We are quoting from the excellent work The BRISTOL RECORDS of Servants Sent to Foreign Plantations 1654-1686 by Peter Wilson Coldham...Printed by Genealogical Publishing Co., Inc....Baltimore, MD 1988.
This work is still available from the above publisher and probably may be ordered from their web site. It is also found in most all libraries that have a good sized genealogical collection.
I urge you all to spend sometime within the book as the information included will touch most of your lines.
We are including here the comments of Mr. Coldham through the INTRODUCTION to his book.
Please enjoy and you will be rewarded with some facts you may not be aware of concerning the early years of our great country.
Harold Oliver......April, 2004
On 29th September 1654 the Council of the City of Bristol enacted an ordinance requiring that a system of enrolment be set up to record the names of all indentured servants embarking from the port of Bristol for service overseas. On the very next day the first entry was penned in what was to become the register known as Servants to Foreign Plantations. The need for a scrupulous tally arose from the long-standing and notorious practice of kidnapping, inveigling and bribing youngsters onto ships bound for the labour-hungry colonies, there to be sold at good profit. Nor was the practice without weighty precedent, for as early as 1619 the State had connived at the rounding up of vagrant children in London and their forcible shipment to Virginia; but when private enterprise adopted similar measures, the State took exception and prosecuted those responsible. Nevertheless, forcible shipment of servants, indentured or not, continued apace. An Order of Parliament of 9th May 1645 required officers and justices to exercise diligence in apprehending those responsible for the kidnapping and shipping of children, and the City Fathers of Bristol may, perhaps, be considered negligent in having allowed nine years to pass before regulating these matters.
The 1654 ordinance acknowledged that many complaints of kidnapping had been made and, "to prevent such mischief," ordained that "all boys, maids and other persons which for the future shall be transported beyond the seas as servants shall, before their going a shipboard, have their covenants or indentures of service and apprenticeship inrolled in the Toizey (i.e. Council) Books." The enrollments were bound in leather covers to form two volumes, the first ending on 24th March 1662/3, and the second starting on 26th March 1663 and ending on 26th August 1679. Throughout that period of twenty five years the entries appear to be complete with the possible exception of 1673 when the middle months of the year seem unnaturally thin. From 1679 to 1686 (and with the exception of the years 1681-1683 inclusive for which only two entries survive) details of some, and possibly all, indentured servants destined for overseas were written into a rough book with the title Actions and Apprentices. Some of the entries duplicate and overlap in date those to be found in the registers, and the very untidy and scribbled notes suggest that the contents may not be comprehensive.
This decline from the previously high standards set by Bristol has an interesting sequel. Judge Jeffrey's "Bloody Assizes" took him in 1685 to Bristol where he condemned many hundreds involved in Monmouth's Rebellion to be transported from that port to Barbados. On the same occasion he took the opportunity of castigating local merchants and magistrates for their evil practices. A contemporary wrote: "There had been a usage among the aldermen and justices of the City where all persons, even common shop keepers, more or less trade to the American plantations, to carry over criminals... and to sell them for money. This was found to be a good trade but, not being content to take such felons as were convicts at their Assizes and Sessions, which produced but a few, they found out a shorter way which yielded a greater plenty of the commodity. What small rogues and pilfers were taken and brought [before the court] were put under terror of being hanged ... and some of the diligent officers attending instructed them to pray transportation as the only way to save them, and for the most part they did so. Then no more was done but the next alderman in course took one and another as their turns came, sometimes quarreling whose the last was, and sent them over [to America] and sold them." Jeffrey's formed the opinion that all the justices and aldermen (including the mayor) of Bristol were tainted by this practice. When he discovered that a boy from one of the city's prisons had been illegally transported he summoned Sir William Hayman, the then mayor, to the bar, accused him of complicity in the crime, fined him £1,000 and bound him and three others over to appear before the King's Bench on further charges of kidnapping the King's subjects for servitude overseas. But, runs the account, "the prosecution depended until the Revolution [of 1688] which made an amnesty; and the fright only, which was no small one, was all the punishment these juridical kidnappers underwent, and the gains acquired by so wicked a trade rested peacefully in their pockets."(1)
Of the total of just over 10,000 emigrants recorded in this book, all but a small handful were laborers, husbandmen or tradesmen, most from the West Country, the West Midlands, and Wales but with a fair sprinkling of intending emigrants from much further afield including London, Cambridge, Lancashire, Scotland, Ireland, France, and even from the American colonies themselves. While many undoubtedly arrived in Bristol having already indentured themselves to overseas service, there is good reason to suppose that a great number came there speculatively in order to seek a considerate master to sign them up on the spot. We get some idea of what terms a good indenture provided from certain of the earliest entries in the registers: a five or seven-year agreement would typically promise the servant, at the end of his or her service, a house, an axe, a year's provisions and double apparel, and sometimes a few acres of land. This, of course, was in addition to the provision of free passage. But it should not be assumed that all servants received such generous treatment nor indeed that all went voluntarily on shipboard; from surviving notes it is clear that errant children could be packed off to the colonies by their parents or guardians, and there is further evidence (see the entry for 20 July 1659) that passengers could be forcibly detained on board ship.
The amount of detail recorded against each name in the registers varied. At the beginning it was plainly the intention to identify the place of origin of each servant, but the practice probably became tiresome as the numbers increased and, by 1661, most entries were abbreviated to show only names of servants and masters, length of service contracted for, and destination. Matters improved again in 1670 when the names of ships were often included, but this custom also lapsed until late in 1675. Every effort has been made to provide an accurate transcription of all the salient information in the registers, and the only liberty taken has been to render the names of towns and villages into their modern form. To judge from some of the Curious entries encountered, the geographical knowledge of the scribes employed at Bristol was limited. There is no certain way of knowing whether they made their original entries by copying from the indentures or by writing down what they heard. The neat and orderly appearance of the two registers strongly suggests that they contain fair copies of entries taken from rough notes (in the same way that most parish registers were compiled) - thus increasing the chances of faulty recording but ameliorating the task of the latter-day transcriber!
The story of how the registers were discovered after 200 years in dusty obscurity is one beloved of archivists. When, in 1925, the Corporation of Bristol decided to rebuild the ancient Council House, the storerooms on the top floor were cleared of a mass of old records and, behind an ancient wall-press, were found the two volumes called Servants to Foreign Plantations. These provide a unique record of indentured emigrants who shipped from Bristol, then the premier English port for emigration. Within four years of their discovery R. Hargreaves-Mawdsley published a severely summarized transcription under the title of Bristol and America, and that slim volume has well served a whole generation of historians and genealogists. Nevertheless, researchers have long known that the book, despite four reprints, contains a large number of faulty transcriptions, omits much material essential to a proper comprehension of the subject, and lacks adequate indexes. It is those reasons which have dictated the preparation of the present volume.
Peter Wilson Coldham
Purley,
AMDG
Surrey.
Easter 1988.
(1.) Roger North, Lives of the North's, London, 1826, Vol.1,
p.250, Vol.11, p.24 fJ;