A First Draft: Reconstructing Forced Migration to Virginia

Robert Hume’s Early Child Immigrants to Virginia, 1618-1642 is a transcription of the list of children sent from Bridewell Hospital, London, to Virginia found in the Court Books of Bridewell Royal Hospital. The children listed in the Court Books were “vagrants” collected to be sent to Bridewell and then on to Virginia under an indenture contract between the city of London and the Virginia Company. The city paid for the expenses and the Company promised that, after a set period of indentured labor, these forced colonists would be given land and freedom. The details on the contract between city and Company changed over time.

Hume’s information is invaluable, but far from providing a full picture of the migration demographics of this period. To supplement the information from the Court Books, we are experimenting with supplementing and matching the data from Hume’s work with the list of “servants” in the Virginia Muster of 1624/5 (available in Adventurers of Purse and Person, Virginia 1607-1625, edited by Annie Lash Jester and Marth Woodroof Hiden). The maps below are a first draft of a visualization of data from both the Court Books and the Muster.

This is a first draft in terms of both data analysis and contextualization of the results. We attempted to match information from the Muster with that from the Court Books and parish records whenever possible, but the inconsistency and brevity of the Bridewell records made this process difficult and, at times, impossible. I am in the process improving this analysis by cleaning and including data from the Ayer Collection at the Newberry Library, from an archival visit in March 2024. It is part of larger project on the economic history and literature of the Virginia Company.

The visualizations illustrate: first, the place of origins in England of the 424 indentured servants living in Virginia according to the 1624 muster; second, the chronological distribution of the migration waves from England to the New World; third, the London location of arrests of vagrant children sent to Virginia as indentured servants (note: when location of arrest was missing, the entry was clustered—for convenience and visual clarity—around Blackfriars bridge); and, finally, the locations in the Virginia Colony of the 21 individuals of African descent recorded in the 1624 muster. Note: at this stage, we have used modern, rather than historically accurate, maps.

Many thanks to my 2023-2024 Bass Connections Team, Ava Bailey, Sarah Konrad, Claire Li, Madison Nguyen, Sophia Immordino, and Emily Gebhardt (graduate mentor), for their data-cleaning and visualization work!

 Visualizing Gospel Use in 17th Century Sermons

Of Domesticall Duties (1622) is a systematic reworking of a series of sermons William Gouge preached during his highly popular tenure in the pulpit of Blackfriars in London. Domestic manuals, such as Gouge’s, were in high demand. Collecting, and expanding, Gouge’s sermons on household management, Of Domesticall Duties reflects a lively, if sometimes querulous, connection between preacher and parishioners at Blackfriars.

In the visualizations below, I experiment with some of the challenges of working with Early Modern texts for descriptive and exploratory analysis. When working with 17th century sermons, I often begin with tracking the sermon’s use of Scriptural places—what are the main Biblical resources employed by the preacher and what are their textual context? While for any given research project I tend to focus my final analysis on just a handful of the large number of Biblical passages cited by a preacher, answering these preliminary questions for all or most of them can provide a strong basis for close analysis that elucidates the exegetical moves in the sermon.

Collections of Puritan sermons will run into hundreds of pages and, in addition to the explicit citations from the Bible, they will often gesture at Biblical narratives through keywords or names. A first good step is to trace specific named persons or books from Scripture.

One of the first challenges is to capture the variability in abbreviation and spelling of Biblical books (and their “authors”). For this example, I focused on references and quotations form the New Testament that named an apostle either as evangelist (e.g., Luke), an author of an epistle (e.g., Paul), or as part of a narrative (as when Jesus addresses Peter). This choice gives us a good illustration of a frequent problem with idiosyncratic abbreviations in Early Modern texts. If I want to understand the terms that are (pair-wise) correlated with each of the named apostles, I have to figure out every spelling employed by Gouge in this treatise.

Note: the apostle Mark presents a special problem. Gouge often exhorts his readers to “Mark” or “Marke” a specific Biblical passage (such as “I may applie to vndutifull children these words of the Psalmist, Marke the obedient childe”). These types of problems require detailed knowledge of the conventions of the period and of the author’s choices. In the end, this is not going to matter for this particular exploratory analysis as Gouge references the evangelist Mark exactly once and briefly.

In the image below, you can see the corrected correlations, where all abbreviations of a name have been collected together:

So, what do we make of these visualizations? For Luke and Matthew, we see a number of Latin terms deriving from Scripture and commentaries that Gouge included in the notes to the manual. Not surprisingly, he is particularly interested in quotes that mention vxor (wife) and parens (parents) and their variations. The use of Latin, instead of the vernacular, alerts us to the status of Domesticall Duties as a text prepared for the press—we would not expect extensive citations in Latin to have been included in the original sermons.

The term Saint(s) is more interesting. Beyond the obvious correlation between “Saint” and “Peter” or “Saint” and “Paul,” the term was also used by 17th century “puritans” to denote themselves and others in their religious community. The association between the names “Peter” and “Paul” and the word “saint” doesn’t distinguish between the two uses. This is where we may want to “zoom out” in our exploration. In creating the visualizations of correlations above, I had to select ahead of time which terms to focus on (the names of the apostles mentioned in Gouge). But what if I wanted to visualize all the correlations between any two term in Of Domesticall Duties above a certain phi coefficient?

Below, I have a first attempt at visualizing pair-wise correlations relationships through networks, with two different layouts. While the images are striking, they are not interpretable—beyond perhaps highlighting that Gouge is working with a complex nexus of Scriptural citations (evident in the links of the numerical Biblical verses, teased out by the second graph, which uses the graphot layout).

Patronage in the Virginia Company of London

An experiment with Social Network Analysis in R

The Virginia Company of London was granted three charters under James I: one in 1606, a second one in 1609, which expanded the Company’s powers, and a third one in 1612, which expanded the Company’s domain to include Bermuda. This quick visualization of the network of subscribers to the charter and their connections can provide valuable insights into the patronage relationships that surround the Company’s brief existence.

Social Network Visualizations and Analysis is a way to understand relationships between entities (people, organizations, nations, companies, …), which is particularly helpful when a large number of actors are involved in a complex set of relationships. Here’s the result from a preliminary visualization of the members listed in the charters of the company and their connections. The biographical information used in this social network visualization is based on entries from the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. In the next version, this information will be checked and expanded by access to Company’s correspondence and meetings’ minutes.

The current network has 240 nodes, representing the members of the company and their close connections. The visualization emphasizes patronage relationships and highlights in blue influential Court members. Even in this first draft of the visualization, William, Robert, and Edward Cecil stand out as key patrons to the Company’s members.