TOM PAINE
Abraham Lincoln became the 16th President of the United States in 1861. We all know the part he played in the Civil War, but the fact that his ancestor Samuel Lincoln emigrated to America from Norfolk is less well know. In 1637, while still in his teens, Samuel Lincoln settled in Hingham Massachusetts, a settlement some 23 miles south of Boston. Samuel had grown up in the village of Hingham in Norfolk, before being apprenticed as a weaver to Francis Lawes in Norwich. This was a time when Puritan feelings were at their height, especially in East Anglia, where the Reverend Matthew Wren (uncle of the architect Christopher Wren) was appointed bishop of Norwich in 1635. He tried to impose traditional elements of worship, such as bowing at the name of Jesus and the wearing of surplices by the clergy, on the churches of the diocese. These things were anathema to the Puritans, and many of them longed to escape to the New World, where the stifling influence of the Church of England would be absent. Francis Lawes was one could no longer tolerate this state of affairs, and within two years of Wren’s appointment he and his family – his wife, daughter and servant Samuel Lincoln – had embarked on the ship the John and Dorothy at Yarmouth for the voyage to New England. There he hoped that he could establish a simpler form of worship.
It was no accident that Samuel Lincoln chose to make his home in Hingham Massachusetts. His elder brother Thomas had emigrated to New England two years earlier in 1635, when the town of Hingham was incorporated. The settlement had been founded by a number of the better-off citizens of that village in Norfolk who, together with their clergy the Reverends Peck and Hobart, had sold their property off cheaply in England to make a new life for themselves in America. The poorer folk who were left behind in Norfolk suffered badly from the loss of so many wealthy inhabitants of the village, and petitioned Parliament for aid. Hingham Massachusetts is nothing like Hingham in Norfolk; for a start it is a coastal town, whereas the English village is deep in the interior of Norfolk. Until the coming of the railways many Norfolk people could live their whole lives without ever seeing the sea, in spite of the county being almost surrounded by water.
The most famous ship to take emigrants across the Atlantic was the Mayflower. She sailed from Rotherhithe in the Thames estuary to Devon in 1620 en route for Massachusetts. She had been built towards the beginning of the 1600s in Harwich in Essex. Although the Pilgrim Fathers came from all over southern England, several of them were from Norfolk.
Many generations separate Samuel Lincoln from his descendant Abraham, and George Washington’s ancestral home in Northamptonshire cannot really be called part of Eastern England, but one of the most influential of political voices of the American War of Independence belonged to a Norfolkman born and bred. Tom Paine was born to a weaver in Thetford (note how the wool trade dominated the lives of East Anglians for centuries) and he was educated at the Grammar School there. You can read more about Thomas Paine in another blog I wrote.
To get an idea of the more general way East Anglians were involved in the earliest settlement of the Thirteen Colonies look at all the place-names that we now associated with North America, but that originated in Norfolk. Yarmouth in Cape Cod was founded in 1639 and Norwich Connecticut in 1659. Norfolk itself means Norfolk Virginia to anyone from across the pond. Denver Colorado gets it name from James Denver rather than from the place in Norfolk, but indirectly it comes from the fenland village. Of course many other parts of England have left their mark on the map of North America, but Norfolk is up there with the best.
So far I have only mentioned those who travelled westwards to the New World, but in the Second World War more American air force personnel were stationed in Norfolk than anywhere else in the UK. In view of the strong ties we in Norfolk have with North America, I think we could do even more to foster tourism from the United States to our county.
JOSEPH MASON
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