Deference to defiance

The last of Roger Thompson’s books on my shelf, and the biggest (593 pages including index), is From Deference to Defiance, Charlestown, Massachusetts, 1629–1692. Published in 2012 by NEHGS, this is the last of Thompson’s works on three founding colonial towns – Watertown, Cambridge,[1] and Charlestown. It is a pièce de résistance for descendants of Charlestown families – including a sketch on one of my most interesting ancestors, Phineas Pratt, who died in Charlestown at the age of 90 after surviving in his younger days a heroic, solitary trip through frozen woods to bring rescuers to the aid of Weymouth settlers in 1623.

Roger continues the same methodology of his earlier books, reading court and government records in detail and compiling case studies to illustrate the workings of the community – noting in his preface that Charlestown had intrigued him since the days of his work on Sex in Middlesex because he “had realized then that the busy port of Charlestown was very different in its mores from the upriver or inland towns of the county.” Go Charlestown!

The book is divided into nine parts: “Peopling,” “Town,” “Land,” “Sea,” “Church,” “Women,” “Violence,” “Defiance,” and “Epilogue.” Each part is illustrated by multiple stories gleaned from court records. These cases are delightfully full of flesh-and-blood history, the lives of our ancestors and their neighbors as we probably have never read before. Under “Land,” for example, is “Hay or Mills? Symmes v. Collins and Broughton: Issues of Land Use, 1657.” Under “Sea” is a section titled “Cutting One Another’s Throats for Beaver, Tidd v. Collicutt, 1656–57,” and “Failure in Success: Captain Marshall’s Long Voyage, 1683–85,” about the Captain William Marshall who married Mary Hilton, daughter of Early New England Families subject William Hilton; and the obviously intriguing “A Damed Whore: Sarah Largin of Charlestown and Whorekill, 1668–1709” under “Women.”

There are several lists of interest: “Charlestown Immigrant Origins, 1630–40,” which gives known English origins – Dorset, Bristol, Dunstable, Stepney, Southwark, and Kent – of Charlestown’s Great Migration settlers; “Charlestown Maritime Inhabitants, 1630–86,” listing Sea Captains, Shipbuilders and Carpenters, Merchants and Retailers, and Seamen and Fishermen as subjects; “Refugees in Charlestown, 1676,” with those who had fled from the Indian attacks on frontier towns; and “Chronology of the Glorious Revolution” from the restoration of King Charles II in 1660 through the arrival of the new Massachusetts Bay charter from King William III and Queen Mary II in 1692.

Footnotes, as always, are full of additional details and cross references to case studies in Thompson’s earlier works and to curious articles such as “Popular Ridicule in Jacobean England,”[2] in the section on libel cases. From Deference to Defiance is chock full of nerdy things we genealogists want to know about our forebears.

Which brings us to our topic for next week. How many readers use Jstor.org to locate articles from periodicals?

Notes

[1] Christopher Child will review Cambridge Cameos in an upcoming post.

[2] Past & Present 94 [2001]: 47–83, esp. 56–64.