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THE HISTORY OF STRATFORD
Golden Hill Indians THE HISTORY OF STRATFORD
Wm. Howard Wilcoxson Establishing
Title to the Land FORREST MORGAN
Lifestyles, Government, Religion and War Indian Titles and Mohegan Land Troubles Sowheag, Uncas, and Miantonomo Owenoco, the Son of Uncas THEHOUSATONIC CHARD POWERS SMITH The Promised Land ALEXANDER JOHNSTON
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PATRIARCH
TO THE INDIANS (1593 -1682) CHAPTER
II THE
EARLY LIFE On
April 1, 1593, in the ancient church of St. John the Baptist, in the parish
of Tisbury on the downs of south Wiltshire, England, Thomas, infant son of
Matthew and Alice (Barter) Mayhew, was baptized. The
father of Thomas was a yeoman of gentle origin. Perhaps as his son was
carried from the font of the parish church, he prayed that the infant who was
destined to become one of a long line of British governors of dominions
over-seas, would live to revive the fortunes of his branch of the Mayhew
family, to bring again to his line the social rank from whence he sprang. The
Mayhew family of Tisbury was a cadet branch of the family of Mayhew, spelled
Mayow, of Dinton, an armigerous county family of considerable distinction,
with its pedigree registered by the heralds in the Visitations of 1565 and
1623. The name is of Norman origin and is most frequently met with in the
south and west of England. It is often spelled Mahu and Mayo and not
infrequently appears clipped down and reduced to May, There can be little
doubt but that it is a softened form of Matthew. The name De Mahieu is found
in the sixteenth century in the southern provinces of the Netherlands among
the noble Walloon families of French-speaking Belgium. Thomas
Mayhew, of Tisbury, a younger son of Dinton, was father of Matthew and
grandfather of the infant Thomas. He is the first of his family to have lived
in Tisbury, the home of his mother's people, where he was taxed for goods as
of the Tithing of Tisbury in 1540. This Thomas was the third son of Robert
Mayow, Gentleman, "eldest sonne and heire of Dynton," who married Joan Bridmore, daughter of John, off Tisbury. Thomas,
of Tisbury, was a yeoman, a member of that free-born class of small
landholders, in the social scale of the feudal system ranking below the
gentry. The
line of demarcation between younger sons of the gentry and prosperous yeoman
was not firmly fixed and was apt to fluctuate in accordance with the wealth
of the parent stock and the size of their 3 THOMAS
MAYHEW, PATRIARCH TO INDIANS families,
Thomas, as one of five sons and two daughters, and the third son of his
stock, underwent this transition, It
has been suggested that he inherited his mother's estate at Tisbury while the
eldest son and heir of the family retained possession of the Mayhew property
at Dinton, These were the days when the eldest son was favored in inheritance
to the exclusion of the younger. The drop of a step in the social scale in
all probability accounts for the fact that descendants of Thomas are not
recorded in the family pedigree prepared at the Visitations. The great art of
the heralds of England was the elimination in tabular pedigrees of the names
of younger sons and daughters and those not in the direct line of ascent from
the head of the family at the time of the Visitation. These were also days
when the Puritan movement was growing in strength. The branch to which Thomas
Mayhew belonged, becoming Protestant, may have lost association and
recognition by the parent stock. The Mayhews of Dinton are said to have been
of the Roman Catholic faith. Thomas
was buried in 1590, in Tisbury, predeceased by his wife, Alice. Robert, father of Thomas, although named in
the Visitations as "eldest sonne," is the only son of his
generation recorded. He was doubtless that Robert Mayhew who, with
JohnTodeworth, in a "Chirograph" dated 7 Henry VI, granted two
messuages, three shops,and ten acres of land in New and Old Sarum to Robert
Asshton and Alice, his wife, for life, remainder to John, son of the said
Robert and the heirs of his body. Simon
Mayhew, Gentleman, father of Robert, and grandfather of Thomas, of Tisbury,
heads the family in the recorded pedigrees, and bore as arms, "Argent,
on a chevron between three birds sable, five lozenges of the field."
Matthew, son of Thomas, of Tisbury, and father of the infant Thomas, was born
about [550. He was a resident of the parish of Tisbury, where he was buried
26 February, 1614. In his will he is described as a yeoman. For his rank he
appears to have been a man of substance. In his will, after minor bequests to
the parish church at Tisbury and "to the poore people" of the
parish, he bequeaths two hundred and twenty-four pounds of "good and
lawfull monie of England" to his several children, and in addition
"all the rest" of his goods, including his landed holdings, to his
eldest son John. 4 THOMAS
MAYHEW, PATRIARCH TO INDIANS Alice,
the wife of Matthew, to whom he was married in '587, was a daughter of Edward
and Edith Barter, of Haxton, in the parish of Fydleton, County Wilts, and a
granddaughter of James and Margaret Barter, of Fovent, in the same shire. A
prominent member of the Mayhew family was Edward, born at Dinton in 1570. He
became a noted monk of the Benedictine Order. According to the writer in the
"Dictionary of National Biography" he was "descended from an
ancient family who had suffered for their attachment to the catholic
faith." It is probable that he was a son of Henry, of Dinton, and a
cousin to the father of Governor Mayhew. Edward, with a brother or cousin,
Henry, not named in the Visitations, was admitted a student of the English
College at Douay, then temporarily located at Rheims. Later attending the
English College at Tome he took orders and was sent to England, where he
exercised his functions for twelve years as a secular priest. Desiring to
revive the Benedictine Order in England he took the habit and at the end of
his novitiate was professed by the famous Father Sigebert Buckley, sole
survivor of the order in England, and aggregated to the Abbey of Westminster.
Edward was one of the two monks to keep unbroken the link in England connecting
the old order of St. Benedictine with the new. When
Governor Thomas Mayhew was born, Elizabeth was Queen, Shakespeare was still
living, and the fame of Raleigh and Drake and worthy John Hawkins and of a
thousand more that by their powers "made the Devonian shore mock the
proud Taugus" resounded still in the Briton's ear. In the same year was
passed the Conventicle Act that provided the imprisonment without bail of any
non-conformist who should be present at a religious gathering not authorized by
the establish church. During the ten years preceding the ascension of James I
to the throne large numbers of Puritan worshippers were sent to jail by the
terms of this act and many others went into voluntary exile. The
formative period of Thomas Mayhew's life, no doubt, was spent in the parish
of his birth. In times of leisure we may picture that he tramped the hills
and downs of the countryside and mirrored his reflections in the still waters
of the Nadder, quietly Rowing, by whose banks ancient Tisbury slept with her
past deep in Saxon history and the days of Ethelred. The
land where he lived was a land of pleasant villages and ancient churches,
trees and parks and manor houses, dusty highways that lead 5 THOMAS
MAYHEW, PATRIARCH TO INDIANS up hill and over rolling downs, where one saw
thousands upon thousand, of sheep cropping grass, the source of England's
woolen trade. It was home. All about him in neighboring parishes, Chilmark,
Font. hill, and Dinton, lived a race of Mayhew squires and country gentlemen. At Dinton, home of his parent stock, was born the
Earl of Clarendon, Lord High Chancellor of England, whose daughter was to
marry James, Duke of York, destined to become James II of England. The church
at Tisbury contains a Brass to the Earl's father, Lawrence Hyde,
great-grandfather of two of England's Queens. In later years Clarendon was to
procure a patent of the province of Now York from the King for his
son-in-law, the Duke. In the history of that province it was destined the boy
Mayhew should playa role. But of this the youth foresaw nothing in the
peaceful days that passed all too quickly. On Sundays he sat in the noble
church that stood in the fields of the village and read inscriptions to the
great Arundels, lords of the countryside, whose castle of Wardour stood not
far distant. He did not know that some of England's history lay in the womb
of that little countryside that seemed so peaceful and stable and far removed
from the stirring world. He saw the Lady Arundel, a noblewoman of rank and
influence, a sister to the Earl of Southampton: that Southampton who was
patron of Shakespeare and who sent Captain Gosnold to America to establish
the first English colony in New England upon an island of which Mayhew was
later to be lord, and from which a town was to grow called Gosnold. Perhaps the boy saw, too, Lord Arundel's daughter,
the future wife of Lord Baltimore, of Maryland. She was to be buried in the
church at TIsbury, where he sat. On
week days he attended the English school and perhaps the grammar school of
the parish. The extent of young Mayhew's education can be no more than
guessed. In the early sixteen hundreds there were three
main types of schools in England-the Dame School, the English School for
instruction in the three R's, and the Grammar School, devoted chiefly
to the study of Latin and Greek with occasionally a bit of Hebrew. The latter
was preparatory to the universities. To the Grammar School at
Stratford-on-Avon went William Shakespeare, who had "small Latin and
less Greek." The education of the great majority of English boys ended
at the English School. It shunted pupils able to read the 6 |
ALEXANDER JOHNSTON
SOUTHPORT SWAMP Colonial History of Pequot Swamp COLONIAL INDIAN ARCHIVES Hon. Ralph D.
Smith David D. Fields Sarah Day Woodward Winthrops Journal |