Abstract
On October 19, 1666, John Harrison, Esquire, steward on the Benham Valente, Berkshire estate of the earl of Craven, convened the court leet and court baron for the manor. The completion of the harvest and the corresponding ritard in the pre-industrial rhythms of the English agricultural year once again allowed the members of this agrarian community to turn to the matters that required their collective attention. To undertake a fuller comparison of social behavior between the “Old World” and the “New” requires a clearer understanding of the character of this sort of institution that continued to provide the basis of order for so many English people even after the Civil Wars.62
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Notes
E.A. Wrigley and R.S. Schofield, The Population of England, 1541–1871 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981), has placed the English population at 2,984,576 in 1561, 4,109,981 in 1601, 5,091,725 in 1641, 4,982,687 in 1671, and 5,057,790 in 1701, at pp. 208–09. They estimate that births exceeded deaths by 7.411 million between 1541 and 1801, at p. 227.
Richard Hakluyt, A Discourse on Western Planting [London, 1584] in E.G.R. Taylor, ed., The Original Writings and Correspondence of the Two Richard Hakluyts, 2 vols. (London: Hakluyt Society, 1935), I, pp. 233–39.
Richard Greaves, Deliver Us from Evil: The Radical Underground in Britain, 1660–1663 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986); idem, Enemies Under His Feet: Radicals and Nonconformists in Britain, 1664–1667 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990).
Keith Wrightson, English Society, 1580–1680 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1990 [1982]), pp. 121–82.
Peter Clark and David Souden, “Introduction” in Clark and Souden, eds., Migration & Society in Early Modern England (Totowa, NJ: Barnes & Noble, 1987), pp. 11–48,
and Paul Slack, Poverty and Policy in Tudor and Stuart England (London: Longman, 1988). The latter study does not consider colonization.
Bailyn, The Peopling of British North America, p. 7; Greene, Pursuits of Happiness; Wrightson, English Society, pp. 40–57; Alan Macfarlane, The Origins of English Individualism: The Family, Property and Social Transition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978), pp. 7–61;
Perez Zagorin, Rebels and Rulers, 1500–1660, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), I, pp. 87–139.
In addition to the Carolina pamphlets discussed below, John Hammond, Leah and Rachel, or, The Two Fruitfull Sisters, Virginia and Mary-Land [London, 1656] in Clayton Colman Hall, ed., Narratives of Early Maryland, 1633–1684 (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1953 [New York, 1910]), pp. 277–308 at 288–300; Willliam Penn, A Further Account of the Province of Pennsylvania [London, 1685] in Albert Cook Myers, ed., Narratives of Early Pennsylvania, West New Jersey, and Delaware (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1912), pp. 255–78 at 262–65.
Jack P. Greene, ed., Selling a New World: Two Colonial South Carolina Promotional Pamphlets (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 1989), pp. 1–30.
H.N. Sainsbury, ed., Documents in the British Public Record Office Relating to South Carolina, 5 vols. (Atlanta, 1928–47), I, pp. 82–83.
Although early modern English people generally recognized landed estates as the barometer of status and the platform for liberties, some of the advertised advantages of Carolina, such as liberty of conscience and ballots in elections, reflect an apparent influence of the republican political theorist, James Harrington, J.G.A. Pocock, Harrington: The Commonwealth of Oceana and A System of Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996 [1992]), pp. 11, 13, 100–01, 114–18, 126. See also the fragment endorsed by Locke, “Carolina, A draught of some laws,” a copy of which was graciously provided to me by the late Peter Laslett. Crucially, of course, the province remained part of the English monarchy.
Sir Francis Bacon, “On Plantations” in C.W. Eliot, ed., Essays, Civil and Moral and New Atlantis (Danbury, CT: Grolier Enterprises Corp., 1988 [1909]), pp. 85–87 at 85; Thomas Woodward to Lords Proprietors, June 2, 1665, in CRNC, I, pp. 99–101 at 100.
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© 2004 L.H. Roper
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Roper, L.H. (2004). Genesis. In: Conceiving Carolina. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403973474_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403973474_3
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