GREETINGS
Our Great Migration tour to Essex and environs is now less than nine months away. As we approach the date of the tour, we propose to issue this monthly bulletin to keep you informed about the details of the tour and also to provide background information on the sites we will be visiting, the New England immigrants who lived there, and a variety of related historical topics. We hope you find these messages helpful and informative. If there are topics you would like to have covered in future issues, please let us know.

Bob Anderson, Tour Leader proband@comcast.net Sandi Hewlett, Assistant Tour Leader

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TERLING
The parish of Terling, Essex, which we will visit on Wednesday, 13 August, lies about seven or eight miles northeast of our base of Chelmsford and about the same distance south of Braintree. The best known immigrant to New England from that parish was the Reverend Thomas Weld, vicar of Terling, who removed to Roxbury, Massachusetts, in 1632.

In 1979, as part of the new social history movement, Keith Wrightson and David Levine published a detailed study of Terling, covering the period of interest to us: Poverty and Piety in an English Village: Terling, 1525-1700 (Oxford, 1979; 2nd ed., with a new postscript, 1995). The authors chose this parish for examination because of the excellent survival of court, parochial and manorial records, and the attention to Thomas Weld and the migration to New England is a small part of the total study. If you wish to read something in preparation for the tour, and only have time for one book, this is the one. (This title is available, both used and new, from Amazon.com.)

Much of the book discusses the economic and social structure of Terling, and the conclusions made by Wrightson and Levine are of general interest to students of the Great Migration. Based on probate, tax and manorial records, the authors divided the adult male population into four broad categories:

Gentry and very large farmers	12%
Yeomen, substantial husbandmen, and wealthy craftsmen	37%
Husbandmen, craftsmen	24%
Laborers, cottagers	27%

The second and third groupings are of most interest to us. The yeomen generally held one hundred acres or more, which supplied them with a substantial excess over subsistence income, and protected them against occasional economic downturns. The husbandmen generally held fifty acres or less, which generally placed them at bare subsistence levels, and made them vulnerable during bad times. Those holding between fifty and a hundred acres might lie at the lower end of category two or the upper level of category three. (The distinction between yeoman and husbandman seen in these English records vanished upon arrival in New England, and the two terms were used interchangeably in the New World.)

Based more on evidence from other parishes, both in Essex and elsewhere in England, than on our direct knowledge of Terling, we find that a large proportion of the Englishmen who came to New England were from the second category, the substantial English yeomanry, although there were also many from the third category as well. This observation constitutes one of the arguments favoring the religious over the economic interpretation of the motivation for migration. Most of those choosing to migrate would not have been seriously squeezed during bad times. The surplus over subsistence obtained by the yeomen could be used to finance the migration process itself. Aspiring immigrants lower on the economic scale would have more difficulty in paying for a family to make the transatlantic passage.

TERLING AND FAIRSTEAD IMMIGRANTS
The churches in the adjacent parishes of Terling and Fairstead are less than two miles apart, and a number of Great Migration immigrants to New England had their origins in each of these parishes. As we shall see, families regularly moved between the two parishes. You will have the option of joining in an easy walk through the fields and woods from Terling to Fairstead.

In each of these monthly bulletins we will present lists of known immigrants from the various parishes we will be visiting. Many of these families have already been treated in one or another of the Great Migration volumes. As is our custom elsewhere, the three volumes of the first series will be referred to by the abbreviation GMB, and the five volumes to date of the second series as GM 2.

1) Thomas Weld was vicar of Terling from 1624 to 1632 and baptized his four children there in 1625, 1626, 1629 and 1631. He sailed for New England in 1632 and was minister at Roxbury from 1632 until 1641, when he returned to old England [GMB 3:1961-63].

2) James Olmstead sailed for New England in 1632, settled first at Cambridge and then moved on to Hartford in 1636. He was baptized and married at Great Leighs, Essex, the parish immediately to the west of both Terling and Fairstead. By 1609 he had moved to Fairstead, where several of his children were baptized, and where some were buried [GMB 2:1357-60]. Richard Olmstead, brother of James, was also baptized at Great Leighs. Like his brother he moved to Fairsted and was buried there in 1641. Three of his children came to Connecticut [TAG 82:36-7].

3) George Steele and John Steele had both settled at Cambridge by 1633 and soon followed Rev. Thomas Hooker to Hartford. They were brothers, sons of Richard Steele; no baptism has been found for George, but John was baptized at Fairstead on 12 December 1591. Both men had children baptized at Fairstead [GMB 3:1754-59].

4) William Cornwall had arrived in New England by 1633, when he had settled at Roxbury. He soon moved on to Hartford, and then to Middletown, Connecticut. He had been baptized at Terling on 25 May 1609 and then married at Fairsted on 27 September 1632 Joan Ranke [GMB 1:481-84].

5) Thomas Birchard sailed for New England in 1635 and settled at Roxbury, then moved on to Hartford, Saybrook, Edgartown and Norwich. He had been baptized at Fairsted on 12 October 1595 and married there on 23 October 1620 Mary Robinson. Within a year after his marriage he had moved to Terling where all eight of his children were baptized, between 1621 and 1633 [GM 2:1:293-98].

6) William Coddington, although he was from Boston, Lincolnshire, had an interesting connection with Terling. He came to New England in 1630 as part of the Winthrop Fleet, and during the first winter his wife died. In the spring of 1631 he returned to old England in search of a second wife. He married at Terling on 2 September 1631 Mary Moseley, the marriage presumably being performed by Thomas Weld, who had not yet left for New England. Weld and John Cotton, minister at Boston, Lincolnshire, were well known to one another, and this may have been the link that led Coddington to find a spouse in Terling [GMB 1:395-401].

7) Robert Turner had arrived in Boston by 1633 and resided there until his death in 1664. He was probably born about 1613 and was not yet married when he arrived in New England. His origin in England is not known, but he must have had some connection with Terling, since in his will of 9 July 1664 he included a bequest to “Mr. Stalham of Tarling in Essex.” John Stalham was Thomas Weld’s successor as vicar of Terling [GMB 3:1851-55].

GLOBE THEATRE
On Sunday, 10 August, we will travel to London for our anti-Puritan day. Our first stop will be Fulham Palace, where we will have a light lunch and then enjoy a guided tour of the palace and the adjacent gardens. Fulham Palace was the official residence of the Bishop of London, and so is connected with William Laud during his years in that office, from 1628 to 1633. In a later bulletin we will present more information on Laud and on Fulham Palace.

We will then move across the Thames to the Globe Theatre, where we will have an early dinner and then take in an evening performance. If there is time, you may want to explore the area around the theater, including the Tate Modern Gallery, the Millenium Bridge, the remains of an old episcopal palace and other attractions.

The Globe Theatre performs a mix of Shakespearean and modern plays, and does not release its schedule until the spring, so we will not know for several months which play we will see on 10 August. For the last two seasons, the Sunday evening performances in August have all been of Shakespeare, and we certainly hope that is what will be available to us next year. Once we know the schedule, we will let you know. The web address for the Globe Theatre is www.shakespeares-globe.org.

Recommended Reading
Andrew Gurr with John Orrell, Rebuilding Shakespeare’s Globe (New York, 1989). On 29 June 1613, the original Globe Theatre was destroyed by fire. The structure was soon rebuilt, but was demolished by the Puritans in 1644. Gurr and Orrell first describe the Globe Theatre as it was in the seventeenth century, and then narrate the process of rebuilding the theater in the late 1980s.

David Crystal, Pronouncing Shakespeare (Cambridge, England, 2005). One of the recent movements in staging Shakespearean performances has been to train the actors to speak the lines with an accent as close as possible to what would have been heard in Shakespeare’s time. The Globe Theatre hired David Crystal, a noted historian of the English language, to undertake that project. Crystal describes the process of bringing an “original practices” version of Romeo and Juliet to the stage in 2004.

Jennifer Lee Carrell, Interred With Their Bones (New York, 2007). The author is a literary historian who has staged performances of Shakespeare at Cambridge, Massachusetts. In this thriller, she begins with the burning of the original Globe Theatre on 29 June 1613, and then jumps forward to 29 June 2004, when she has the new Globe Theatre also burn. This sets off a chase for buried knowledge of Shakespeare that leads to Cambridge, Massachusetts, Cedar City, Utah, Shakespeare, New Mexico, and many other venues. The scholarship behind this work of fiction is solid, and includes references to the migrations of the Puritans to New England and the closure of the theaters by the Puritans in the 1640s. Good entertainment, and educational as well.