Finding America in Oxfordshire

The pretty village of Stanton St. John lies in rolling countryside close to Oxford. We had intended a  family gathering in the city but there was a carnival in the suburb of Cowley and the Royal Henley Regatta was on the Thames not far away. Worse still, the British Formula1 Grand Prix was happening at Silverstone, right on our route to Oxford.

The Bath and Huntingdon Stevensons set out from their respective homes about the same time, but I insisted on an over-long diversion via Aylesbury that took us well south of the Grand Prix, and almost everything else, except tractors and bicycles. The Tour de France was happening in Yorkshire, maybe 180 miles away, but everyone who had a bike seemed to be out wobbling along the lanes. Inevitably the Bath team arrived in Oxford first and called us to say it was impossible. We scanned the map for alternatives and Hanna tried her good pub guide.

That's how we ended up at The Talkhouse in Stanton St. John. It took several trips around the village to find the abandoned Star Inn that lies at the end of a closed off lane where, tantalisingly, we could smell Sunday roasts from the empty car park. Sure enough, The Talkhouse was next door, but only accessible by driving a a mile around the village to the other side of the wall.

After a good lunch with seven of us sat around a big oak table, we needed tho stretch our legs. No-one fancied driving anywhere so we just strolled around the village, heading down-hill towards the church, past picture-postcard cottages made of Cotswold stone all with pretty gardens that spilled out flowers in all directions.

The church-yard was obviously managed with wildlife in mind. Lime-loving flowers sprouted in every corner and in strips where the grass had been deliberately left long. Flowers attract insects, of course, especially bees, but I was pleased to see my first garden tiger moths for years. You can't miss them because they are big like butterflies, they fly in the day and they are coloured red, black and white. we also saw marbled white butterflies that the Bath Stevensons know from the horse racing course above the city on the edge of the Cotswolds.

Looking across from the graveyard we saw an imposing stone house that we took to be the old vicarage. A plaque above the door stated that this was the birthplace of John White (1575 - 1648), Fellow of New College Oxford and chief founder of the Colony of Massachusetts.

Now, Mainers will tell you that founding Massachusetts is not a thing to be proud of.  For one thing, as the Bee-gees found out, it doesn't rhyme with anything.

The rivalry between the states in New England dates back to White's time, which was dominated by religious and political rivalries between Puritans and the established church that we remember as Roundheads versus Cavaliers,  Parliament versus Royalists or Cromwell versus King Charles the First, that climaxed in the English Civil Wars of 1642 to 1651. Troubled times in England, and a good time to head out for the New World.

My textbook knowledge of the period tells me that Parliament dominated in the East of England, and the Royalists held the West Country. It seems that the Puritans who settled in Massachusetts called their towns Boston, Cambridge, Ipswich and Haverhill after the East Anglian places they left behind. Your typical Puritan was not well suited to settling the land but they had good connections back home and soon carved up the rest of new England between themselves. The people who came and cut down the trees and made a living directly from the land were farmers and fishermen from the West Country; places like Gloucester, Wells, Exeter, Plymouth and Biddeford, and they were largely not Puritans. The next wave came from Protestant Northern ireland and Lowland Scotland, hence Derry and Londonderry in New Hampshire and Belfast in Maine. It seems the Scot s came too late to name many places in New England.

All that is an over-simplification. The Civil War rampaged around England at an alarming rate and it seems that Royalists and Puritans could be found everywhere, even in the same village and possibly in the same house. Oxford, which is north-west of London, was at one time the King's HQ while the colleges were an academic centre for Puritanism.

Dorchester, Boston MA

After his university days, our man John White married a girl from Peterborough near Cambridge and settled down in Dorset where he became the Rector of Holy Trinity Church in the county town of Dorchester. He was not active politically but concerned himself with the reform of his church, but he had other fish to fry as well.

White set about founding a colony around a new settlement to be called Dorchester. It is now a sprawling suburb, just south of Boston. If you have landed at Logan Airport, you may well have flown over it. His son became a trader in Boston, but John White never visited the New World at all. Prince Rupert's cavalry raided his library and many of his papers were lost but, despite the wars he remained quite a wealthy man.