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Christmas in 17th century England and America

© 2014 Christy K Robinson

A very happy holiday season to friends, readers, Dyer descendants, author colleagues, and those who enjoy this blog for its wide-ranging historical research presented in laymen's terms.

If you know of others with similar interests, I hope you'll share the three Dyer books and the Mary Dyer letter poster, either by giving them as gifts, or by sharing the links to them in this blog.

I hope you'll enjoy this small collection of articles and images of what Christmas and Advent season would have been like for our ancestors of 11 to 14 generations ago! And feel free to share it in Facebook and Twitter.

Click the highlighted titles to go to the articles:
 

Mary Dyer and Christmas
by Christy K Robinson
This article describes customs of Advent and Christmas in the early and mid-1600s, across Great Britain and the colonies of New England, including Rhode Island, where William Dyer was a government official.

Also in this blog:

Enlightened
by Christy K Robinson

Oliver Cromwell cancels Christmas
by Sarah Butterfield Ursell

The Puritan problem with Father Christmas
by Barbara Wells Sarudy

Ride the TITLE WAVE into the 17th century

by Christy K Robinson

Books by Eve LaPlante, David Teems, Francis Bremer,
John Fox, and Nathaniel Philbrick,
fascinating nonfiction set in the 17th century.

 There’s a vast crowd of enthusiasts reading and discussing everything medieval and renaissance. But time didn’t stop with Elizabeth I’s death in 1603, and start up again at the Regency. Are you looking for the rest of the story? This is the century that brought you William Shakespeare's greatest works, the science of Bacon and Descartes and Newton, the astronomers like Kepler, the musicians Lanier and Purcell, Dr. William Harvey who discovered blood circulation, the great artists Vermeer and Rembrandt, Roger Williams and separation of church and state, the invention of the barometer and pendulum clock and steam pump and air pump, the Inquisition dispersing Protestants and Jewish refugees to Europe and America, the Great Migration to the Americas, the birth of secular democracy, Leeuwenhoek's microscope that showed bacteria and spermatazoa for the first time, and all the ideas and heresies that germinated between 1600 and 1700, the beginning of the Early Modern Period. It was a starkly different period than the medieval, renaissance, and Tudor periods it followed.

King James (he commissioned the 1611 Bible that's still the favorite version 400 years on), his son King Charles I (the only English king to be executed), and grandsons Charles II and James II kept the drama level high and dangerous in the seventeenth century. Their marriages and lovers, births and deaths, political intrigues, religious conflicts, witch hunts, and wars marked the beginning of our modern period. Their aristocrats and politicians, tradesmen, midwives, ministers, writers, musicians, scientists, and artists changed the world.  

This is a list of authors who have the 17^th century covered, from Shakespeare and midwife forensic investigators to barber surgeons, Charles II’s mistresses, men and women who founded American democracy, servants and highway robbers, people who gave their lives for their principles or just because they were falsely accused as witches. In these books you’ll find sumptuous gowns and high society, educated women, poverty, prostitutes, and massacres, childbirth and plague, castles and manors, cathedrals and meetinghouses—even a vampire.

Our ninth or tenth great-grandparents knew these people—or were these people, metaphorically speaking. (Well, probably not the vampire—but everyone else!) Discover what their lives were like, and how their lives formed who you are. Many of the book characters from the 17^th century are based on facts, events, and real people. You'll see parallels in economics and politics between then and now. The authors, in addition to their literary skills, have spent months and years in research to get the 17^th century world “just right,” so you’ll get your history veggies in a delicious brownie.

Ride the wave of the time-space continuum into the 17^th century with these award-winning and highly-rated authors. The images you see are a small sample of what's available from this talented group! Click the highlighted author’s name to open a new tab.

Anna Belfrage — Time-slip (then and now) love and war.	Jo Ann Butler — From England to New England: survival, love, and a dynasty.	Susanna Calkins — Murder mysteries set in 1660s London.
Francine Howarth — Heroines, swashbuckling romance.	Judith James — Rakes and rogues of the Restoration.	Marci Jefferson — Royal Stuarts in Restoration England.
Elizabeth Kales — French Huguenot survival of Inquisition.	Juliet Haines Mofford — True crime of New England, pirates.	Mary Novik — Rev. John Donne and daughter.
Donald Michael Platt — Spanish Inquisition cloak and dagger.	Katherine Pym — London in the 1660s.	Diane Rapaport — Colonial New England true crime.
Peni Jo Renner — Salem witch trials.	Christy K Robinson — British founders of American democracy and rights.	Anita Seymour —  Royalists and rebels in English Civil War.
Mary Sharratt — Witches (healers) of Pendle Hill, 1612.	Alison Stuart — Time-slip war romance, ghosts.	Deborah Swift — Servant girls running for lives, highwaywoman.
Ann Swinfen — Farmers fighting to keep land, chronicles of Portuguese physician.	Sam Thomas — Midwife solves murders in city of York.	Suzy Witten — Salem witch trials.
Andrea Zuvich — Vampire in Stuart reign, Duke of Monmouth and mistress.

Introduction and illustrated table by Christy K Robinson. You're welcome to share this page in your blogs, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, etc. Shortened URL: bit.ly/1xAUir1

Thou-Tube: a 17th-century musical playlist

© 2014 Christy K Robinson 

I've started a Thou-Tube (oops, I mean YouTube) playlist of 17th-century music. Most of the music, except for the Henry Purcell pieces, was composed and played during the first half of the 17th century, during the lifetimes of William and Mary Dyer, and Anne and William Hutchinson.

I used "Sing Care Away" on p. 276 of Mary Dyer Illuminated, having found the lyrics in a website on ballads of the era. It was also available on YouTube for a while, but is no longer available.

So turn up the external speakers, set the playlist to "play all," and do some housework, read this blog's 110+ archived articles in another tab, or relax with a book about the Dyers. 

Here's the link to the playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLbJLH1i37JVDU-omkR_K0fi5isOYmesWx 

Mary Dyer goes west (to AZ-CA-NV-UT-HI)

Mary Dyer debuted in the Adventist magazine Pacific Union Recorder, in November 2014. Read the article by PDF (turn to page 40), or in digital flip-book (turn to page 40). Or, if you click the photo below to enlarge it, you can read the slightly blurry screenshot. This feature was printed in the Arizona insert of the regional magazine.

Update: Former TV host (Faith For Today, Lifestyle Magazine) and minister Dan Matthews said on December 6, 2014, that if you haven't yet read these books Mary and William Dyer, you need to "cuddle up" to the author, Christy Robinson. 

Hauntings, death, monsters, and witches

© 2014 Christy K Robinson

This article is copyrighted. Copying, even to your genealogy pages, is prohibited by US and international law. You may "share" it with the URL link because it preserves the author's copyright notice and the source of the article.  
All rights reserved. This book or blog article, or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the author except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

Heretic burnings at Guernsey during 1550s, the time of the parents of
Anne Hutchinson and John Winthrop, and grandparents of the Dyers.

If you’re a frequent reader of this blog, you know that Mary Dyer was a woman who believed and lived in the Light of God. Because she believed in eternal life, death was nothing to be feared—in fact, she willingly laid down her own life to bring religious liberty to the oppressed.

However, Mary and William Dyer lived in an extremely superstitious, hyper-religious, brutal era. It wasn’t only the individuals who might have been cursed by a witch, but the entire community that feared them. Educated and illiterate people alike believed that their theocratic society as a whole had to purge evil, and to be pure and holy, which would hasten the Second Coming of Christ. (Why do you think the village of Naumkeag was renamed Salem? It was the New Jerusalem, the holy city of God.) Boston was to be “The City Upon a Hill” in Gov. John Winthrop’s sermon, that term taken from Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount. They believed that God demanded perfection of them before he could trust them not to pollute the Holy City in heaven.

On the European continent in the early 17^th century, 30,000 innocent men and women were burned to death, believed to be witches. In England, hundreds of people, almost all them women, were tried, tortured, and hanged as witches, even though they were church members minding their own business. Midwives and healers were susceptible to accusations of witchcraft. If your patient recovered unexpectedly, or died, it must be because of the intervention of the devil.

In America, witch trials and executions took place 50 and 60 years before the famous Salem outbreak, in Connecticut and Massachusetts.

The Puritan Americans didn’t officially believe in ghosts because spirits went immediately to heaven or hell—but they did believe in ghosts, because Gov. John Winthrop wrote of spirits haunting the place where a ship had blown up because some drunken sailors shot a pistol into kegs of gunpowder.

John Winthrop’s Journal, January 1644:

“Captain Chaddock [Englishman who had previously stolen a French ship] having bought from the French a pinnace of about 30 tons, he manned and fitted her to go to Trinidad, and riding before Boston ready to depart, and eight men aboard her, one striking ...fire with a pistol, two barrels of powder took fire and blew her up: five of the men being in the cabin were destroyed, and the other three being in the other part were much scorched and hurt, but got into their boat and were saved. The captain himself was then on shore at Boston. It is observable that these men making no use of the sudden loss of three of their company, but falling to drinking, etc., that very evening this judgment came thus upon them. It is also to be observed that two vessels have thus been blown up in our harbor, and both belonging to such as despised us and the ordinance of God amongst us.”

From the Tor Even Mathisen photo website,
http://flickrhivemind.net/User/Tor%20Even%20Mathisen/Interesting

Governor Winthrop usually saw the wrath of God in disasters that befell “unrepentant sinners” such as these. But there’s more! About two weeks later, unexplained lights appeared in the sky where the ship had been.

“About midnight, three men, coming in a boat to Boston, saw two lights arise out of the water near the north point of the town cove, in form like a man, and went at a small distance to the town, and so to the south point, and there vanished away. They saw them about a quarter of an hour, being between the town and the governor's garden. The like was seen by many, a week after, arising about Castle Island and in one fifth of an hour came to John Gallop's point.”

Rev. Davenport of New Haven reported that a ghost ship appeared in the clouds as a message from God that their ship, their investments, and of course, their beloved family members who were passengers, had been lost at sea. Read The Ghost Ship of 1647

Every natural history event (comet, meteor, eclipse, earthquake, severe weather) was considered a message from God, or manifestation of a curse on unbelievers. (But that’s never been limited to the 17^th century: after catastrophic earthquakes and tsunamis, we’ve heard people talk about the devastation being the judgment of God upon unrepentant pagans. I had to edit sermons and articles of that false teaching at one point in my career.)

 Neither Anne Hutchinson nor Mary Dyer were formally charged as witches, but there were murmurs about them, particularly after they both had tragic pregnancies amid charges of heresy. Mary’s anencephalic/spina bifida miscarriage, and Anne’s molar mass were called monsters. There’s so much interest in that, even today, that the “monster” article is the most-read piece in this blog.

Here are the links to my articles about the unknown, unseen world as the Dyers, Hutchinsons, and Winthrops knew it.

Witches Who Weren't Witches

Endecott's memento mori death's head 

The 1630 Comet of Doom

The Case of the Surfing Witch

The Ghost Ship of New Haven 

http://marybarrettdyer.blogspot.com/p/blog-page.html

There’s more—much more!—in the books Mary Dyer Illuminated (Vol. 1) and Mary Dyer: For Such a Time as This (Vol. 2). The stories of the unexplained phenomena came from the journals of John Winthrop, books, court records, and letters from eyewitnesses of the events. Find out more about the FIVE-STAR REVIEWS by historians, English professors, other discerning readers, and how to order the books at this link: http://marybarrettdyer.blogspot.com/p/blog-page.html

Christmas is coming: these books (or Kindle editions) would make fantastic gifts.



Christy K Robinson is author of the books:

·          We Shall Be Changed (2010)
·          Mary Dyer Illuminated (2013)
·          Mary Dyer: For Such a Time as This (2014)
·          The Dyers of London, Boston, & Newport (2014)
·          Effigy Hunter (2015)
·          Anne Marbury Hutchinson: American Founding Mother (2018) 

The latest book is a biography
of Anne Hutchinson

This article's short URL  bit.ly/1kYYkWo

Significant Ancestry

I'm pleased to present a guest writer, editor, author, and friend, Dr. Ken Horn, a 12th-generation descendant of William and Mary Dyer. Thank you so much, Ken!


© 2014 by Ken Horn
 

Statehouse in Boston, with Hutchinson statue on the left,
and Dyer statue on the right.
The statues face the Boston Common.

Anyone who seriously attempts to trace his or her family history knows the longing to follow the family name far into the past, and also to find an ancestor who somehow made a significant contribution to the world.

Alas, I can only trace my Horn family name back four generations. Even though I have serious genealogists in my family, they have not been able to reach any further into the Horn history than my great-great grandparents Samuel A. and Mary Ann Horn. That side of my family does have very successful people who appear in local histories and were recognized as fine Christians. (This includes Samuel A.) That’s important and I value it. But few will ever read the scant information available on their lives.

I turn to my mother’s side of the family to find the more-than-satisfying significance of ancestry I had hoped for—an ancestor whom history has not forgotten.

There are far too many deserving women whose contributions have been forgotten by history. Mary Barrett Dyer is not one of those. But she paid a dear price to be remembered. I will not repeat Mary’s history—it is familiar to readers of this blog. She died a martyr. But Mary Dyer was far more than just a Quaker doing Quaker-type things, for which she suffered. She willingly gave her life, making both a religious statement and a civil, human one. As has often been noted, Mary struck a blow in 1660 that has resounded down the corridors of time to our own day—a significant blow that helped those who lived after her gain civil and moral rights to act according to their consciences.

Though history has not forgotten her—and she even has her own statue at the Boston Statehouse and elsewhere—most people know little of the significance of her life. It is monumental … definitely worthy of the memorials erected to her.

Mary Dyer was my ninth great-grandmother. (That's grandmother with nine “greats” in front of it, for twelve generations.)

Unfortunately, when I was at the Boston Statehouse I didn't know that she was my ancestor. Thus, I took a picture of the statue but failed to get one of myself standing next to it.

I plan to return to Boston to get that shot. I also plan to find and photograph the other monuments to her, including the statue at Friends Center in Philadelphia. That institution’s website shows how the Friends recognize the importance of her contribution: “The sculpture of Mary Dyer represents the Quaker ideal of committed action grounded in quiet and worship. Her presence at the entrance of the building silently conveys to all who pass through Friends Center’s doors that it is a place of both conviction and contemplation.”

Dyer statue at Philadelphia Friends Center

 The statue at the Friends Center is intentionally identical to the one near Boston Common. In the 1950s a bill of the General Court of Massachusetts authorized “the construction and erection of an appropriate statue of Mary Dyer, who was hanged on Boston Common in the year 1660 because she chose the death penalty rather than abandon the principles of freedom of speech and conscience.”

I belong to a religious tradition that values the contributions of women. The weekly magazine I edited for nearly eighteen years published an annual women's edition and many other articles about women—both clergy and lay—who excelled in ministry and community service.

Many women have followed Mary’s grand example, mostly on a far smaller scale. Few have had such lasting influence. 

As difficult as it has been to trace some of my ancestors on my father’s side, imagine my delight when I discovered that my ancestry includes two of the most influential Christian women in American history: Mary Dyer and Mary’s friend and mentor Anne Marbury Hutchinson (my tenth great-grandmother) who made her own significant contribution. I am descended from both through my eighth great-grandparents, Mary’s son Samuel Dyer and Anne’s granddaughter through Edward Hutchinson, also named Anne.

This Dyer blog has provided a rich source of reliable information about my ancestor Mary. I also discovered another rich, and enjoyable, source.

I took Christy Robinson's novels about Mary Barrett Dyer with me on a recent international trip and devoured them both. Mary Dyer Illuminated and MaryDyer: For Such a Time as This were both page-turners for me.

Dyer statue in Boston
The three Dyers books are found at
http://bit.ly/RobinsonAuthor

I seldom read fiction, but Christy’s writing is presented on a framework of reliable, detailed history, so there is abundant information to be gleaned … and in an entertaining way. I felt the time I invested in these books was well worthwhile. Christy’s compelling narrative greatly aided in making Mary a real person to me. These are fascinating books that deserve a much-expanded exposure. They are simply outstanding, a feast for lovers of history and good writing. 

My quest for significance in ancestry has been successful. Mary Barrett Dyer and Anne Marbury Hutchinson have made important marks in our world. 

I’ll continue my search for ancestors, valuing each name, and the life of each one that served God and made some contribution—large or small—in his or her area of influence.

Those of you who are my distant cousins, in the Dyer and/or Hutchinson lineage, can share in this kindred sense of fulfillment.
We should all take the fact of this relationship as a challenge—to serve God and do some good in this world.

______________

Peggy and Ken Horn

 Dr. Ken Horn is an ordained minister in the Assemblies of God, and recently retired as editor of their international magazine, Pentecostal Evangel. This is the second article he's kindly written for this Dyer blog. The first was Where Paths Diverge: The Great Quaker Debate.

The Dyers books include Anne Hutchinson and her son Edward Hutchinson as major characters. Anne appears in Volume I, and Edward is an integral character in Volumes I and II, including having the last word of the final chapter.