By George MacLaren Brydon Historiographer of Diocese of Virginia Virginia 350th Anniversary Celebration Corporation Williamsburg, Virginia 1957 COPYRIGHT © , 1957 BY VIRGINIA 350TH ANNIVERSARY CELEBRATION CORPORATION, WILLIAMSBURG, VIRGINIA Jamestown 350th Anniversary Historical Booklet, Number 10...

The settlement of Englishmen at Jamestown in 1607 was the outgrowth of a vision of transatlantic expansion which had been growing stronger steadily during the preceding generation. It was in the following of that vision that Queen Elizabeth granted to a group of men headed by Sir Walter Raleigh the authority to establish a colony upon the remote shores of the Atlantic ocean, and out of the plans of this group came the ill-fated colony which was started at Roanoke Island, in what is now the State

The men who came to Jamestown brought the ideals and ways of life of the mother country; its common law, the enactments of Parliament, the Church of their people; and as shown in the prayer written in England which the commanding officer of the colony was required to use daily at the setting of the watch, they hoped also that the natives of the land might be brought into the Kingdom of God. They made petition for their own needs, but they prayed also: And seeing, Lord, the highest end of our pla

There are several first-hand accounts of religious worship in the earliest days of the Jamestown colony. Captain John Smith wrote of the men at worship in the open air until a chapel could be erected. He describes the scene of a celebration of the Holy Communion, with the Holy Table standing under an old sail lashed from tree to tree, with a bar of wood fastened between two trees as the pulpit, and men kneeling on the ground before their first altar. Services were held daily, according to the ru

The colony of Virginia, after the protective and guiding influence of the Virginia Company was taken away, found itself in an almost impossible situation so far as religious organization was concerned. The leaders of colonial life realized all the more clearly as time passed that King Charles I, who succeeded his father King James I in 1625, was not the least interested in the religious welfare of the colony. America was entirely outside the bounds of any diocese or province in England, and cons

John Hammond, in his pamphlet Leah and Rachel sketched briefly conditions which existed in Virginia between the "starving time" of 1609-10 and the year 1656. His attempt was to correct an opinion widely held in England of the lawlessness of colonial life. He interpreted the great massacre of 1622 as the end of one phase and the beginning of another. He showed that in each phase there was an inevitable period of laxity of life and disregard of moral and legal conventions which was overcome finall

A new element came early into the life of Virginia, with permanent and continuous hurt to the welfare of the colony and later to the Commonwealth; an element to which the colony was compelled to adapt itself because it did not have the power to eradicate it after men perceived its danger. It was the element of human slavery. The first Negro captives were brought into the port of Jamestown in the year 1619. They were brought by a foreign ship then described as a "Dutch" ship, but presumably a Por

The political conditions in England throughout the middle of the seventeenth century bore heavily upon Virginia in religious as well as in civil matters. The period of civil war which began in 1642 lasted until the King was captured by the parliamentary forces, and Archbishop Laud, the hated persecutor of dissenters, was beheaded. After an imprisonment of four years the king was beheaded and Oliver Cromwell reigned as Protector of the Commonwealth. The civil war had lined up the dissenting bodie

The decade 1690-1700 was an era of steady growth in the religious and cultural life of Virginia. New counties were created as population spread further and further up the great rivers; and parishes increased in numbers as the population grew. The first official list of "The parishes and the clergymen in them" which has survived the wreckage of time was the list of 1680, and the next is the list of 1702. These lists show that in 1680 there were forty-eight parishes and thirty-six clergymen incumb

In addition to the titles in the following brief list the reader will find many references to official papers, and other important and useful works, in the author's Virginia's Mother Church , volumes one and two. A great many of the statements herein made are based upon these two volumes. Anderson, James S. M. A History of the Colonial Church . London: 1843. 3 vols. Andrews, Matthew Page. The Soul of a Nation, The Founding of Virginia and the Projection of New England . New York: Doubleday, 1943

The following extracts from the Journal of the Life of Thomas Story, during his visit to Virginia in 1698 are indicative of the attitude of the people of Virginia toward religious toleration: 8th Day of the 12th Month, we landed in Mockjack Bay—— Next Fourth Day being the 1st day of the 1st month (i.e. January, 1698/99) we went again by water to a monthly meeting at Chuckatuck, where came our friend Elizabeth Webb from Gloucestershire in England, who had been through all the English colonies on