The Manor

by Mac Griswold

  “The Body is the Shell”: Francis Quarles, Epigrammes (London, 1695), 127, quoted by Aileen Ribeiro, Fashion and Fiction: Dress in Art and Literature in Stuart England (New Haven: Yale University Press for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, 2005), 159.

  “weareing your cloathes”: James Cleland, Hero-paideia, or, The Institution of a Young Nobleman (Oxford: Joseph Barnes, 1607), 125, quoted in Ribeiro, Fashion and Fiction, 181.

  “Skin-close” breeches: Samuel Purchas, Purchas His Pilgrim: Microcosmus, of the Historie of Man, Relating the Wonders of his Generation, Vanities in His Degeneration, Necessity of His Regeneration (London, 1619), 267, quoted in Ribeiro, Fashion and Fiction, 185.

  “old Violett Coullered cloak”: Copy of Bradford’s probate in Plimoth Plantation, “Dossier for Alice Bradford,” n.p.

  “For to Make a Hand som Woman”: Seaborn Cotton, “Commonplace Book of Reverend Seaborn Cotton,” MS A1454, R. Stanton Avery Special Collections Dept., New England Historic Genealogical Society, paraphrased in Martha Saxton, Being Good, 47–48, and note 9, 314.

  “Women of the gentry”: See Ribeiro, Fashion and Fiction, 203–7, and the reproductions of “Hester Tradescant and her Stepson,” 1645, oil on canvas, attributed to Emmanuel de Critz (Ashmolean Museum, Oxford) and “Winter,” 1644, by Wenceslaus Hollar, for this quote and the succeeding paragraph.

  Autumn: Autumn. Wenceslaus Hollar, in Ribeiro, Fashion and Fiction, 207.

  Hollar’s drawings: Ribeiro, Fashion and Fiction, 204, for Hollar’s “Young Woman,” 1645.

  near-transparency: the sheerness of the fabric helps explain why, in the seventeenth century, “naked” usually meant “wearing a shift,” while “stark naked” was used for complete nudity.

  best defense against pestilence: Kathryn Ashenburg, The Dirt on Clean: An Unsanitized History (New York: North Point Press, 2007), 93–111.

  Robert Herrick’s Julia: Of the fifty-four poems about Julia in his Poetical Works, ed. F. W. Moorman (London: Humphrey Milford/Oxford University Press, 1921), eight are about how her body smelled, including “Upon Julia’s unlacing her self” (156); “Upon Julia’s sweat” (240); “On Julia’s lips” (271); and “His embalming to Julia” (129).

  preserving the Englishness: “Considering, amongst many other inconveniences … how like we were to lose our language and our name of English … how unable there to give such education to our children, as we ourselves had received.” Edward Winslow, “Hypocrisie Unmasked” (London, 1646), reprinted in Chronicles of the Pilgrim Fathers of the Colony of Plymouth from 1608 to 1625 (Boston, 1841, reprinted Baltimore: Clearfield, 1995), 381.

  “the usuall speech of the Court”: Anonymous (attributed to George Puttenham), The Art of English Poesie (London, 1589).

  secular contracts: Puritans in England, Europe, and New England restricted religious recognition of marriage to banns read in advance of the marriage—part of the struggle to set themselves apart from the Church of England. Chilton L. Powell, “Marriage in Early New England,” The New England Quarterly (NEQ) 1, no. 3 (July 1928): 323, 324–25, http://www.jstor.org/stable/359877.

  Francis: In early 1652 in Newport, Francis Brinley, identifying himself as “Secretary,” copied an official letter for his brother-in-law William Coddington, who in 1652 was still governor under his 1651 commission. Freiberg, WP 6:182.

  “Sexual experience”: Ulrich: Good Wives, 95.

  feme sole: Dayton, Women Before the Bar, 19–20; MaryLynn Salmon, Women and the Law of Property in Early America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1986), 81–119; Susan Staves, Married Women’s Property Rights in England, 1660–1833 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), 95–130; Linda Sturtz, Within Her Power: Propertied Women in Colonial Virginia (New York: Routledge, 2002), 20–24.

  “better comfortable livelyhood”: Will of GBS.

  Under Nathaniel’s will: Will of NS.

  “So long as the husband and wife”: Staves, Married Women’s Property Rights, 149–50.

  larger expenditures: A long-held rule that “the right to present enjoyment of a thing did not allow the owner to change its nature” meant a wife’s annual allowance—“pin money”—could not be converted into real property or chattel without becoming something else, and therefore the husband’s property. The rule of no arrears beyond a year minimized “the possibilities that women could take property intended for maintenance and use it as capital.” Staves, Married Women’s Property Rights, 150, 155.

  Jacquero: The variety of European monikers by which Abee Coffu Jantie Seniees, a leading late-seventeenth-century politico and merchant at Cape Coast, was known (Jan Snees, Jacque Senece, Johan Sinesen, Jantee Snees) indicate that he worked with Dutch, Danish, and English traders. Berlin, Many Thousands, 23.

  “my Negro Girl Isabell”: Will of NS.

  “negotiated relationship”: Berlin, Many Thousands Gone, 2.

  “I give unto my five daughters”: Will of GBS.

  9. WHERE THEY LIVED

  “it hath pleased god”: NS, Shelter Island, to JWJr, August 8, 1653, WP, 6:20–21. JWJr was close by in New London (Pequit) at the time, Walter W. Woodward, pers. comm., Sept. 5, 2006.

  female relatives: Anne Coddington, Grizzell’s sister, was her only female relative in America.

  sociable community life: Ulrich, Good Wives, 50–67.

  became a Quaker: In 1657 when the Friends arrived in New England from Barbados, or soon thereafter, GBS and NS, and the Coddingtons, were convinced.

  “deputy husband”: Ulrich, Good Wives, 8–10.

  “moved freely”: For this quote, and “A New England woman” in the next paragraph, see Berkin, First Generations, 33.

  “Yongest Child”: NS to JWJr, Shelter Island, 6th of 8br [October 6], 1655, MHS Proc., ser. 2, 4: 274–75.

  Winthrop’s advice: For Winthrop’s role as regional physician, see Woodward, Prospero’s America, 182–99.

  The baby: Nathaniel’s will lists eleven children born between 1654 and 1675 (Grizzell, Giles, Nathaniel, Peter, Patience, Elizabeth, Mary, Anne, Constant, Mercie, and Benjamin).

  “strong, self-contained”: Saxton, Being Good, 24.

  female domestics: Ann Collins, perhaps the wife of John Collins, witnessed Nathaniel’s will in 1680. A John Collins had contracted to barter island produce from Nathaniel in 1658. Anna Guillat, perhaps the wife of Jacques Guillot, witnessed Constant Sylvester’s will in 1670. A John Collins and a “Jacquis Guillot” also witnessed NS’s will. Sylvester Manor Account Book 1658–1768, East Hampton Library; Will of Constant Sylvester, Records of Barbados 6/8: 316.

  “to doe any busenes about ye house”: NS to JWJr., October 6, 1655. MHS Proc., ser. 2, 4: 274–75.

  “That until such time”: Articles of Agreement, September 20, 1652, GSDD, SIHS.

  visit for a year: Francis Brinley lived with the Sylvesters in 1654. Dorothy C. Barck, ed., Papers of the Lloyd Family of the Manor of Queens Village, Lloyd’s Neck, Long Island, New York, 1654–1826 (New York: New-York Historical Society, 1927), 1:219.

  unrelated men and women: Multiple examples, often leading to rape as well as consensual sex, are cited from New England court records by Ulrich, Good Wives, and Saxton, Being Good.

  “starter house”: Eighty-four pre-1725 Massachusetts houses out of Abbott Lowell Cummings’s sampling of 144 were first built on a one-room or half-house plan (an entrance hall with a chimney behind, and a single “parlor”); almost all were enlarged. Abbott Lowell Cummings, The Framed Houses of Massachusetts Bay, 1625–1725 (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1979), 23.

  “a dynamic, multi-cultural landscape”: Mrozowski et al., “Archaeology of Sylvester Manor,” 3–8.

  EDM: For this explanation of how an EDM operates, pers. comm., Katherine Hayes, 10/15/12.

  “Record everything”: On the first day of each field school, Steve gathered the students to talk about the summer plan. Griswold Papers, Fales Library, NYU.

  “paint chips
for dirt”: Griswold Papers, Fales Library, NYU.

  available histories: The manor’s library includes standard American and Long Island histories, as well as works of local interest such as William Wallace Tooker’s The Indian Place-Names on Long Island and Islands Adjacent with Their Probable Significations (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1889; Knickerbocker Press, 1911), and memoirs by family members, such as Catherine E. Havens’s Diary of a Little Girl in Old New York (New York: Henry Collins, 1919, reprinted Bedford: Applewood Books, 2001), Sylvester Manor Book Inventory, Sylvester Manor Educational Farm, Shelter Island, NY.

  hard facts: See Cummings, Framed Houses of Massachusetts Bay, and Cummings, ed., Rural Household Inventories: Establishing the Names, Uses and Furnishings of Rooms in the Colonial New England Home, 1675–1775 (Boston: The Society for the Preservation of New England Antiquities, 1964).

  tiled roof: See Horsford, unfinished genealogical manuscript, SMA, NYU IV/I /2/111/ 20–21, 112/ 1–6; Martha J. Lamb, “The Manor of Shelter Island, Historic Home of the Sylvesters,” Magazine of American History 18 (November 1887): 365–66; Rev. Jacob E. Mallmann, Historical Papers on Shelter Island and Its Presbyterian Church (New York: A. M. Bustard, 1899, reprinted Shelter Island: Shelter Island Public Library, 1985), 21–22, 47; Cornelia Horsford, “The Garden at Sylvester Manor, Shelter Island,” in Gardens of Colony and State: Gardens and Gardeners of the American Colonies and of the Republic Before 1840, ed. Alice G. B. Lockwood (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1931), 1:278–79; Ralph G. Duvall, The History of Shelter Island, from its Settlement in 1652 to the Present Time, 1932 (Shelter Island Heights: privately printed, 1932), 21, 53; Cornelia Horsford, “The Manor of Shelter Island,” address read before the annual meeting of the Order of Colonial Lords of Manors in America on April 23, 1931 (New York: privately printed, 1934), 6–7.

  The first printed Long Island history: Silas Wood, A Sketch of the First Settlement of the Several Towns on Long-Island with their Political Condition to the End of the American Revolution (Brooklyn: Aldeu Spooner, 1828). Harold D. Eberlein’s Manor Houses and Historic Homes of Long Island and Staten Island (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott Company, 1928) includes a description of Sylvester Manor, 58–67.

  “The twilight zone”: C. Vann Woodward, The Strange Career of Jim Crow (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1955), viii, quoted by Michael Kammen, Mystic Chords of Memory: The Transformation of Tradition in American Culture (New York: Vintage, 1993), 31.

  “as it ought to have been”: “By a curious paradox through the very fact of their respect for the past, people came to reconstruct it as they considered it ought to have been.” Cultural historian Marc Bloch, Feudal Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964), 1:102, quoted in Kammen, Mystic Chords, 30–31. For traditional accounts and folk history of the manor, see Hancock, “Changing Landscape,” 12–14, 41–44.

  smaller wire mesh: Katherine Howlett Hayes, “Field Excavations at Sylvester Manor,” in Historical Archaeology, 34.

  Center for Archaeological Research: The Andrew Fiske Memorial Center for Archaeological Research (AFMCAR) was established with a $650,000 gift from Alice Fiske in 1999, which was matched by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts for a total of a million dollars; http://www.fiskecenter.umb.edu.

  the technologies of magnetometry: Magnetic gradiometry responds to iron in an iron tool or a brick or any heavily fired clay surface containing iron. Ground-penetrating radar sends pulses of radar energy into the ground to locate discontinuities between the pulses such as changes in stratigraphy and the evidence of walls, house or pit floors, rubble or midden deposits. All geophysical testing technologies require extensive processing of the data they produce. Kenneth L. Kvamme, “Geophysical Explorations,” Historical Archaeology of Sylvester Manor, 51–70.

  “square corners”: Griswold Papers, Fales Library, NYU. “Linear features, squares, rectangles, right angles, circles or ovals are not generally products of nature, but are culturally produced.” Kenneth L. Kvamme, Final Report of Geophysical Investigations Conducted at Sylvester Manor, Shelter Island, New York, 2000 (Boston: ArcheoImaging Lab, University of Massachusetts Boston, 2001), 11.

  major change in plantation layout: Kvamme, “Geophysical Explorations at Sylvester Manor,” 59–60.

  as many as eighty buildings: Griswold Papers, Fales Library, NYU.

  shadowy footprints: See Kvamme, “Geophysical Explorations,” 59–60, for examples of how different technologies are used to check and enlarge results.

  ad hoc “first house”: Before the Sylvesters arrived, James Farrett, the Earl of Stirling’s agent, may have built a house in 1638 after he claimed both Shelter and nearby Robins Island as payment for his services in settling English colonists on Long Island, a patent that had been granted to William Alexander, the Earl of Stirling, by the Crown in 1636. After the earl’s death in 1640, Farrett sold the islands to Stephen Goodyear (deputy governor of New Haven Colony) to pay for passage to Scotland in 1642. Until Goodyear’s 1651 sale of the island to the four partners, no Europeans apparently lived there. See Hancock, “Changing Landscape,” 69–70 and figure 9.

  “earth fast” structures: Emerson W. Baker, Robert L. Bradley, Leon Cranmer, and Neill DePaoli, “Earthfast Architecture in Early Maine,” presented at the Vernacular Architecture Forum Annual Meeting, Portsmouth, NH, 1992, http://www.salemstate.edu/~ebaker/earthfast/earthfastpaper.html.

  unfinished manuscript: Horsford, unfinished genealogical manuscript, SMA, NYU/IV/I/2/111.

  the storytellers: Eben W. Case (1918–2004) knew Cornelia Horsford and was revered as Shelter Island’s “memory.” The UMass team consulted him.

  personal sensitivity: See David Presti and John D. Pettigrew, “Ferromagnetic coupling to muscle receptors as a basis for geomagnetic field sensitivity in animals,” Nature 285, no. 5760 (May 8, 1980): 59–91, http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v285/n5760/abs/285099a0.html.

  a stretch of the southeast lawn: Sylvester Manor Project researcher Barbara Schwartz interviewed Eben Case twice about the possible “first house” location, then plotted his description to scale on graph paper and placed the scaled dowsing result over the Case plan. Case confirmed the location as what Cornelia Horsford had told him. Barbara Schwartz interviews with Eben Case, SIHS; Griswold Papers, Fales Library, NYU; Hayes, “Field Excavations,” 47, 48.

  “closet or porchamber”: The rear section of the “cross” was often lacking, leaving only a projecting two-story lobby entrance on the front of a rectangular box. Will of GBS; Virginia and Lee McAlester, A Field Guide to American Houses (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2003), 105–6, line drawing, 107. Architectural historians agree that porch towers indicated wealth and status. Cummings, Rural Household Inventories, 1964), xiv; Cummings, Framed Houses of Massachusetts Bay, 35–36 and Appendix I, Table 3, numbers 224, 228, and 231; Richard L. Bushman, The Refinement of America: Persons, Houses, Cities (New York: Vintage Books, 1993), 103–4; William N. Hosley Jr., “Architecture,” in The Great River: Art and Society of the Connecticut Valley, 1639–1820, ed. William N. Hosley Jr., and Gerald W. R. Ward (Hartford: Wadsworth Athenaeum, 1985), 73–74; Updike, Richard Smith, 66; The Diary of Joshua Hempstead: A Daily Record of Life in Colonial New London, Connecticut, 1711–58 (New London: New London County Historical Society, 1999), 626–27; James D. Kornwolf and Georgiana V. Kornwolf, Architecture and Town Planning in Colonial North America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), 2:1058, Figure 7.176b.

  ell: A lean-to, sometimes one and a half stories, was often added (at Sylvester Manor, perhaps the “Long Room” described in GBS’s will).

  postholes: Hayes, “Field Excavations,” 48.

  a new hypothesis: Griswold Papers, Fales Library, NYU; Hayes, “Field Excavations,” 48.

  10. HOW THEY LIVED

  his inventory: Dean Failey, Senior Director of American Furniture and Decorative Arts at Christie’s, and author of the authoritative decorative arts work for Long Island, Long Island Is My Nation (Albany: Mount
Ida Press for the Society for the Preservation of Long Island Antiquities, 1998), observed that, among the period Long Island inventories with which he is familiar, “only Wm Tangier Smith’s probate inventory even approaches the scale of Nathaniel’s inventory.” (William “Tangier” Smith, 1655–1705, Manor of St. George, Long Island.) He also noted that while “the greate glasse” that Grizzell mentions was a sign of wealth, “textiles were what really counted. The 10 beds is an extraordinary number as all had to be ‘dressed.’” Dean Failey, pers. comm., April 2006.

  a couch: A seventeenth-century couch was like a chaise longue, but angular and stiff, with hard-surfaced embroidered upholstery.

  baroque stone carpet: When the late art historian Robert Hughes observed the pavement emerging from the ground, he drew the analogy between the diagonals emphasized by baroque painters and sculptors and the diagonal patterning of the pavement, presumably of the same period.

  No comparable example: For other period pavement surfaces in New England that may be as early as 1690, see Anne A. Grady, Historic Structure Report: Spencer-Pierce-Little House, Newbury, Massachusetts (Society for the Preservation of New England Antiquities, Conservation Center, Waltham, 1992), section 3, 61–65.

  a few cobbles: Hayes, “Field Excavations,” 46.

  royal manor: Sung Bok Kim, Landlord and Tenant in Colonial New York: Manorial Society, 1664–1775 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, published for the Institute of Early American History and Culture, Williamsburg, VA, 1978), 9–13.

  Steve said: MKG Field Notes, Summer 2000, SMA, NYU.

  one archaeological stratum: Hayes, “Field Excavations,” 46–47; Gary, “Material Culture and Multi-Cultural Interactions at Sylvester Manor,” Historical Archaeology of Sylvester Manor, 107–8.

  Pins also secured: Mary C. Beaudry, Findings: The Material Culture of Needlework and Sewing (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006), 8, and chap. 2.

  “long shell’d”: “The Second Voyage,” in Lindholdt, John Josselyn, Colonial Traveler, 79.