9. Registering the Pilgrimage

The growing importance for Bristol of trade with the American colonies had the paradoxical effect of diminishing the power of the city’s mere merchants in its economy. For decades these men had been pursuing high-profit imports—tobacco and sugar, as well as other wares—to their first markets. This process had led them from the Iberian peninsula into the Mediterranean and the Atlantic islands. With dreams of their city becoming a new Venice or a new Lisbon, they searched for the Northwest Passage to the riches of the East, only to find Newfoundland and begin their quest for wealth on American shores. But the very openness of the trans-Atlantic markets and their nearly unquenchable demand for strong backs and small wares had made most of Bristol’s old techniques of commercial regulation ineffective. The damage done to conservative aspirations was only enhanced by the turmoil of the Civil Wars and Interregnum. As a result, the merchants’ long-standing efforts to control the city through the maintenance of an exclusive organization of traders, exercising political as well as social and economic power, gave way to a new approach, one employing regulations geared to the disciplines of the market in an attempt to protect the interests of the civic elite. By increasing the transaction costs associated with the servant trade, the Bristol common councillors sought to give an advantage to those dealers who could bear them and thereby to concentrate the trade in the hands of a small number of large-scale entrepreneurs, traders whose economic behavior would be predictable. Since the export of servants was paid for through the import of sugar and tobacco, such a system of economic regulation, if it worked, would give order to the American trades in ways that the Society of Merchant Venturers desired but could no longer accomplish through its corporate powers.

By some measures the Merchant Venturers’ new strategy may be counted a success, since the servant trade, which had reached enormous heights in the 1650s and early 1660s, settled down after 1662. The average number of servants shipped annually from Bristol in the period from 1662 to 1678, the last full year for which a separately kept Register of Servants has survived, was more than 50 percent below the peak annual averages reached in the previous period (Table 29).^[1] But in other respects it might seem that the project had failed, since the servant trade never became concentrated in a small number of hands. Most servant traders still limited themselves to shipping one or two servants a year. For example, in 1667–68, when four hundred and forty-nine servants left Bristol for America, two hundred and forty individuals took responsibility for their indentures; in 1677–78 ninety-four men and women took responsibility for the indentures of one hundred and forty-four servants.^[2] A similar pattern can be observed in other aspects of trade as well. Leaving the Irish trade and coastal enterprise aside, seaborne traffic to and from the American colonies in the early 1670s accounted for about 45 percent of the vessels and 60 percent of the tonnage frequenting the port of Bristol. But this expansion in the colonial trades was accomplished primarily by numerous small exporters, most of them Bristolians, who still sent every variety of manufactured item along with servant labor to the planters in return for their produce, primarily sugar and tobacco. The concentration of colonial enterprise in the hands of large firms was a phenomenon primarily of the eighteenth century.^[3]

The above conclusions assume, in part, that the Register of Servants offers a consistently accurate record of the scale and structure of the servant trade over the full life of the registration scheme. But perhaps this premise is mistaken. In order for the Register to provide us with a trustworthy tally of the movement of servants to the colonies, the Bristol magistrates would have had to maintain efficient enforcement of the law over a long interval, something they could rarely accomplish even when the policy being enforced was not controversial. Given the political emotions behind the scheme, the policy is all the more unlikely to have been carried out with a steady hand. Can we turn this possible shortcoming for economic history to the advantage of the story we have been telling? Since the Register was created as a weapon of war in a period of political turmoil, did political considerations affect—even distort—the data we can derive from this source? The main targets of the original ordinance, as we know, were the Bristol radicals who had come to play a large role in the increasingly important colonial trades. After the Restoration, they were an even greater source of concern to the local authorities than they had been under the Protectorate. In this chapter we shall use the Register to provide clues to the history of political conflict and revenge in Bristol we have been following.

The Bristol Register presents evidence of an anomaly in the statistics of the servant trade. The number of servants leaving the port was relatively low in 1654 and 1655, then rose steadily through the later 1650s and early 1660s, only to drop off during the summer and fall of 1663, never again to recover the old peak. The largest number to leave in a single year, measured from Michaelmas to Michaelmas, was over eight hundred, but after the fall of 1662 the totals exceed four hundred only four times and never exceed five hundred (see Table 29).^[4] Calendar-year totals show the same pattern as those for harvest years (Table 30). When measured against the best available estimates of total migration to the colonies, these figures seem rather puzzling. Between 1654 and 1662, for example, Bristol’s share of average annual emigration from the British Isles to America may have been as high as 9.6 percent. But from 1662 to 1669, the city’s share appears to have dropped to 8.1 percent, and by the 1670s it seems to have amounted to no more than 5.0 percent. Yet Bristol’s involvement in trans-Atlantic commerce became, if anything, even stronger in these years than it had been in the 1650s. We would expect it to have maintained its share of the servant trade or at least to have experienced a less precipitous decline.^[5] The relation of servant enrollments in Bristol to English population trends also points to another puzzle. In the years from 1655 to 1662, emigration from the city was closely correlated to net migration from England. After 1662 there is no longer any correlation between the figures for Bristol and those for the country as a whole.^[6] Was there in fact an abrupt change in the nature of the servant trade after 1662, or are we observing an artifact of the registration system itself? Why did it cease working uniformly and effectively in the period after 1662?

Column 1 gives the raw figures as derived from the Register. Column 2 adjusts the figures on David Galenson’s assumption that the annotation “on the same conditions” means “same destination as the last listed” (David Galenson, White Servitude in America: An Economic Analysis [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981], pp. 220, 224). Column 3 is calculated by assigning the “unknowns” in each month to destinations according to the proportion of the knowns. Column 4 halves the difference between Column 2 and Column 3. Since the “unknowns” do not seem to have been randomly distributed, Column 4 probably comes closest to the correct totals. Fewer than eight observations. These correlations are given on the assumption that the demand for servants fluctuated with a year’s time lag to allow for news of tobacco price variations to reach England. These correlations test the relationship between emigration and Maryland prices.

In recent years we have come to know a good deal about the overall pattern of migration from England in the seventeenth century. The peak years of this migration were the 1650s, when perhaps as many as seventy-two hundred individuals, many of them servants, went each year from England and Wales to the American colonies. In the decades thereafter, the pace slackened to between 60 and 70 percent of this total.^[7] A number of explanations have been presented for this course of development. Mildred Campbell has argued that decayed conditions in the clothmaking districts of the West Country and economic pressures on West Country leaseholders at renewal of their tenures account for much of the emigration of the 1650s and that religious persecution of the Quakers may also have been important in the later 1650s and early 1660s. Wesley Frank Craven has added to this list the harvest failures of 1657 to 1661, which, he argues, drove many of the hungry to migrate. His reading of the evidence suggests that improved conditions after 1662 account for the drop in servant registrations at Bristol. Other hypotheses have appeared. Some scholars, for example, point to rising real wages in England and the increased demand for labor caused by the rebuilding of London after the great fire. In addition, changes in the colonies, such as the introduction of black slavery in the sugar plantations and the falling prices of tobacco, have been suggested. To this we might add the effects of war with the Dutch.^[8] How do these explanations square with what we have learned about Bristol?

Seventeenth-century emigration was of course a highly complex social phenomenon. Each year hundreds of men and women of assorted ages and backgrounds left Bristol for a variety of overseas plantations. Some undoubtedly felt conditions at home to be pushing them abroad, while others almost as certainly found the opportunities for a new life in the colonies calling them forth. Many probably responded to pressures of both kinds. We can hardly expect a single explanation to account completely for their movement. In a sense, history has presented us with too many explanations. Not all of them are testable with the surviving data. For example, we shall probably never know enough about the West Country land market to assess whether the renewal rate for West Country leases corresponds in any way to the rate at which migrants from this region headed for America. However, a quick examination of the evidence we do have calls in doubt a few proposed hypotheses, at least as they might apply to Bristol.

Take the case of the trade in slaves, which competed with the servant trade in supplying agricultural labor to the American colonies. At first glance, the grant in January 1663 of a new charter to the Company of Royal Adventurers Trading to Africa might seem to explain the precipitous decline in the enrollment of servants at Bristol during this year, especially to Barbados, where the Africa company made most of its slave shipments. But Bristol’s servant trade operated independently of this competition. During the 1650s and early 1660s it exported large numbers of servants to Barbados, even though slaves were already in heavy use there. There is no reason to think that the Africa company’s activities in the island changed the situation enough to explain the decline in the servant figures. Since the fall in the number of servant enrollments after 1662 also affected Bristol’s traffic to Virginia, where the demand for slaves did not yet match that in the West Indies, some other factor must have been at work limiting the market.^[9] As regards the role of war in disrupting Bristol’s servant trade, the timing seems to be somewhat off. Although warfare with the Dutch certainly affected English enterprise in American waters, the Second Dutch War began only in March 1665, albeit after a year of earnest preparations. The decline in servant enrollments in Bristol had already set in more than a year before the talk of war with the Dutch had become serious.^[10] Again we are driven to look for further explanations.

Many of the proposed economic explanations, taken individually, seem plausible enough in accounting for the general pattern of change in the servant trade during the second half of the seventeenth century. Undoubtedly, the state of food prices and real wages in England and Wales and of tobacco and sugar prices in the international market affected the numbers of servants indentured and shipped from England and Wales to the colonies during this period. Yet when we trace the history of any particular causal factor in relation to Bristol’s own servant trade, we find that its effects vary widely from period to period. For example, if we lay out our data from Michaelmas to Michaelmas, the state of the harvest is significantly correlated with emigration. This result is almost entirely a consequence of famine conditions during the first eight years of the registration. During these years, the annual peak of servant registrations, which always occurred in the summer and early fall, appears especially high, just as we would expect if food shortages were driving the emigration.^[11] But for the period after 1662 the pattern does not hold. The correlation of enrollment with wheat prices breaks down completely: emigration rates appear relatively high in some bad years and relatively low in others. Indeed, 1667–68, with its low grain prices, yields the highest emigration figures for the period following 1662–63 (see Table 29), a fact made all the more puzzling by the increased demand for labor in London that is said to have begun in this year.^[12] One possible explanation for this uneven effect of grain prices on emigration may lie in the character of the food market, which had changed after the Restoration, when substitutes for wheat became more widely used. It has been argued that this change diminished the threat of famine in England and thus reduced the effect of high wheat prices upon population trends.^[13] Use of the Phelps-Brown/Hopkins index of consumer prices, based on a wide variety of foods and other commodities, permits a test of this hypothesis, even though the data are drawn primarily from the southeast of England. The results are almost exactly the same as those obtained using wheat prices alone. There is a strong and significant positive correlation, but it is heavily dependent on the results for the first eight years of the series; this relationship disappears after 1662 (see Table 29).^[14]

Food prices alone, however, tell us little about the economic pressures on population in periods without famine, since a rise in food prices may be matched by a corresponding increase in wages. To correct for this limitation we can look at real wages. These were on the increase in the later seventeenth century, as population growth leveled and then entered a thirty-year period of stagnation or even decline.^[15] This change has been used by historians not only to explain the slackening pace of emigration to the colonies but even to account for the shift from indentured servitude to slavery as the preferred labor system in some of them.^[16] However, comparison of our Bristol data with real wages yields almost exactly the same results as before. Once again, a strong and significant correlation appears for the years up to Michaelmas 1662, though this time a negative one, but after 1662 the relationship no longer seems meaningful.

If economic conditions in England cannot account for the pattern of servant migration from Bristol after 1662, perhaps economic conditions in the colonies can. Although we know that in general sugar prices fell during the later seventeenth century, no reliable series of them exists against which to test our data. We are somewhat better off for the tobacco trade with the Chesapeake, for which it has been shown that the number of new servants indentured in this region each year rose and fell with the farm price of tobacco.^[17] But the same direct relationship does not appear to hold for the registration of indentures at Bristol, even if we allow a year’s time for the news of changing prices to reach the city (see Table 30). In fact, Bristol’s trade in servants to Virginia and Maryland appears at times to contradict the price trends. In the late 1650s and early 1660s, emigration rose at a steady pace despite falling prices; the correlation is a negative one. The years after 1662 witnessed something of the same confused relationship between emigration and prices. According to Russell Menard, the period from 1665 to 1667 was among the worst for the Chesapeake tobacco industry in the century, yet Bristol’s shipments of servants to the region recovered in these years from the low figures of 1663 and 1664.^[18] When tobacco prices rose between 1668 and 1671, however, Bristol’s recorded shipment of servants dropped. In the following decade the arrival of new servants in the Chesapeake was disrupted by the Third Dutch War, but recovery is said to have begun in 1674, rising to a peak in 1678 or 1679.^[19] Bristol’s recorded shipments fall significantly only in 1673, and they rise to a peak in 1675, on stagnant tobacco prices. With more buoyant prices, the export of servants from the city appears to have fallen to about 45 percent of the level in 1675.

Of course, we are working with a rather blunt instrument, one based only on scattered prices primarily from Maryland, which did not receive the majority of Bristol’s servant exports. Still, this evidence, taken together with our examination of the effects of the Africa company’s new charter, the coming of the Dutch War, and domestic prices and wages on emigration, makes it hard to escape the conclusion that after 1662 some intervening factor, not already accounted for, affected the number of servants registered from year to year. Up to that year the servant trade followed a steady course in which the impetus of hard times in England overcame the effects of poor commodity prices in the colonies to produce a pattern of enrollments in the Bristol Register explicable in economic terms. Even though there must have been considerable underregistration in these years, what there was appears to have occurred at an even rate, with enrollments closely following the rhythms of migration itself. As a result, the figures we have derived for the period from 1654 to 1662 give us a reliable idea of the secular trend in the trade, though probably not of its true volume. After 1662, however, the administration of the Register seems much more haphazard, with the numbers of enrollments rising and falling in an erratic fashion.

If economics alone cannot explain the patterns revealed by the Bristol Register, can politics provide a further understanding? Did the registration of servants respond to the rhythms of politics as well as to the ebb and flow of economic or demographic trends? For example, does the persecution of the Quakers and their despair over religious conditions in England account in part for the large numbers of emigrants in the late 1650s and early 1660s?^[20] There can be no doubt, of course, that the Chesapeake and the West Indies had significant Quaker communities in the mid-seventeenth century and that Bristol was a way station for them and for other sectaries on their pilgrimages to the New World.^[21] Bristol’s Quakers, many of them heavily engaged in colonial trade, certainly did not shy away from helping their fellows on both sides of the Atlantic. George Bishop acted as such a conduit for emigrant Friends in 1656, continuing a tradition among the Bristol sectaries that went back to the earliest days of colonial migration.^[22]

The role of persecution in accounting for this movement during the 1650s, however, cannot be demonstrated so readily. Between 1654 and 1656, only twenty-one Bristol Quakers were actually imprisoned for their religious activities, although there were several serious riots and warrants were issued in the city for the arrest of John Camm, John Audland, George Fox, James Nayler, and Edward Burrough as members of “the Franciscan Order in Rome.” Moreover, the Bristol Quakers carefully disassociated themselves from the James Naylor affair in 1656 and as a result suffered little serious trouble with the authorities in the aftermath of this scandal.^[23] Although the Quakers themselves complained loudly of persecution in Bristol in these years, the pattern seems much the same in other prominent Quaker strongholds. In London and Middlesex, for example, there were clashes between the Friends and their opponents, but no systematic persecutions.^[24] For all the upheavals caused by the Quakers in the mid-1650s, it appears that they enjoyed a degree of religious toleration from the authorities, even if they were subject to periodic attacks from their religious enemies and to regulation of their nonreligious activities.

The same could not be said, however, for the early 1660s. As the decade began even James Powell, no friend to the Quakers, could see the signs of a terrible change about to wreck the delicate balance that had been reached in the 1650s. Just before the king’s return in 1660 Powell wrote to acquaint John Weaver of the Council of State “in what sad state and condition we are fallen unto.”

How the old good cause is now sunke and a horrid Spirit of Prophanenes Malignity and revenge is risen vp Trampling on all those that have the face of godlinesse and have been in ye Parliament party insomuch that if the Lord doe not interpose I doubt [not] a Massacre will follow on the godly. And the very name of fanaticke shall be sufficient to ruine any sober Christian as the name of Christian amongst the Heathens Lollards amongst the Papists and Puritan of Late amongst the Prelaticks.…The Lord prepare us for the great storm that is approaching.^[25]

Even before the Restoration, the sectaries, especially the Quakers, became targets of violent apprentice riots encouraged by many of their masters.^[26] With the return of the monarchy, the persecution took on an official character and proceeded with depressing regularity through the decade. As Edward Terrill of Bristol’s Broadmead Baptist Church reported when the Second Conventicle Act came into force in 1670, this “trouble was our seventh Persecution in Bristoll, since K. Charles II returned.” He noted persecutions in 1660, 1661, 1662, 1663, 1664, and 1666, as well as in 1670.^[27]

These persecutions sprang from a variety of motives, ranging from a wish for revenge against Commonwealthmen to a desire to suppress all heterodox religious practices. But one recurring theme was fear of the sectaries as a source of disorder or even insurrection.^[28] In 1660, for example, Richard Ellsworth, one of Bristol’s most ardent scourgers of dissent, urged the imprisonment of those who refused the oaths of Supremacy and Allegiance, noting

[t]hat noe Quaker or rarely any Anabaptist, will take those Oathes, soe that the said Oathes are refused by many hundreds of those Judgments, being persons of very dangerous principalls, & euer Enimies (in this City) to his Majestie’s royall person, gouernment, & restauration, & some of them, petitioners to bringe His Martired Majestie of blessed Memory to his Triall; & will vndoubtedly fly out againe, & kicke vpp the heele against his Soueraigne Authority, should it lie in theire Power.^[29]

The large public meetings favored by the sectaries were one source of this fear, for throngs, often composed of strangers as well as citizens, gathered at them. As Ellsworth says,

These…Monsters of Men with uss, are very, yea more Numerous, then in all the West of England…on this side [of ] London; & heere they all Confer, & haue Their Meetings, att all seasons till 9 of the clock att night, & later, sometymes aboue 1000, or 1200 att a tyme, to the greate affrighting of this City, as to what wilbe the Consequent thereof, If not restrained.^[30]

At Bristol, moreover, the existence of the two fairs, at St. Paul’s tide in January and at St. James’s tide in July, only made matters worse; for these were not only great clearinghouses for trade but gathering places for the sectaries, many of whom, of course, were traders themselves.^[31] At the same time, the city was well recognized by the authorities as a center vital to the control of the West, for, as a Somerset gentleman observed in 1663, it was “one of the most Considerable Townes vnder his Majesty’s subiection, beeing a good Port, and furnished with a well stored Magazine of Wealth & all ammunitions of warre, and able to secure themselves and give assistance to the neighbouring Countrys.”^[32]

Not surprisingly, the authorities at Bristol displayed a marked skittishness at the first hint of danger.^[33] Reacting perhaps to news of Venner’s Fifth Monarchy plot in London, they struck at once in January 1661, when Henry Roe, the Quaker ironmonger, and Samuel Clarke, the Baptist merchant, both former Cromwellian soldiers, were found to have large trading stocks of powder and shot in their cellars. These stocks, of course, were primarily to supply merchant vessels with the arms they needed on the high seas. Nevertheless, the ammunition was confiscated, and the magistrates in their zeal shut the city gates against impending insurrection.^[34] Similar rumors of insurrection abounded in this period, forcing the civic authorities repeatedly into a posture of defense. The city gates had to be guarded again in November 1661, when wild stories of a fanatic uprising spread through the West, though these precautions were soon left off on “hearinge ye designe was quasshed.”^[35] At the time of the St. James Fair of 1662, new rumors of trouble surfaced but could not be confirmed; still, the Trained Bands had to be called to keep watch over the fair-goers.^[36] In the fall rumors spread again, and the deputy lieutenants resolved to raise part of the militia and to secure all suspected persons.^[37] By December this vigilance had turned up evidence of what the deputy lieutenants called a “very dangerous” design to begin at Whitehall on 1 January and spread throughout the realm. Six or seven hundred persons were said to be engaged around Bristol alone, requiring “the speedy raising of the Militia for the safety” of the city.^[38]

These conditions demanded vigilance from the authorities both against sectarian meetings and against the wanderings of vagrants and other masterless men, two issues closely connected in national politics from the outset of the Restoration, if not before.^[39] Fear of sectarian vagabondage seemed to take precedence, partly to halt the work of the Quaker missionaries and partly to prevent the mass gatherings which caused such apprehension. For example, the very first day of business in the Convention Parliament saw a bill “against Vagrants, and wandering idle, dissolute persons,” which, having failed of passage in 1660, was entered again on the first day of business in the Cavalier Parliament and incorporated in part in the Quaker Act of 1662.^[40] Moreover, this linkage of issues prevailed in Parliament even after the passage of the Quaker Act. It is no surprise, perhaps, that many of the MPs involved in the passage of the Act of Settlement in 1662 were also interested in the attack on the sects.^[41]

Among these MPs we find John Knight, Senior, one of the members for Bristol. Not only did he work as a committeeman on the Act of Settlement and on later measures to explain and expand it, but he was similarly engaged in the Commons work on the Conventicle Act, and he is even said to have wept for joy on receiving news of its passage.^[42] In Bristol this combination of issues had a special local flavor, conditioned by the city’s prominence both as a commercial center and as a sectarian stronghold. As we have seen, in the 1650s politics had already been penetrated by a mixture of religious and economic rivalries. Many of the old issues flared with new force at the Restoration. With Charles II’s return, the Smiths, the Bakers, the Barber-Surgeons, and the Shoemakers all complained that those not free of their gilds took apprentices and practiced their crafts outside gild regulations. As a result, the mayor and aldermen ordered the city clerks in each case to refrain from registering any apprentice in these crafts without the certificate of the master of each gild, and in 1667 the Common Council passed a comprehensive ordinance on the matter.^[43] In these same years the Merchant Venturers made yet another try to halt the “interloping of Artificers & others…tradeing into forreigne parts, not haveing beene bounde Apprentices to ye Art & mistery.”^[44] At the Restoration, the civic authorities turned their attention to the colonial trades, appointing as water bailiff John Towgood, son of a prebend in the Bristol Cathedral, and an enemy of the sectaries.^[45] From early in 1660 evidence appears in the city of careful searches aboard ships for unindentured servants, and in Parliament in 1662 John Knight became engaged in an attempt to legislate against the stealing of children and servants.^[46] When his efforts failed, Nathaniel Cale, mayor in 1662–63, petitioned the Crown, apparently without success, for letters patent to bolster his authority to enforce the procedures established in 1654.^[47] The search for settlement at the Restoration revived with even greater force the heady mixture of religion, politics, and economics already present at the creation of the Bristol Register.

Although the scourging of the sects in England might well have encouraged some dissenters to seek relief in the colonies,^[48] at the Restoration these places had become almost as incommodious for nonconformists as England itself. In Barbados, for example, official objections to the Quakers and other separatists began within weeks of Charles II’s return to the throne, and by the spring the Assembly of Barbados complained that the island’s many sectaries

have declared an absolute Dislike to the Government of the Church of England as well by their Aversion and utter Neglect or Refusal of the Prayers, Sermons and Administration of the Sacraments, and other Rites and Ordinances thereof…as by holding Conventicles in private Houses and other places, scandalizing Ministers, and endeavouring to seduce others in their erroneous Opinions, upon Pretence of an alteration of Church-Government in England. All which their Misdemeanours have begotten many Distractions, a great Reproach and Disparagement to the Church and Ministry, and Disturbances of the Government of this Island.^[49]

In response to an order from the Council of Foreign Plantations to settle religion, the legislature required all residents of the island to conform themselves to English law governing the practice of the Anglican church.^[50] As a result, at least thirty-six of the island’s Quakers were imprisoned for their meetings and their subsequent refusals to take the oath of allegiance to the king.^[51] During these same years the sectaries in Maryland, Nevis, Antigua, and other American plantations also suffered persecutions.^[52]

Probably the most significant attacks on religious dissent, however, occurred in Virginia. Events there demand a close look, since the Bristol Register shows this colony to have experienced the greatest decline in the number of enrolled servants after 1662. Action against the sectaries in Virginia began even before the Restoration itself. In March 1660, at the same time as the Quakers in Bristol were being threatened by the city’s apprentices, the Virginia General Assembly enacted legislation forbidding ships’ captains from bringing Quakers to the colony and ordered the suppression of Quaker publications, the punishment of those who held conventicles, and the arrest and deportation of all Quakers already there.^[53] But the colony remained interested in attracting new population and seems not to have enforced this measure vigorously; in any case the legislation did not stem the tide of Quaker migration. With the Restoration a somewhat less harsh approach was tried for a time, using fines and other punishments short of outright banishment.^[54]

By the winter of 1661, the Virginia General Assembly had taken its first tentative steps to settle the church.^[55] A year later, more comprehensive legislation appeared arranging church finances, subjecting all nonconformists to heavy fines for failing to attend the services of the established church in the colony—now fully restored in Anglican practice—and specially punishing the Quakers “for assembling in unlawful assemblies and conventicles.”^[56] In December 1662 the General Assembly extended this policy of intolerance by ordering the punishment of all those who refused to have their children baptized, a direct confrontation with all the sects.^[57] These measures were given teeth by vigorous enforcement, for in 1662 it was reported that many of the Virginia Quakers were imprisoned or even banished because they would not aid the established church, promise to abstain from their own meetings, or swear oaths.^[58]

The climax of this process of persecution came in 1663. September saw the passage of an act against the “Quakers and any other separatists” that signaled a renewed desire to destroy the sects. The Virginia General Assembly, liberally plagiarizing the English Parliament’s Quaker Act of 1662 and anticipating the language of the English Conventicle Act of 1664, called the nonconformists a threat to “public peace and safety” and “a terror to the people.” It forbade all conventicles and again subjected all ships’ captains to heavy fines for transporting Quakers to the colony.^[59] This measure put the final touches on an anti-sectarian code in Virginia almost as strict as the Clarendon Code taking shape in England itself. Moreover, at about the same time, news came of a “barbarous designe” of what Robert Beverley called “several muntinous and rebellious Oliverian Soldiers, that were sent thither as Servants,” who, “depending upon discontented People of all sorts, form’d a villanous Plot to destroy their Masters, and afterwards to set up for themselves.” This event caused an immediate shock in the colony. The militia was called at once, the plot thwarted, and arrests made. Even after the execution of the leaders, fear of its nearly successful “subversion of…religion lawes libertyes, rights and proprietyes” lingered in memory, and as late as 1670 the colony enforced an act to keep 13 September, the day of the plot, “holy” and “in perpetual commemoration.”^[60]

As a result, Virginia in 1663 and 1664 was not an especially congenial place for the sectaries. Persecutions were harsh and, according to Beverley, made many of the nonconformists “flie to other Colonies, and prevented abundance of others from going over to seat themselves among ’em.”^[61] It is possible that the sharp decline in servant enrollments in Bristol in the summer of 1663 and after owes something to this history. Virginia nevertheless continued to draw some dissenters to it even in the years after 1663, since the anti-Quaker legislation of the 1660s was used only against those Quakers who engaged in controversy; others remained free as long as they lived peaceably in the colony.^[62]

In Bristol, as in Virginia, the chronology of persecutions also made 1663 and 1664 an especially dangerous period for the sectaries. Despite the Declaration of Indulgence of 1662, throughout the winter and early spring of 1663 there was considerable uneasiness about an impending insurrection in England, particularly in the West.^[63] By the end of May word had come of a major plot set in Ireland for taking Dublin Castle in which, as the king reported in a speech before the Commons, “many parliament men were engaged.” “You will not doubt,” he said, “but that those seditious persons there had a correspondence with their friends here.”^[64] And although this conspiracy had been nipped in the bud, evidence of further plots in England began to appear.^[65] The threat to Dublin Castle, moreover, drew Bristol into the center of these affairs. Not only was the city the major English port for travel to and from Ireland, but some of the conspirators, such as Captain John Gregory and John Casbeard, who had been uncovered earlier by the city’s magistrates, appeared to be deeply involved in the Irish matter.^[66]

As the year went on conditions seemed to worsen. In July, news of the Derwentdale plot broke in Yorkshire,^[67] and the king issued orders to the justices of assize to “prevent and punish the scandalous and seditious Meetings of Sectaries.” In addition, he asked the members about to return home at the proroguing of Parliament to use their vigilance and authority in their counties to prevent disturbances by “the restless spirits of ill and unquiet men,” securing their persons if need be.^[68] At the same time, a new militia act came into force, authorizing the lieutenants and their deputies to call up contingents of the Trained Bands for fourteen-day intervals, a course followed in many places in the north and west.^[69] Although no direct evidence of Bristol’s reaction to these events in the summer of 1663 has survived, careful precautions by the commanders of the militia, similar to those taken in the previous year, would have been in order as the time of the St. James Fair approached in July. Early in September, the king and queen journeyed to Bath and Bristol, only to be met by sectarian disturbances in the region, for which Charles Baily, the Bristol Quaker, was among those arrested.^[70] Finally, in October definite word came of a plot set especially in the western counties, in which Bristol was to have been one of the principal targets.^[71] On receiving word from the Privy Council, two companies of foot soldiers were immediately put on guard, and the following day the whole regiment was mustered. Sir John Knight, the new mayor, whom we have already met as one of Bristol’s MPs, quickly took the opportunity to “putt in Execution his Majesties pleasure against the Sectaries in this Citty & theire seditious meetings.”^[72]

Knight’s entrance into the mayoralty at Michaelmas 1663 began one of the most violent periods of religious persecution in Bristol’s history. Even before news of the plot reached him in mid-October, he was already at work suppressing the sects, arresting Thomas Ewins and other Baptists and threatening the Quakers.^[73] By the end of November he had begun a series of attacks on sectarian meetings designed to procure, as reported by the Quakers, “the rooting of us, and the generation of us, out of this City.”^[74] Over a four-week period he and the deputy lieutenants repeatedly disrupted the Quaker meetings, closed the meeting house, and arrested the sect’s leaders and imprisoned them.^[75] On Christmas Day these attacks reached a level of genuine barbarity when three Quaker servants at work in their masters’ shops were caught by members of the militia, “tied Neck and Heels with half hundred Weights and Muskets about their Necks, in extreme cold Weather, till the Eyes of two of them were thought to be drawing out, their Faces being black.”^[76]

The remainder of Knight’s year in office proceeded in much the same vein. From Christmas on, he and his officers repeatedly interrupted Quaker meetings, made arrests, and at one point even had the meetinghouse door nailed shut. In February Knight, joined by two aldermen, one of the sheriffs, and “sundry officers,” broke up a meeting of three hundred at Samuel Tovey’s house in Broadmead and arrested and imprisoned eighty men and women.^[77] When January brought word of another plot of the “fanaticks” to surprise Bristol, the civic authorities again struck at the Quakers, this time arresting fifteen of them for unlawful assembly.^[78] Yet all of this was but a prelude to the outburst of persecutions that occurred when the Conventicle Act came into force at the beginning of July. On the first Sunday in the month, Knight and two aldermen came to the Quaker meetinghouse and opened a court for the judgment of the violators of the act. On this day alone, one hundred and seventy persons were fined for a first offense under the statute.^[79] During the following weeks Knight returned again and again to the Quakers to close down their meetings and to arrest their membership. In all, he succeeded in convicting two hundred and nineteen for a first offense, a further one hundred and five for a second offense, and twenty-three more for a third offense, a dozen of whom were sentenced to banishment in the West Indies. When he left office, one hundred and forty-five Quakers remained in prison under the act. Moreover, the new legislation placed other dissenting sects in the same jeopardy as the Quakers. The Bristol Baptists also found themselves targets for arrest and conviction and “were forced to…meet more Privately” and “to move from house to house.”^[80]

After reviewing this dismal narrative, we can hardly be surprised to find intolerance contributing in some measure to emigration from England. Between 1659 and 1662, attacks on the dissenters must have added considerably to the pressures already produced by poor conditions in the English economy. Yet no simple explanation is possible. During this same period, religious oppression also grew in the colonies, although in Virginia the persecution of the sects in 1659–1660 abated somewhat just after the Restoration, and broke forth anew only in 1663. Until that year, Virginia may have remained reasonably attractive to the sectaries as a possible place of safety; afterward it could no longer have seemed very secure. This change in the practices of persecution in the colonies, taken together with improvements at the same time in English grain prices and real wages, may help explain the decline in servant enrollments at Bristol after the peaks reached in the late 1650s and early 1660s. Nevertheless, the whole story cannot turn on these two considerations alone, if only because sectarian migrations continued to Virginia itself and to other colonies throughout the Restoration period.^[81] If religious persecution played a significant role in driving Englishmen to the colonies before 1663, we must wonder why, according to the Bristol Register, its effects diminished so dramatically just as the attacks grew to their most intense. Nothing in the history of intolerance in the colonies could have outweighed the oppressions in England in the mid-1660s.

To see what mechanisms were at work in determining the rate of servant enrollments in Bristol we need to return to England once again. Unfortunately, we can say little about whether events outside the city played a decisive role in limiting the registration of servants there. It might be, for example, that West Country justices of the peace, apprehensive about insurrection in 1663 and 1664, used the Act of Settlement to turn back migrants before they reached the city, especially at fair time, when large numbers of indentures were usually drawn. But no evidence has come to light to confirm such actions. An examination of Bristol’s own Restoration politics, however, can show us something of the way noneconomic events governed the administration of the servant Register during this period. Even though the policy of persecution followed by Sir John Knight and his allies had considerable support within the city, there was also much opposition to it from moderate members of the Restoration Common Council, as well as from the larger body of citizens. As the Quakers said with only slight exaggeration, Knight’s zeal “set-up to counter-buff the stability of the City, and to overturn…the well poized Government of unity and peace into disunion and troubles.”^[82]

Bristol’s politics in these years are difficult to unravel, for a number of rivalries were at work both inside and outside the government.^[83] For example, Richard Ellsworth, the Customer for Bristol who during the last days of the Commonwealth had played a major role in organizing Royalist efforts in the city, looked upon Knight as “disaffectious to the interest Royall” and used his connections in Westminster to advocate an even more vigilant and extreme policy against the sects.^[84] On the other side, a number of officials had close ties to the sectaries. Many were engaged in the colonial trades, which regularly brought them in contact with the sectarian community. Of the twenty-seven Bristolians who petitioned the Crown for a convoy to Virginia in September 1665, eleven were members of the Common Council, and one a recently retired member. Yet along with them were James Wathen and Thomas Ellis, whom we have already met, and Gabriel Deane, who voted for John Haggatt in the parliamentary election of 1654 and who was purged from the council in 1661.^[85] With such shared business interests, councillors and sectaries sometimes entered into partnership. In the Commonwealth period, Robert Cann, mayor in 1662–63, had invested in ventures with Thomas Speed, with whom his relations remained good even after the Restoration, when Cann became a planter in Barbados.^[86] In 1661 William Willett, another councillor, owned the ship Resolution with Speed, Gabriel Deane, and five others.^[87]

At about the same time, Sir Humphrey Hooke, a man with important family and political ties in Bristol, Gloucestershire, and Barbados who was deputy lieutenant for the city in 1664, received from the king an extensive grant of land in Virginia which he held jointly with Robert Vickris, whose wife and children were Quakers.^[88] Kinship ties also affected the relations of the civic authorities to the sectaries. Richard Streamer, sheriff in 1663–64 and sometimes a colonial trader himself, was George Bishop’s brother-in-law, and Sir Robert Yeamans, sheriff in 1662–63 and a former Royalist officer, was a kinsman of Thomas Speed’s wife, who was a prominent Quaker in her own right.^[89] As George Bishop reminded Knight, the Bristol sectaries were

a considerable body of people in this City, we, our families, our relations, our estates; we are of the City, and in the City, and inhabitants thereof, and enterwoven we are therein, and with the people thereof, as a mans flesh is in his body, and his spirit in his flesh.^[90]

Business and kinship connections, of course, could not always counteract the power of religious conviction or political principle among the Bristolians. Sir John Knight, whose zealous hatred of sectarian and republican ideas went back to the 1640s, did not alter policy because of his own close family ties to the dissenters.^[91] Nor did the rather similar family relations of Sheriff Streamer prevent his conscientious, though reluctant, performance of duty.^[92] But they made full enforcement exceedingly difficult, because many Bristolians did not share Knight’s bloody-mindedness. Though prepared to resist public outrages by sectarian incendiaries, they preferred to ignore those dissenters who lived peaceably in the city. For example, juries at the Sessions in January 1664 would not find the Quakers guilty of unlawful assembly as charged: one group of defendants was acquitted, and a second convicted, after considerable debate, by special verdict covering only a part of the indictment.^[93] Later in the same year, when the authorities attempted to transport three Quakers for their third conviction under the Conventicle Act, the crew of the Mary Fortune refused to take them, saying that “their Cry, and the Cry of their Family and Friends, are entered into the Ears of the Lord, and he hath smitten us even to the very Heart, saying, Cursed is he that parteth Man and Wife.”^[94] Many others were moved to acts of compassion as well. Sir Robert Cann, by now a baronet, and Sir Robert Yeamans visited the arrested Quakers in jail, and Robert Yate and John Knight, of the Sugar House on St. Augustine’s Back, both of whom had extensive business connections with Speed and other Quakers, offered to stand surety for the jailed sectaries.^[95]

These events illustrate the degree to which Bristol was torn by political division in the 1660s. Sir John Knight, Senior, was among the leaders of a significant group of Cavaliers in the city. His principal allies were men like Nathaniel Cale, soapmaker, who had been purged from the city government as a Delinquent in 1645, and John Locke, merchant, who had left in 1656 because of his Royalist views.^[96] These men and a few others like them, including several prominent members of the local gentry, served as deputy lieutenants for the city. Although in law, as some of them said, they had “no Authoritie to exercise any Ciuil power as magistrates in the Citty agaynst any man for delinquency,” their military office gave them considerable ability to control events, especially when the mayor was in sympathy with their cause, as in Sir John Knight’s term. When necessary, a large body of citizens under their command could be relied upon for political aid.^[97] For most of the period, however, only a handful of leading aldermen held the office of deputy lieutenant concurrently. In any case, the Common Council did not consist entirely of men of similar background. At the outset of Knight’s mayoralty in 1663, only five aldermen and three common councillors were old Royalists, either having been ousted for their political views in the 1640s or 1650s or, like Knight himself, having refused to swear the oath of office until the Restoration.^[98] By contrast, four aldermen and five common councillors had served in the civic body during the Interregnum and thus had worked closely at times with the members of the sects. Furthermore, a number of those elected to the council after the Restoration served only with great reluctance, in some instances caused by their unwillingness to enforce harsh government policy against friends and kinfolk. Among the latter may have been John Knight, the sugar refiner, who though elected in 1661 would not be sworn until September 1664, and then only under the Privy Council’s threat of a stiff fine.^[99]

Under these conditions, it should come as no surprise to find the city government rent by fierce battles for political primacy in this period. During Sir John Knight’s term, the conflict took the form of a challenge to the precedence of the local leadership, in which Sir Robert Cann, Baronet, and Sir Robert Yeamans were in the vanguard. Cann and Yeamans claimed on behalf of those titled members of the council that they should have precedence before all others regardless of their seniority. In large measure the issue was a symbolic one that served to draw political support for Cann and Yeamans from aldermen who possessed knighthoods. But more was at stake than mere symbolism, since nominations and votes in the civic body proceeded by order of precedence. In effect, Sir Robert Cann was seeking to use his baronetcy to oust the mayor from his privileged place in directing the affairs of the city. For Yeamans, who was not yet an alderman, the issue also had special importance; had he won his point, he would have gained precedence over all but those aldermen who had received knighthoods before him. It is no wonder, therefore, that the issue created an explosion of antagonism in the city that quickly evinced itself in challenges to Knight’s actions against the dissenters.^[100]

To a large degree, the rate of servant enrollments in Bristol depended upon which faction controlled the civic administration at the time. After Sir John Knight’s year of terror, no other mayor before the 1670s undertook an all-out attack on the dissenters.^[101] John Lawford, Knight’s immediate successor, aided by Knight himself, vigorously enforced the Conventicle Act; yet he did not make mass arrests or attempt to impose the penalty of banishment.^[102] During 1667–68, peace and quiet were said to have reigned in Bristol, and in 1669 little was done to suppress the sects, even after the issuance of a royal proclamation against conventicles.^[103] The mayors during these years were Alderman Edward Morgan, father of John Morgan, upholsterer, one of Bristol’s great exporters of servants to the colonies, and Alderman Thomas Stevens, a grocer much of whose business must have been in colonial products. Both of these men had joined the Common Council in the Interregnum, and, interestingly, both had resisted accepting high office in the 1660s until forced by threats of confiscatory fines.^[104]

In addition to Lawford, Sir Thomas Langton, mayor in 1666–67, and Sir Robert Yeamans, mayor in 1669–70, receive mention as prominent persecutors in these years. But neither man was hellbent on routing the sects. Langton acted only on direct evidence of apparent seditious activity, to which he was especially alert because of the threat of a Dutch attack during his term.^[105] Yeamans, for his part, had the misfortune to hold office when the Second Conventicle Act came into force. Thus he found it his duty to execute a policy his enemy Sir John Knight had helped create.^[106] This act gave substantial authority to the deputy lieutenants to aid in enforcement and subjected the justices of the peace and the chief magistrates of the towns to stiff fines for each failure to respond to informations duly presented them.^[107] Even so, Yeamans acted only reluctantly, prodded by the bishop of Bristol, whose informers made it impossible to disregard the dissenters’ meetings. Furthermore, many of his colleagues, assistants, and fellow citizens refrained from supporting his efforts. Statutory fines were imposed; but when the cases arose, numerous aldermen absented themselves from the bench, and the goods distrained to pay the fines often found no buyers. With the aid of the Trained Bands, Yeamans managed to close the meetinghouses for a time, but the Baptists and the Quakers took to the streets to hold their services. For two months, in fact, Yeamans’s persecution amounted to little more than halfhearted threats against the sectaries put forth in combination with plaintive letters of apology to the Privy Council for failing to do better. Yeamans confined himself to his duty narrowly construed; he attacked sectarian religion according to law, but had no interest in abusing the dissenters in their businesses or everyday lives. Perhaps to indicate his distaste even for this task, he ended his term by nominating as his successor the moderate-minded sugar refiner Mr. John Knight, although the king had previously ordered that only aldermen were eligible for the office.^[108]

The years following Sir John Knight’s mayoralty brought with them a moderation of religious persecution in Bristol. These same years also saw the beginning of an era of more favorable material conditions for English labor. As population growth ceased and agricultural production diversified, England no longer suffered periodic subsistence crises and real wages improved, with the result that everywhere in the country the rate of emigration to America fell to levels significantly below those reached in the 1650s. In a general way the decline in the number of indentured servants enrolled at Bristol after 1662 parallels the development nationally. Had the registrations for these years recovered their earlier peaks, we would have every reason to be surprised. From the beginning of 1663, however, a number of factors other than wages and prices intervened to affect the flow of servants through Bristol. War in colonial waters and the plague in London, though not the fire, appear to have played a short-term role. Religion and politics, in both England and the colonies, seem more significant, sometimes stirring religious discontent at home and at other times threatening equal danger abroad.

But Bristol itself is where the most important intervening factors can be found. As we have seen, the city was at times an exceedingly dangerous place for sectaries. In 1663–64, many of the leading colonial traders found themselves in jail for their religious beliefs and no doubt were unable to attend to their businesses. In other years, religious persecutions must have thoroughly distracted them, even though they did not result in long imprisonment. When persecutions raged in Bristol, emigrating dissenters may have avoided the city on their way abroad, using other and safer ports instead. However, the greatest effect was probably administrative, rather than economic. The system of registration could not be enforced for long without cooperation from the traders. The city’s administrative resources simply were far too small to do the work day in and day out. In July 1662, when Mayor Nathaniel Cale was maintaining his vigilance against impending insurrection, the whole registration scheme had come under challenge. Periodically during the previous two years, city officials had boarded ships to assure themselves that all servants were properly registered. But resistance by the ships’ captains and traders seems to have halted this practice, causing Cale to petition the Privy Council for authority to make these inquiries.^[109]

No such grant was forthcoming, and the practice of boarding ships did not begin again until August 1670, at the very end of Yeamans’s mayoral term.^[110] Thus for most of the 1660s the city seems to have employed no effective means of checking the indentures of servants. During periods of persecution it was easy enough for servants to embark on Bristol ships far from the scrutiny of the city authorities, boarding, as Farwell Meredith had done in 1654, at Kingroad at the mouth of the Avon, rather than nearer to the sources of trouble. In other words, persecution served to increase underregistration. Only when the city was relatively free of attacks on the sects or when those attacks were accompanied by vigilant searches for unindentured servants, as was the case from 1660 to 1662 and again during Ralph Olliffe’s troubled mayoralty in 1674–75, can the Bristol Register give us a reasonably accurate picture of the servant trade.^[111]

The scheme to register indentured servants in Bristol was never exactly what it pretended to be. Instead of offering genuine protection for boys, maids, and other persons who might be spirited beyond the seas by the rogues who plied the servant trade, it sought to control the commercial activities of the numerous men and women, some of them religious and political radicals, who pursued profit in the American colonies. The entries in the Register responded as much to the fortunes of politics as to the economics of trade and agriculture. Since Bristol was a commercial city whose very social structure and social geography rested on its role as a major port, its community life was dominated by its connections with distant markets on the continent and in the Atlantic. Its politics and its economy had been inextricably intertwined ever since it received its first grants of privileges in the twelfth century, if not before.^[112] This meant that the exercise of power never took a single form. Those who contested for command of the city’s markets also vied for control of its government and of its rituals and symbols, sacred and profane. Political strife centered on the regulation of trade and manufacture, which in turn became the means to enhance economic power and advance an ideology. As Bristol’s commerce with America increased in importance during the middle and late seventeenth century, not surprisingly it became the arena within which these battles for local domination were fought.

Notes