Abstract
In October 1658, Elizabeth Woods, along with Johanna Poynter and Elianor Cooper, plotted to post a libelous document on the Marston parish church door. As recorded by the county court clerk, Woods wrote:
Gentlemen this is to give you all notice that we have a new fine trade come up amongst us. One of our Vestrymen is turned Mirkin maker. Thomas Bromfield by name, and also his wife and goodwife Cobbs, one of our Churchwarden’s wife, they make one very handsome Mirkin amongst them and sent it to ye neighbors.1
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Notes
Edmund S. Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom (new York: W. W. Norton, 1975), 149.
William Waller Hening, The Statutes at Large Being a Collection of All the Laws of Virginia from the First Session of the Legislature in the Year 1619 (New York: R. & W. & G. Bartow, 1823), 1: 240.
Michael J. Braddick, “Civility and Authority,” in The British Atlantic World, 1500–1800, ed. David Armitage and Braddick (new York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 94–95.
James Horn, Adapting to a New World: English Society in the Seventeenth-Century Chesapeake (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994), 196.
On deference in Virginia, see Alexander B. Haskell, “Defamation, Defiance, and the Language of Office in Seventeenth-Century Virginia,” in Early Modern Virginia: Reconsidering the Old Dominion, ed. Douglas Bradburn and John C. Coombs (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2011), 158–184.
Jon Kukla, “Order and Chaos in Early America: Political and Social Stability in Pre-Restoration Virginia,” The American Historical Review 90.2 (April 1985): 275–298.
On Virginia as a tumultuous colony, see also Lorena S. Walsh, “Community Networks in the Early Chesapeake,” in Colonial Chesapeake Society, ed. Lois Green Carr, Philip D. Morgan, and Jean B. Russo (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988).
On the stability of colonial Virginia, see, for example, Darrett B. Rutman and Anita H. Rutman, Place in Time: Middlesex County, Virginia, 1650–1750 (new York: Norton, 1984)
Elizabeth Stanton Haight, Heirs of Tradition/Creators of Change: Law and Stability of Virginia’s Eastern Shore, 1633–1663 (PhD dissertation, University of Virginia, 1987).
Laurel Thatcher Ulrich minimizes the gendered nature of gossip and instead focuses on its importance for both men and women and the dynamics of community formation. See Ulrich, Good Wives: Image and Reality in the Lives of Women in Northern New England, 1650–1750 (new York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1982).
Natalie Zemon Davis, The Return of Martin Guerre (cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983).
Warren M. Billings, The Old Dominion in the Seventeenth Century: A Documentation History of Virginia, 1606–1689 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1975), 297.
Annie Lash Jester and Martha Woodruff Hiden (eds.) Adventurers of Purse and Person: Virginia, 1607–1625 (Alexandria: Order of First Families of Virginia, 1964), 144–145.
Weisiger, York County Records, 1665–1672 (Athens, GA: Iberian Publishing, 1987), 179 (hereafter cited as YCR, 1665–1672).
Nell Marion Nugent (ed.) Cavaliers and Pioneers: Abstracts of Virginia Land Patents and Grants, 1623–1666 (Baltimore, MD: Genealogical Publishing, 1983), 303, 330.
According to two land transactions, by September 10, 1657, Thomas and Hannah were married.
George Cabell Greer (ed.) Early Virginia Immigrants, 1623&3x2013;1666 (Baltimore, MD: Genealogical Publishing, 1982), 71.
Dell Upton, Holy Things and Profane: Anglican Church Parishes in Colonial Virginia (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1968), 168–169.
Marsha Urban, Seventeenth-Century Mother’s Advice Books (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2006), 37. Only 10–25 percent of women in England were functionally literate, or able to sign their names, although functional literacy rates were higher for middling social groups and those in urban areas.
Michael Dalton, The Countrey Justice (1618; reprint, Norwood, NJ: Walter J. Johnson, 1975), 161.
William Hudson, “A Treatise of the Court of Star Chamber,” Collectanea Juridica: Consisting of Tracts Relative to the Law and Constitution vol. 2, ed. F. Hargrave (London, 1791), 100, as quoted in Fox, “Ballads, Libels, and Popular Ridicule,” 100.
Martin Ingram, “Ridings, Rough Music and the ‘Reform of Popular Culture’ in Early Modern England,” Past and Present 105 (November 1984): 82, 86.
Norton, Founding Mothers and Fathers: Gendered Power and the Forming of American Society (new York: Alfred A. Kopf, 1996), 277.
Elaine Forman Crane, Killed Strangely: The Death of Rebecca Cornell (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002), 170–172.
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© 2014 Kathleen A. Feeley and Jennifer Frost
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Eisel, C. (2014). “They make one very handsome Mirkin amongst them”: Gossip and Church Politics in Mid-Seventeenth-Century Virginia. In: Feeley, K.A., Frost, J. (eds) When Private Talk Goes Public. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137442307_2
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