubourdieu, “Identification of 4-Mercapto-4-methylpentan-2-one from the Box Tree (Buxus sempervirens L.) and Broom (Sarothamnus scoparius (L.) Koch,” Flavour and Fragrance Journal 12, no. 6 (Nov./Dec. 1997): 373–76.

  rooted cutting: If rooted boxwood cuttings arrived on Shelter Island safely, they were probably “containerized” without earth, packed in moss or grasses. Sir Thomas Hanmer, “How to Packe Up Rootes and Send Them to Remote Places,” in Hanmer’s Garden Book (1659, first pub. 1933), cited by Leith-Ross, The John Tradescants, 110.

  “the Child’s Corall”: The will of Grizzell Brinley Sylvester, May 7, 1685, SMA, NYU I/A/140/19. Nathaniel Sylvester II gave his name to his eldest child, who died after 1714. Grizzell’s probate inventory (October 12, 1687) lists a “silver coral with bells,” but what happened to it is unknown. Acknowledgment/promissory note, Nathaniel Sylvester III to his mother, Margaret Hobert Sylvester, May 17, 1714, Hannah and Frederick Dinkel Collection of Family Papers, Shelter Island, NY; transcriptions, SMA, NYU, and SIHS; Kenneth Scott and James A. Owre, Genealogical Data from Inventories of New York Estates 1666–1825 (New York: New York Genealogical and Biographical Society: 1970), 148.

  “walking up and downe”: Dydymas Mountain (Thomas Hill), The Gardeners Labyrinth (London, 1577; reprint, New York: Garland, 1982), 24; pers. comm., David Jacques, Aug. 8, 2007.

  “strawberries”: William Lawson, The Countrie House-Wife’s Garden for Herbs of Common use. Their Virtues, Seasons, Ornaments, Variety of Knots, Models for Trees, and Plots, for the Best Ordering of Grounds and Walks (London, 1617; reprint with William Lawson, A New Orchard and Garden: or, The Best Way for Planting, Graffing, and to Make Any Ground Good for a Rich Orchard, etc. London: Cresset, 1927), 64.

  branches: Early-fruiting trees were planted against a south-facing wall. Parkinson, Paradisi in Sole, 537; David Jacques, pers. comm., 2007; Sloane and Malcolm, Excavations, 258–59, 276.

  “answerable”: Parkinson, Paradisi (A Garden of Pleasant Flowers), 3.

  “Bee-house”: Lawson, Countrie House-Wife, 64.

  “Bir
d pots”: Sloane and Malcolm, Excavations, 276–77.

  “Weeding”: Lawson, Countrie House-Wife, 86.

  “comforting the spirits”: Lawson, Countrie House-Wife, 81. compost pit: Sloane and Malcolm, Excavations, 267.

  “servants and apprentices”: Alan Macfarlane, The Family Life of Ralph Josselin, a Seventeenth-Century Clergyman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), 146, quoted in Ann Kussmall, Servants in Husbandry in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 3.

  “family”: Kussmall, Servants in Husbandry, 6–8; F. P. Leverett, New and Copious Lexicon of the Latin Language (Boston: J. H. Wilkins and R. B. Carter, 1839).

  “lytle Blackamore”: Marika Sherwood, “Blacks in Tudor England,” in History Today 53, no. 10 (October 2003), http://www.historytoday.com/marika-sherwood/blacks-tudor-england.

  ineffectively illegal: The 1569 Cartwright case, about an Englishman’s Russian slave, was “the first proceeding in which slavery was found to be inconsistent with English traditions,” but the question of freedom would not be directly confronted until 1772. Higginbotham, In the Matter of Color, 321–55.

  “blackamoors”: Sherwood, “Blacks in Tudor England”; Kathleen M. Brown, Good Wives, Nasty Wenches & Anxious Patriarchs: Gender, Race, and Power in Colonial Virginia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, 1996), 37–41.

  altar-tomb: Thornbury, Old and New London, 339.

  Royal Exchequer: G. E. Aylmer, The King’s Servants: The Civil Service of Charles I, 1625–42 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1961), 32–40; Madeleine Gray, “Land Revenue in the Late Sixteenth and Early Seventeenth Centuries,” Archives: The Journal of the British Records Association 20, no. 87 (April 1992): 45–62.

  Richard Budd: Budd’s sister, Christina (b. 1556), married William Wase (b. 1554), whose granddaughter Anne married Auditor Brinley. See the genealogical chart “Wase, Budd, Brinley, Hanbury, Wheeler,” comp. Janet Kennish, Griswold Papers, Fales Library, NYU.

  real estate agents: Madeleine Gray, “Exchequer officials and the Market in Crown Properties 1558–1640,” in The Estates of the English Crown 1558–1640, ed. R. W. Hoyle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 112–36.

  Vermuyden: Joan Thirsk, “Vermuyden, Sir Cornelius (1590–1677)” (ODNB, 2004), http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/28226.

  12,459 acres: Charles I to Cornelius Vermuyden and his partners, William Courteine, knight, Robert Cambell, Charles Harbord, Thomas Brinley, John Lamote, and Timothy Vanvleteren, confirming a lease of December 27, 1628. Confirmation of lease by royal letters patent, SY648/Z/1/1, March 24, 1634/5, http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/a2a/records.aspx?cat=197-sy648z&cid=1#1.

  acreage: The grant is described as “massive.” Madeleine Gray, “Exchequer officials,” 113, 126.

  Albion’s Triumph: Graham Parry, The Golden Age Restor’d: The Culture of the Stuart Court, 1603–42 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1985), 185.

  Gardeners, scientists, scholars: Henry Lowood, “The New World and the Catalog of Nature,” in America in European Consciousness, 1493–1750, ed. Karen Ordahl Kupperman (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press for the Institute of Early American History and Culture, 1995), 295–99.

  free inquiry: Bacon’s The advancement of learning was first published in 1605; and see Michael Hunter, “Boyle, Robert (1627–91)” (ODNB, 2004), http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/3137.

  John Winthrop Jr.: Walter W. Woodward, Prospero’s America: John Winthrop, Jr., Alchemy and the Creation of New England Culture, 1606–76 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, 2010), 14–74.

  “world of wonders”: Woodward, Prospero’s America, 306.

  “all parts of nature”: Susan Scott Parrish, American Curiosity: Cultures of Natural History in the Colonial British Atlantic World (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 42.

  “comforting sameness”: Carol Berkin, First Generations: Women in Colonial America (New York: Hill and Wang, 1996), 6.

  “recognized the power”: Parrish, American Curiosity, 20–21.

  bestselling account: Mary Rowlandson, “A True History of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson” (London, 1682); reprinted in Colonial American Travel Narratives, ed. Wendy Martin (New York: Penguin Books, 1994); Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, Good Wives: Image and Reality in the Lives of Women in Northern New England 1650–1750 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1980; Vintage, 1991), chaps. 9–12.

  female characters: STR 1; Records of the Colony or Jurisdiction of New Haven from May, 1653, to the Union (NHCR), ed. Charles J. Hoadly (Hartford: Case, Lockwood and Co., 1858), https://play.google.com/store/books/details?id=7PwPAAAAYAAJ&rdid=book-7PwPAAAAYAAJ&rdot=1; and for examples of the use of these voices, see Ulrich, Good Wives, and Martha Saxton, Being Good: Women’s Moral Values in Early America (New York: Hill and Wang, 2003).

  Thomas: Thomas Jr. (1634–1672), at King’s College, Cambridge, by 1643, probably belonged to Benjamin Whichcote’s group of clergymen and philosophers, the Cambridge Platonists, who read the works of the mystical Jakob Boehme and Henrik Niclae. Sarah Hutton, “Whichcote, Benjamin (1609–83)” ODNB, 2004), http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/29202; Sacks, “Francis Brinley and His Books,” 22–23.

  Francis: Francis Brinley (1632–1719) apparently left England in 1650 or 1651 for Barbados. Brinley briefly acted as secretary to his brother-in-law Governor William Coddington of Rhode Island before becoming a merchant and landowner. Bridenbaugh, Fat Mutton and Liberty of Conscience, 97.

  His 217 books: Brinley, “A Gentleman’s Library of 1713,” 75–78; Sacks, “Francis Brinley and His Books,” 3–4, 19–22.

  “human reason”: Sacks, “Francis Brinley and His Books” (2006), 21.

  literate: She had her own Bible, according to her will. Will of GBS, 1685.

  “fatal curiosity”: Parrish, American Curiosity, 17, 174–214.

  “tedious prescriptions”: Rebecca Bushnell, Green Desire: Imagining Early Modern English Gardens (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003), 9.

  “apparelled with plants”: John Gerard’s dedication to his patron William Cecil in The Herball or Generall Historie of Plants (London, 1597), cited by Bushnell, Green Desire, 100.

  regular city sight: Leith-Ross, The John Tradescants, 14–15.

  “full improvement”: Charles Hoole, A New Discovery of the old Art of Teaching Schoole (London, 1660), 284–85, quoted in Arthur MacGregor, “The Tradescants as Collectors of Rarities,” in MacGregor, ed., Tradescant’s Rarities: Essays on the Foundation of the Ashmolean Museum, 1683, with a Catalogue of the Surviving Early Collections (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983), 22–23.

  light craft: Jennifer Potter, Strange Blooms: The Curious Lives and Adventures of the John Tradescants (London: Atlantic Books, 2007), 195.

  sixpence admission charge: MacGregor, “The Tradescants as Collectors,” 23, note 27.

  cultural world: Ken Arnold, “Trade, Travel and Treasure: Seventeenth-Century Artificial Curiosities,” in Chloe Chard and Helen Langdon, eds., Transports: Travel, Pleasure, and Imaginative Geography, 1600–1830 (New Haven: Yale University Press, Studies in British Art 3, 1996), 263–85.

  whale ribs: In 1638 the German visitor Georg Christopher Stirn saw them lying in the courtyard; the antiquarian John Aubrey described them as an arch later in the century. MacGregor, “The Tradescants as Collectors,” 21; John Aubrey, The Natural History and Antiquities of the County of Surrey (London, 1719), 1:12–13, cited by Jennifer Potter, Strange Blooms: The Curious Lives and Adventures of the John Tradescants (London: Atlantic Books, 2006), 361.

  “little boat”: MacGregor, “The Tradescants as Collectors,” 17–23.

  1656 catalogue: The catalogue is printed in full in Leith-Ross, The John Tradescants, 231–93; the coat is listed on p. 245.

  “the “robe”: “‘Powhatan’s Mantle’ �
� need not necessarily have been worn as a garment,” http://www.ashmolean.org/ash/amulets/tradescant/tradescant07-13.html.

  They eagerly consumed: For English interest in exotic experience, see Kupperman, Jamestown Project, 109–44.

  “a Bedstead”: Kupperman, Jamestown Project, 132. Smith quotes are from John Smith, The Generall Historie of Virginia, New-England, and the Summer Isles: with the Names of the Adventurers, Planters, and Governours from Their First Beginning An. 1584 to This Present 1624 (London, 1624), reprinted in Captain John Smith: A Select Edition of his Writings, ed. Karen Ordahl Kupperman (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, 1988).

  “could not trust them”: Karen Ordahl Kupperman, The Jamestown Project (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2007), 225.

  “Weroances”: Gregory A. Waselkov, “Indian Maps of the Colonial Southeast,” in Powhatan’s Mantle: Indians in the Colonial Southeast, ed. Peter H. Wood, Gregory A. Waselkov, and M. Thomas Hatley (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1989), 292–343, 306–7.

  “girdles”: The quotes in this paragraph are from MacGregor, Tradescant’s Rarities.

  The two John Tradescants: Arthur MacGregor, “Tradescant, John, the elder (d. 1638)” (ODNB, 2004); Arthur MacGregor, “Tradescant, John, the younger (bap. 1608, d. 1662)” (ODNB, 2004).

  American species: MacGregor does not credit John the younger with the introduction of many American plants, assuming rather that most such plants arrived via other intermediaries. However, John the younger collected many plants in Virginia that may have been introduced previously. Arthur MacGregor, “The Tradescants: Gardeners and Botanists,” in Tradescants’ Rarities, 11–13; Potter, Strange Blooms, 265, citing J.A.F. Bekkers’s introduction to Correspondence of John Morris with Johannes de Laet, 1634–49 (Assen, The Netherlands: Van Gorcum & Comp., NV, 1970), 3; Potter, Strange Blooms, note 18, 420.

  American flowers: Roger Torey Peterson and Margaret McKenny, A Field Guide to Wildflowers of Northeastern and North-central North America (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1968).