Alice Martin Bishop

Timeline to Martha’s murder: In 1639 Alice marries George Clark and has a daughter, Abigail.  In 1644, Martha is born, George Clark dies and Alice remarries Richard Bishop in December of that year.  In 1645, Damaris Bishop is born.  On Wednesday, July 22, 1648, Alice murders her four year-old daughter, Martha Clark.

At the end of this blog are the original Plymouth Colony court records pertaining to the Clark murder inquest and AMB trial.  But I wanted to deconstruct the day’s events into individual pieces for examination.  Here goes:

1. The Plymouth Coroners are called to the Bishop home after Rachel Ramsden runs to her parent’s home to tell them she believes four year-old Martha is dead.
2. Coroners enter the Bishop home and see “much blood” at the foot of ladder (that leads to upstairs loft where Clark-Bishop girls presumably slept).
3. Coroners go up ladder to “upper chamber” and find a four year-old female in her shift on her left side.  Injury is several deep cuts across throat, severing windpipe.
4. The knife is found beside the dead child.
5. Alice immediately confesses to all five Coroners present that she killed Martha.
6. Rachel Ramsden, the neighbor, testifies that she came to Bishop house on an errand and noticed Martha sleeping in loft with no apparent injury.
7. Rachel testifies that AMB gave her a kettle and asked her to fetch buttermilk from the Winslow home.
8. Rachel testifies that AMB appeared normal when she left for the buttermilk but “sad and dumpish” when she returned.
9. When Rachel returned, she immediately asked Martha about the blood at the foot of the ladder.
10. Alice points to the upper chamber and “bid [Rachel to] look.”
11. Rachel is too afraid to look as she surmised that Martha was dead and instead ran to tell her parents.
12. Rachel tells Coroners (where and when?) that the reason she thought Martha was dead was that when she returned and saw the blood, she looked up to the loft and “the child was not there.”
13. On August 1, 1648 AMB again confesses to murdering Martha and “was sorry for it.”

As horrific as the events seem now, there is no evidence that July 22, 1648 did not begin like any other summer day in the colony.  The Bishop household was up early – at least Alice, Richard and Abigail who had chores to tend to.  Perhaps Alice let Damaris and Martha sleep in.  Maybe older Abigail was sent to fetch water and Richard had left for firewood collecting or farm chores.  Alice would prepare a morning meal like cornmeal porridge.

I have assumed Martha’s murder happened in the morning for the following reasons:

1. Martha was still sleeping and in her shift (although she could have been taking an afternoon nap on a hot summer day).
2. Rachel came over on an errand and then Martha sent her off to fetch some buttermilk for what I presume is meal preparation.
3. There is no mention of Abigail or Richard in the home at the time of the murder and they were likely doing their outside chores in the cooler hours of the day.

Like most of us nosey genealogists, I am left with a lot of questions from the scant “eyewitness” testimony we have (of which, technically, Rachel and the Coroners do not count).

1. Where were Abigail and Damaris and why were they not attacked by their mother?  Remember there is nothing “unique” about Martha from what we know: she shared a common father with her sister, Abigail. Martha was not the only female child nor was she the youngest or oldest.
2. Thinking back to the crime scene:  How high from the floor was the loft whereby Rachel could see the sleeping Martha the first time but could not when she returned?
3. What do we know about Rachel (Eaton) Ramsden?  She is also a Mayflower daughter (of Francis Eaton and Christian Penn) and married to Joseph Ramsden (aka Ramsdell).
4. Berkin (33) speaks of how New England women were often in their neighbor’s home to borrow items and visit.  Surely, Alice knew there was a good chance that someone could walk in while she was murdering Martha or that she’d have a great deal of explaining to do once Rachel returned.  For what reason did Alice make no effort to place blame elsewhere or hide evidence?

A great deal of this blog from here forward deals with the question of WHY. Why did Alice savagely murder her young daughter and can we imagine any factors that led to her decision to do so?

Shurtleff’s Records of the Colony of New Plymouth in New England (155-1861) have the following entry (vol. 2, p 132) for 1 August 1648 (which I have adjusted into contemporary English):

*These showeth, that on July the 22nd, 1648, we, whose names are underwritten, were sworn by Mr. Bradford, Governor, to make inquiry of the death of the child of Alice Bishop, the wife of Richard Bishop. 

We declare, that coming into the house of the said Richard Bishop, we saw at the foot of a ladder which leadeth into an upper chamber, much blood; and going up all of us into the chamber, we found a woman child, of about four years of age, lying in her shift uon her left cheek, with her throat cut with [numerous] gashes cross ways, the wind pipe cut and stuck into the throat downward, and a bloody knife lying by the side of the child, with which knife all of us judged, and the said Allis hath confessed to five of us at one time, that she murdered the child with the said knife.

JOHN HOWLAND, JAMES COLE, JAMES HURST, GYELLS RICKARD, ROBERT LEE, RICHARD SPARROW, JOHN SHAWE, THOMAS POPE, FRANCIS COOKE, FRANCIS BILLINGTON, JOHN COOKE, WILLIAM NELSON (petty jury names)

Rachel, the wife of Joseph Ramsden, aged about 23 years, being examined, said that coming to the house of Richard Bishop upon an errand, the wife of the said Richard Bishop requested her to go fetch her some buttermilk at Goodwife Winslows, and gave her a kettle for that purpose, and she went and did it; and before she went, she saw the child lying abed asleep, to her best discerning, and the woman was as well as she hath known her at any time; but when she came she found her sad and dumpish; she asked her what blood was that she saw at the ladder’s foot; she pointed unto the chamber, and bid her look, but she perceived she had killed her child, and being afraid, she refused, and ran and told her father and mother.

Moreover, she said the reason that moved her to think she had killed her child was that when she saw the blood she looked on the bed, and the child was not there.

Taken upon oath by me, WILLIAM BRADFORD, the day and year above written.

At a Court of Assistant held at New Plymouth, the first of August, 1648, before Mr. Bradford, Governor, Mr. Coliar, Captain Miles Standish, and Mr. William Thomas, gentlemen, Assistants, the said Alice, being examined, confessed she did commit the aforesaid murder, and is sorry for it.

(From Shurtleff, vol 2, p 124): The General Court convened  4 October 1648 where Alice “was indicted for felonious murder by he committed upon Martha Clark, her own child, the fruit of her own body.”  Governor Bradford and his General Assistants were all present and her jurors were: Josias Winslow, Sr., Thomas Shillingsworth. Anthony Snowe, Richard Sparrow, Gabriell Fallowell, Joshua Prat, Gyells Rickard, John Shaw, Sr., Steven Wood, William Mericke, William Brete and John Willis.

The Plymouth court records read:

These found the said Alice Bishop guilty of the said felonious murdering of Martha Clarke aforesaid; and so she had the sentence of death pronounced against her [and therefore] to be taken from the place where she was to the place from whence she came, and thence to the place of execution, and there to be hanged by the neck until her body is dead which accordingly was executed.

One can only imagine the reputation Richard held in Plymouth after his stepdaughter’s grisly murder by her mother.  Less than six months after Alice’s execution, Bishop went before the Plymouth court (6 March 1649) for stealing a neighbor’s spade. He was judged guilty and sentenced to both sit in the stocks and replace the spade prior to the June court or be whipped (Swift, 15).

By 1654, Bishop was in Eastham and had tracts of land allotted to him. There, in 1670, he was accused of stealing fleece from the property of George Crisp. Bishop was ordered to pay thirty shillings. He then moved to Piscataway, NJ where his daughter, Damaris, had married William Sutton.  He sold his Plymouth land to Benjamin Church – a hero of the Indian wars in the colony.  William Sutton was a Quaker leader in NJ (Monnette, 792).

Richard Bishop was born 5 December 1612 in Dorset, England.  He married the Widow Clark on his birthday in 1644.  According to Savage’s Genealogical Dictionary (1860), there are numerous Bishops (Job, Edward, Henry, James, etc.) in the Boston-Ipswich-Salem area beginning families near the time our Richard Bishop was settling down with Alice Martin.

Richard Bishop was in Plymouth Colony as early as November 1637 because he hired himself out as a servant to Truelove Brewster (of the Mayflower) for a twelve month period (an unusually brief time). By 1643, Bishop had relocated to the actual town of Plymouth because he is listed in their records as permitted to bear arms (Stratton, 440).

Savage references two Richard Bishops and it is a challenge to keep them separate (see Savage beginning on 183).  The Richard Bishop listed on p. 185 who dies 30 September 1674 is not our Bishop.  Instead, we are referring to the second Richard Bishop listed: “Richard [Bishop], Plymouth, was unhapp. m. 5 Dec. 1644, Alice wid. of George Clark, and she was hang. Oct. 1648 for murder of Martha Clark, her ch.”  It is remarkable that Savage outright categorizes the marriage as “unhappy” since we have no evidence about the Bishop-Martin union.  Is Savage making a presumption about the marriage because AMB was a murderer?

A word of caution to Marge Waterfield’s The Sutton Family: Allied Lines Bishop, Bonham, Conger, Dunham, Fuller, Lothrop.  She claims Richard Bishop came on the Abigail in 1628 and was a “first settler of Duxbury but was living in Plymouth in 1628” (10).  This is certainly not our Richard Bishop despite numerous claims that it is.  I find no evidence that Richard came on any of the ships that arrived in 1628 although those passenger lists are incomplete. 

Berkin notes that a third of early Puritan passengers were single men (24) but we do not have all of the names to adjust for that figure.  Bishop nor George Clark are named in the 1623 Division of Plymouth Land – not surprising but nor does he appear in the 1633 or 1634 Plymouth tax list (again, no mention of Clark).  I am left with two unresolved issues: Did Bishop come over as a servant and therefore not recorded on a ship’s passenger list?  Two, if Bishop was not yet a freedman in 1634 (when he does not appear on tax list), it may mean he did not arrive to Plymouth Colony until after 1634 but before 1637.  Again, relocating servants and transients coming to Plymouth Colony were documented before the 1630’s (Stratton, 180 and 421). 

The experience of being a servant and/or apprentice is likely common between Clark, Bishop and Martin.  Most males began formal apprenticeships by the age of fourteen and then struck out on their own professionally by twenty-one (Morgan 68).  I have yet to find a profession for Clark or Martin.  Apprenticeships often required parental support if nothing more to make those arrangements for their children and Clark and Bishop lacked these connections.  But servants – a working class not as esteemed as apprentice – were not limited to domestic and agricultural labor.  They also worked in small industry, scouting and hunting.  Those who had served well were likely sent on in their new lives with tools or other instruments to help with their new vocation (Morgan 118).  Many were also promised  land by the Plymouth Colony government (Stratton, 183).

A word about indentured servitude which is the probable situation Clark and Bishop found themselves in as young, landless, family-less men:  Indenture servitude is a “contract committing one party to make a series of payments to or on behalf of the other — settlement of a transport debt, subsistence over the (negotiable) contractual term, a final payment in kind or, less usually, cash at the conclusion of the term.  In exchange, the payee agrees to be completely at the disposal of the payor…for the performance of work, for the term agreed” (Tomlins, 6).  For our historical recreation, indentured servitude seems apropos to Bishop and Clark who likely had expensive ocean passages to pay off and new community connections to make.  Conversely, apprentices tended to come from families with greater resources to support that child in receiving long-term vocational education.

Unclear as to the causes of George Clark’s death, we know for certain 1644 was an eventful year for Alice.  She buried a husband, gave birth to a second daughter (Martha) and remarried.  According to Morgan, “a widow in New England inherited a life estate in at least a third of all the land which her husband had possessed at any time during the marriage” (58). This made widows appealing marriage prospects and, because AMB had but two young daughters, we can assume she inherited all of Clark’s land and wealth.  That being said, all of Clark’s “wealth” might have been minimal indeed. Second marriages were not uncommon and widows and widowers faced social and economic pressures to remarry quickly.  Therefore, Alice’s marriage within the same calendar year of her first husband’s death may not have seemed hasty to the community intent on their divinely-called population plan.  If only I could determine when in 1644 and how George Clark died…

Certainly I have many questions about the nature of the Bishop-Martin marriage simply because, less than four years in, Alice is murdering one of her children.  First of all, we do not know if there were any other adults in the house although it appears not.  Richard and Alice would have had no parents to share a home with and there is no mention of a servant.  Therefore, in the first years of their marriage, their small home would have had two adults and three young girls.  Some genealogist claim Martha had a son (James) – born closely before or after Damaris Bishop – but I have yet to find conclusive evidence.

Because there is no mention of Richard Bishop serving in some civic capacity and plenty of mention of him breaking the law after his wife’s execution, I do question what sort of person he was.  Perhaps, the most damning conclusion we can make about Richard Bishop is that he was poor.  His family, like everyone else in the colony, struggled to keep themselves fed.  Perhaps he was a Puritan, perhaps he was a ne’er-do-well who trekked his way to Plymouth looking for land, a wife and ensuing stability.  We just don’t know.

We can add context to the Martin-Bishop marriage, however.  In 1624 Puritan William Whately had this to say about marriage:

It comes to pass, that marriage proveth to many, just as the stocks to the drunkard; into which when his head was warm with wine and ale, he put his foot laughingly and with merriment; but a little after (having slept out his wine and cooled his head with a nap) he longs as much to get it out again. Hence it is that divers’ houses are none other but even very fencing schools, wherein the sex sexes seem to have met together for nothing more but to try masteries.

This conveys that Puritans did not believe marriage, by design, was harmonious even if it was for the greater good.  Marriage did not always grow easier with time but rather just settled into a tolerance of one another.  That being said, there is ample evidence of happy Plymouth Colony marriages and writers who thought that marriage should contain bonds of tenderness and respect.

Certainly, colonial marriages were patriarchal-centered where husbands made decisions about finances, housing and expectations of all familial relationships.  But husbands were not universally dictators and wives were not universally submissive.  Berkin (31) writes that “[M]en were expected to reach downward and overlook women’s spiritual, physical, and social inferiority, while women were supposed to reach upward and acknowledge without resentment men’s superiority and power.  That some couples sought and sustained loving marriages cannot be doubted.  That others did not is equally unsurprising.”

Nonetheless, Plymouth men knew where they stood.  From the landing of the Mayflower until the 1650’s, there was but one single (English) woman for every four single men (Berkin, 31).  Even if Alice was widowed and fearing for her future as a single mother, she must have known she had more than one prospect to consider – unless there was something about her reputation that made her undesirable to most of the colony’s bachelors.  More likely, Richard was available and willing (and, to his credit, to raise two daughters by his former neighbor) and, as such, marriage seemed timely and good sense.

Again, there are no records to indicate the Martin-Bishop marriage was in dire straits.  That does not translate to it being a happy home.   Physical spousal abuse was considered a criminal act in most cases in the Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay colonies.  This is not to say that domestic violence did not occur often and repeatedly in these homes – just that the courts did not automatically excuse domestic violence.  If we surmise that Alice was assaulted in her home, then we would have to consider the same for her girls.  We do not know that Richard was a wife beater.  We know he was, later in life, a repeat thief.  It is not fair to assume he was a violent husband and stepfather due to his later criminal activity.

I expect the home was a chaotic one with a mother worn out with cycles of pregnancies and breastfeeding, not enough nutrition and endless housework demands.  The towns of Plymouth Colony were not quaint hamlets.  They were isolated communities with no stores, little time or place for entertainment and a moral code that must have, at times, put people at odds with their desires and needs.  Mix in Indian wars and raids, rattlesnakes, bears and hellish winters.   Richard and Alice would rise early each day to build fires, fetch water, mends clothes and structures, scrounge for meals – not leaving much time for romance or even friendship-building.  Their marriage was challenging even before we consider the possibilities of domestic abuse and mental illness.

A final note… I presume, by the last name bestowed upon her, that Martha was the legitimate child of the Clark-Martin union.  But we do not know if Damaris was conceived before Alice Martin married Richard Bishop – they married in December of 1644 and she was born at some point in 1645.  There are numerous court records of women conceiving children (not always willingly) outside of wedlock.

In January 1638, the year Alice turned twenty-two, she married George Clark from England (born ca. 1620).  Clark emigrated to Barbados from London on the Falcon at the age of fifteen.  Almost all of the Falcon’s 70+ male and female passengers were between thirteen and twenty-four and came as indentured or convict laborers.  No other Clarks were on board and I presume he was a young man left to his own devices when he boarded (or was forced to board) the Falcon in 1635.

Barbados had been settled by the English 1620’s and wealthier settlers expanded their land ownings to the new Carolina colony in North America.  What is likely is that George, along with many of his peers, emigrated to more northern America as slave trade began to dominate the island’s plantation system.  We do not know what brought Clark to Plymouth and perhaps “Barbados George Clark” is the incorrect match to AMB but I have yet to find evidence of other George Clarks that would be an age-appropriate mate (see Notes at end).

George was four years younger than Alice and one may question why she married a relatively new and younger Plymouth resident rather than within the community that raised her.  Perhaps, George Martin was simply the best choice before her. We do not know how Clark and Martin met.  All single persons were required to live with a family, often as servants (Thompson, 83).  Since parents played a role in suggesting and approving potential spouses for their child, who made the suggestion of George Clark to Alice Martin?  Was he a familiar in her daily life?  (Morgan, 82-83).

We are left to our imaginations considering the nature of the Clark-Martin marriage (January 22, 1638, Barnstable, Plymouth Colony).  They were married for just five years and there are not court records indicating marital discord.  Abigail Clark was born in 1640 or 1642 and Martha was born in 1644, the same year George Clark died of unknown causes. 

There has been much made over the frigidity of colonial American marriages and it is true colonists’ romantic bonds were less sentimentalized notions than we currently hold.  Marital love, however, was more than a lucky by-product of the civil union (as Puritans believed marriages should not been a religious ceremony).  To love one’s spouse tenderly and above all others was an obligation owed to God (Morgan, 47).  We can presume George and Alice felt like they were well-suited to one another in terms of social hierarchy.  The expectation in Plymouth was that one would strive to marry within their own class, even when the pickings were slim (Morgan, 55).  Perhaps both were young adults who had just completed apprenticeships and no family to claim in the New World.

I am reminded of what John Cotton preached about women in 1694:  “Women are Creatures without which there is no comfortable Living for man; it is true what is said of women can be said of Governments: That bad ones are better than none” (Morgan, 29). Marriage was an expectation held to all Plymouth men.  They were called by a higher authority to raise families and, perhaps more importantly, being a family man leveraged resource allotment– certainly indicating the need for a home, livestock and land.

In 1643, George Clark was listed as “able to bear arms in the colony of New Plymouth” – on the same date as Richard Bishop who would become AMB’s second husband.  This indicates that both Clark and Bishop were freedmen by that point.  

Notes: The following references to a George Clark are certainly not AMB’s Clark: Henry Whittenmore’s  Genealogical Guide to the Early Settlers of America (1898) lists two entries for George Clark. The first resided in Milord in 1639 with occupation of husbandman, had seven children (including a son named George) and did not die until 1690.  There is a second George Clark of Roxbury, MA who was a “fellmonger” but alive in Boston in 1690’s (see p. 89.  There is no evidence that connects George Clark to a Richard Clarke, a sailor on the Mayflower.  A Thomas Clarke is repeatedly cited in Shurttleff but seems to hold not relation to George Clark.  A George Clarke lodged a property dispute against Edward Dotey in 1638 in which Clark was awarded damages.  Because Clark would have been young to be demanding land, one does have to question if this “Barbados George Clark.” 

It is possible both George Clark and Richard Bishop emigrated directly to the Massachusetts Bay Colony (MBC) in the 1630’s.  As Stratton notes (180), by the middle of that decade servants were leaving both MBC and England and getting hired on in Plymouth. Quoting Governor Bradford “so many wicked persons and profane people” had come to his neck of the woods and yet were a necessary “evil”” since they tended to stay and raise families of their own once completing servitude (Stratton, 184).  Men like Clark and Bishop may have been drawn to Plymouth Colony’s practice of awarding land tracts to male newcomers who successfully completed the servantship/apprenticeship (Stratton, 183).  Stratton also notes that transients were noticed in Plymouth Colony as early as 1627 (421).

 Provisions were made for eldest Clark daughter, Abigail, after her mother’s execution.  On 1 May 1649, George Clark’s home and land were sold for her benefit (PCR 2 and Savage, 393).

By November 1621 (the first Thanksgiving), Alice had been orphaned for nearly a year and was just five years old.  We do not know who took her in or whether they did so as a daughter or a servant-in-training.  The distinction may be a moot point as almost all Plymouth children were sent off to other families before adolescence to begin apprenticeships as servants.   There are limited names to consider as AMB’s “step-in family” because fewer than a dozen adult females had survived. Just seven homes had been completed that first year and families as well as unattached males were forced by circumstances into communal living (Hodgson, 88).  The next ship to arrive on their shore, The Fortune, arrived November 1621 inspiring the day of thanks giving.

Again, I wonder what psychological damage had been done to Alice.  We can assume every Pilgrim was suffering from varying degrees of exhaustion, fearfulness, depression and loss.  But Alice had lost more than her fair share by the age of five.  She certainly did not buy into the utopian vision of this voyage – she boarded the Mayflower simply because that is where her family had taken her.  And then they all died leaving her in a land of strange people, foods and sounds, absent of housing, family and creature comforts.

Philosopher Dan Putman speaks of a distinct type of courage, psychological courage, which is when one risks their “own psychological stability to bring about a positive change in your life.”  Perhaps adult Pilgrims understood they would face hardship and anguish for the sake of their faith and new homes but, as a child, Alice neither made that choice nor was mature enough to manage it (See Pury).  For all we know, Alice’s utopia was her home back in England. 

We do not know if Alice was adopted by a loving family, by a religiously devout one that influenced her worldview later in life, or if she was taken in grudgingly as another mouth to feed.  But, by the absence of her name in any Plymouth Court Records (PCR) or other colonial documents, perhaps we can hope her childhood was without any further traumatic incidents. 

Almost everyone in Plymouth lived at some point with three families: their family of origin, the family to which they served (such as in an apprenticeship) and the family they created through marriage (Thompson 157). Within AMB’s lifetime, New England law required that every parent find a vocation or skill as well as a family for their child (Morgan 66).  Young children had full days of chores especially during sowing and harvest times (Philbrick 150, Morgan 66-68).  While Puritan children were expected to work, literacy was highly valued because every Pilgrim should know how to read the Bible (Moran 31).  It is a misconception to think this community saw children as no more than miniature adults.  Childhood, especially those seven and younger, was seen as a distinctive age (Moran 29).

By the age of ten, Alice would have begun formal domestic skills training – churning butter, weaving, and so forth – because the only vocations before her were servant, wife and mother (Morgan 66-68).  Interestingly for the AMB case, orphaned children, by the age of fourteen, were given the right to choose their own guardians.   But again, we have no record of where Alice was before adulthood.

As such, we do not know the circumstances of the home in which she served as a domestic worker.  Parents were actively discouraged from permitting child servants to become play mates with their own children (Hemphill, 281). Relationships between master and servant could be physically abusive.  Thompson describes numerous instances where masters and mistresses inflicted graphic beatings on minor servants and females also endured sexual assaults.  This treatment was legal as long as the beatings did not result in permanent injury or death (Hoffer, 46).   If Alice found herself in one of these homes, to whom could she have turned?  Would it have made any difference?

Hemphill makes an important point about these Pilgrim servants:

It is possible that the harsher extreme of corporal punishment seemingly prescribed for servants than for one’s own progeny helps to explain the Puritan habit of placing their youth in others’ households.  This “putting out” system may have been a method of disciplining young people and enforcing authority over them, by sending them to someone who would beat them harder than a parent would or should.  Historians have wondered why the Puritans put their offspring out to service; and while they have offered several suggestions, none of the economic arguments suffices on its own because all classes engaged in both placing and receiving youth (281).

Hoffer concurs:

The right to discipline children and servants went almost unquestioned.  Behind the willingness to punish children lay the sanction of traditional disengagement between parents and small children.  Some New England families may have been exceptions to the rule, but for many children life was brutal, nasty, and short (46).

Most Plymouth women married (for the first time) near their twentieth birthday but Alice did not marry until she was twenty-three.   Perhaps, as a woman with no wealth of her own or a family seeing her married off, Alice enjoyed her independence or bemoaned her lack of prospects (Stratton notes that some women served as apprentices for more than a decade, p. 182).  Certainly, she would have known every man in the town of Plymouth and the  unattached men from nearby communities (see Wessagusset, below) often had less than desirable reputations following them. 

Alice married her first husband, George Clark in 1639 and had her first daughter, Abigail, within the next few years (I have conflicting birth dates of 1640 and 1642).  Berkin provides clues about AMB’s life: “Women born in New England before 1650 [AMB’s contemporaries] thus married young, bore their last child at thirty-seven, and gave birth to an average of seven children.”  Therefore, Alice was on the trajectory for expected family growth when she murdered her second child in 1644.

There is nothing to indicate that George Clark and Richard Bishop were wealthy men and both had scrapes with the law and neighbors.  But in a town where there were no stores for decades and land was parceled out, not purchased, financial wealth did not matter as much as allegiance and reputation.  Once again, there is a maddening lack of information to recreate AMB’s experience.  Perhaps she married these men because they were the only ones who asked for her hand, maybe they had genuine affection for one another – maybe both are true.  In the case of the Bishop marriage, there is some possibility Alice was already pregnant with Damaris.  How Richard Bishop and George Clark were viewed in the Plymouth Colony is left to a few pertinent records that are discussed later.

Determining where Richard Bishop came from is a frustrating exercise of conflicting information but George Clark’s emigration is an outright mystery.  More on both men in subsequent entries.  But one tantalizing possibility is that soon after Plymouth was established, Thomas Weston – one of the Mayflower’s primary financial backers – decided to establish another settlement nearby.  This settlement was known as Wessagusset and was more commercially-oriented.  Problem was this entirely single male community could not feed itself despite their grand dreams of dominating the fur and fishing trades. Almost seventy men arrived in 1622, most gravely ill from the voyage and a lack of provisions.    By 1623, men had begun abandoning it and moving to Plymouth.  Possibly Clark and Bishop were founding members of this ill-fated colonial frat.

When Alice was not busy tending for her young children and or housekeeping, she was expected to help in the fields and with livestock (Berkin, 27).  I was struck by the fact that the account of Martha’s murder makes no mention of a domestic servant being present.  Maybe the new Bishop household could not yet afford household help. 

The good…housewife not only prepared meals for immediate consumption but also replenished supplies, …tended the gardens and preserved its crops, raised the animals and slaughtered them, spun cloth and mended clothing… [Then] a woman struggled to maintain her family in a single-story cottage, whose one room was refuge for men, women, children, and barnyard animals.  In addition to cooking, milking, and baking, women on the frontier forged for food in forests, marshes, and streams, in order to add fruit and fish to the family’s diet (Berkin, 29).

Plymouth in the time of AMB’s adulthood was still a frightening place. Murderous interactions followed by a war with the Perquots in the 1630’s made Plymouth feel like a vulnerable outpost at times more than an experiment in harmonious, holy living.

The mystery remains as to who Alice Martin Bishop’s parents are. However, I believe the primary source evidence points to Christopher Martin and Marie Prower as Alice’s parents.  This is not simply to claim for her the “glamour” of being a Mayflower passenger.  Rather, there is no other logical explanation for how Alice Martin ended up in Plymouth Colony in the 1630’s. 

It’s important to look at the primary source clues we do have and develop commonsense conclusions from that:

Great Burstead Records: There is no baptism record for AMB or her parents but there is one for Nathaniel Martin born 1609 and identified as the son of Martin and Prower.  Nathaniel and Christopher Martin are documented up until 1620 in church records.

Mayflower Passenger Documentation:  Nathaniel has never been identified by name (or by the designation of “son,” “child,” etc.) being on ship.  The names that can be absolutely connected to the Martins are Solomon Prower (Marie’s son from her first marriage) and John Langemore – both of whom likely came as indentured servants to Martin and died the first winter.

The Mayflower lists are not perfect documents, notably those that are secondary sources or operate from anecdotal evidence.  For example, when I read Bradford’s passenger I see several unnamed persons: Carver’s maid servant, a brother of Richard More who traveled with the Brewsters, Thomas Tinker’s wife and son, James Chilton’s unmarried daughter,   Edward Fuller’s unnamed wife,  John Turner’s unnamed two sons.  Isn’t it just as likely that Bradford (and others) failed to list every person on board especially when lists are built around family units vs. individual entries?

One Plymouth expert, Eugene Aubrey Stratton, gives fair warning to those of us “filling in” historical gaps when he writes, “All in all Bradford’s list has held up quite well to the test of time, and anyone contradicting the inclusion or exclusion of a given name on or from the list must assumes the burden of proof from other original records (p.405).” 

Bradford’s Journal (aka Of Plimoth Plantation): “Journal” is not an accurate term because Bradford wrote this history of early Plymouth in retrospect.  These were not personal entries written within days events occurred.  Most significantly, Bradford’s “Increasings and Decreasings” – a list of what happened to the Mayflower passengers – was written a quarter of a century after the Martins’ deaths near 1650.  Stratton also makes this argument (p. 405).

This span between events and writing is significant.  I question the likelihood that Bradford accurately remembered every passenger especially someone he would have had no interactions with:  a four year-old girl.  We can reasonably expect that Bradford documented best the lives of the people who mattered most to Plymouth’s longevity.  A minor female, orphan of the less-than-admired and quickly deceased Christopher Martin, may have simply been forgotten. 

But there is another angle to be considered.  What if Governor Bradford, who had just concluded presiding over Alice’s trial, decided to omit from his beloved Plymouth’s history one of its most notorious citizen?  What if Bradford chose to forget the whole sorry lot of Martins by claiming they had all died off before settling on shore? 

As Stratton explains,  “Bradford’s list [Increasings and Decreasings] is actually two lists, the first a grouping of people who were on the Mayflower, usually under a head of family, followed by a repetition of the same names and sequencing with additional comments on who was still living, …who had died, what had happened to some, and their ‘increasings…’” (p. 405).

Bradford’s documentation of the Martin family says only two things:

First, “Christopher Martin, and his wife, and .2. Servants, Salomon Prower and John Langemore.” The odd punctuation around “2” has been open to interpretation.  Does this mean Bradford was specifying Martin brought along two servants or that Martin and wife came with two unnamed persons – whom we could presume were Alice and Nathaniel – as well as Solomon and John?  I give credence to the first scenario that Bradford found it necessary to attach these single, adult males to a family as this exact practice would become Plymouth protocol in the early years. 

Secondly, Bradford summarized the Martins’ fate as: “Mr. Martin, he and all his died in the first infection, not long after the arrival.”  We know that Solomon and Marie Prower, John Langemore and Christopher Martin all died within months of one another.  If the Martins had brought the two children Nathaniel and Alice, then is it possible that the son died on board, Alice survived, and Bradford failed to recall these details? 

I have seen several genealogists claim that Nathaniel surely traveled to Plymouth with his parents even though there isn’t proof that happened.  If we presume that the Martins brought their minor son along, then can we not make the same presumption they brought his little sister as well?

If we believe Alice was born in 1616, then why would her family have left her behind in England?  To leave behind a son who could emigrate later with provisions, continue the family business, maintain ownership of the home or work his own career — that makes sense.  But by what benefit would they have to leave Alice behind – when they took Nathaniel?  Alice would grow to be her mother’s helpmate, possibly align the Martins with a profitable Plymouth family through marriage, etc.

Sadly, Alice Martin Bishop is an undocumented American.  We have no birth or baptism record, no travel documents and no indication where and with whom she lived before her first marriage to George Clark.  It is all but certain we will never conclusively establish AMB’s lineage.  But theories of alternative parents just don’t make any sense (notably Francis Martin and Prudence Deacon) because they lack any corroborating evidence.

Nonetheless, the Martin-Prower theory is problematic.  The baptism of Nathaniel is recorded but why not his sister’s?  This is not simply a matter of “daughters don’t count” as the baptisms of several Great Burstead daughters are recorded.  But the more significant mystery is why there are no children between Nathaniel’s 1609 birth and Alice’s supposed in 1616.  Seven years is a long time for a seventeenth century couple to go without having children especially since we knew that Christopher worked in the same town in which he lived. 

For those, like me, who are comfortable concluding the Christopher Martin and Marie Prower were Alice’s parents, we are still left with questions about who raised her after she was orphaned on the Mayflower.  There are numerous examples of children from one family being raised by another.  Bradford’s Mayflower lists identify children being placed with Puritans in 1620 with the knowledge they would be traveling to the New World colonies.  Governor John Winthrop of Massachusetts Bay Colony lists in his memoirs that children orphaned on ship were frequently adopted by other families (even more intriguing is his claim that English families took in orphan children of nearby Native American families).  Certainly we know that families took on others’ children for labor needs as well as formal apprenticeships (see Winthrop’s journal, Morgan p. 76-78 and Philbrick p. 85 where the names of several adolescent orphans are given but not those of younger children).

A few notes on my research …I made every effort to access Great Burstead records over the internet but relied heavily on Richard Carpenter’s brochure about Christopher Martin’s life.

I scoured online passenger lists for Plymouth/Massachusetts Bay emigration in the 1620’s and 1630’s.  Certainly, these documents are incomplete and some ships’ lists did not survive. 

I quickly came to question two things – whether Nathaniel was every on board the Mayflower and that Bradford’s memory was entirely reliable.

Perhaps, AMB’s story has not been recreated in a scholarly format because her ancestry is so murky.  I found very few scholars who would outright claim she was a Martin/Prower daughter.  Two of these are Patricia Scott Deetz and James Deetz of the Plymouth Colony Archive Project at: http://www.histarch.uiuc.edu/plymouth/Maydeaths.html.

Alice Martin Bishop’s (AMB) childhood is as unknown as the circumstances of her death are certain.  Genealogists often cite her birth as 1616 in Essex, England but there is no birth record or conclusive data to determine who her parents were. In genealogy forums, there is considerable debate whether Christopher Martin (1575-1621)/Marie Prower (1577-1621), Mayflower passengers, were her parents.  After doing considerable research of primary documents, I am operating from the premise that Alice Martin was the daughter of Christopher Martin and Marie Prower.  I could, for the record, be wrong. But I have yet to find better evidence for how she ended up in Plymouth Colony in the mid-1630’s with the last name Martin.  Here is a more complete discussion of the AMB lineage issue.

Christopher Martin and Marie Prower were likely born between 1577 and 1582 in or near Great Burstead, Essex.  Richard Carpenter’s fourteen page pamphlet makes the best use of Great Burstead records to reconstruct Martin’s personal and professional life. Martin and Prower married 26 February 1607 after Marie’s first husband died (she had a son from that union, Solomon Prower).  A Martin-Prower son, Nathaniel, was baptized on the same date in 1609.  There is no mention of Alice’s birth (presumed to be 1616) and her parents would have been in their late thirties when they had her.  Richard Carpenter is explicit that Nathaniel, then eleven, was left behind when his parents boarded the Mayflower in 1620.  Others have claimed Nathaniel travelled to America with his parents.  However, Nathaniel (just like Alice) is not listed on the Mayflower passenger list and there is no record of him dying aboard or living in Plymouth (unlike Alice).

Christopher Martin was an Essex merchant who began his vocation under the accusation of “unlawful trading” – essentially practicing as a merchant without the proper apprenticeship.  It wouldn’t be the last time Martin would disregard the expectations of others.  By the time Nathaniel was born, Christopher Martin had respectable land holdings in Great Burstead and two years later he was appointed a church warden.  Martin concluded his term, which normally ran for twelve months, in dramatic fashion as Carpenter notes:

At the end of [the church wardens’] stewardship it became plain that they did not accept the church as it was.  They then made a very public and dramatic expression of disagreement.  It was made all the more striking by the occasion on which it was made – the Easter celebration of Holy Communion when all parishioners were expected to receive Eucharist. The events give the first recorded display of Christopher Martin’s puritan views (p.4).

On that holy day, Martin and another church warden refused to kneel for communion before their vicar. When later questioned by the archdeacon, Martin reiterated his choice to not kneel before what he felt was a corrupt representation of his faith.  In 1620, Martin was summoned again by the archdeacon for “shortcomings” found in his son, Nathaniel, accused of back talking the vicar about the function and authority of catechism (p.7).  Stepson Solomon was also in trouble for mouthing off at the vicar.  Martin got into even further trouble with the church for failure to produce financial records as a warden – something he would also be accused of as the Mayflower’s treasurer (p. 5).

In the years leading up to the Mayflower voyage, Martin bought shares in the Virginia Company of London and, by 1620, was tasked with purchasing Mayflower provisions. Right off the bat, Martin was deemed bullish, duplicitous, a bad accountant and one who did not play well with others (Stratton, 323).

Technically, the Martins came to the New World as “Strangers,” contracted by English merchants and not as religious dissidents known as “Saints” (or, as we came to know them, Pilgrims). But I believe Martin was a Saint in Stranger clothing.  As “treasurer-agent of the colonists,” he was brought on board for his financial acumen (despite his inability or unwillingness to share account information) and as one of the voyage investors.  But Martin had made it clear with his earlier Great Burstead outbursts that he was Puritan-friendly.

Martin was not, by the accounts of his fellow voyagers, a well-liked man and was known for his arrogance and temper.  Governor Bradford had less-than-fond memories of Martin writing that the treasurer treated fellow passengers as if they “were not good enough to wipe his shoes. It would break your heart to see his dealing.” Furthermore, Martin “regards not counsel, may better be a king than a consort.” One can only imagine what sort of father Martin was to a young daughter – dismissive, lavish, holding excessive expectations, kind, frightening?  We do not know because as far as the historical records we do have, AMB did not even exist before her first marriage at the age of twenty-three.

102 passengers (not including crew) sailed on the Mayflower departing from Plymouth, England on September 6, 1620 and arriving at Cape Cod in mid-November after a storm diverted the ship from her original Hudson River destination on the northern side of the Virginia colony (AMB would have been four years old).  The transatlantic voyage was utterly miserable and William Bradford wrote of sailors bullying passengers, unrelenting, en masse sea-sickness and people dying in “desperate manner.”    The ship barely weathered fierce storms and leaked constantly – a terrifying prospect for a child who knew the ocean could promise death – by drowning, pirates or starvation.

William Bradford wrote of the Mayflower passengers as they arrived in the New World:

But here I cannot but … pause and stand half amazed at this poor people’s present condition; and I think will the reader too, where he considers the same.  Being thus passed the vast ocean…they now no friends to welcome them, nor inns to entertain or refresh their weather beaten bodies, no houses or much less towns to repair to, to seek for succor…[W]hat could they see but a hideous and desolate wilderness, full of wild beasts and wild men?

The Pilgrims were, as Bradford eloquently wrote, between two worlds: their English past on the other side of an unforgiving ocean and a future that now seemed hardly welcoming.  First on their list was drafting a document of governance which came to be known as the Mayflower Compact.  Christopher Martin was the ninth person to sign it.

The Mayflower passengers wintered aboard ship but epidemics, exposure and exhaustion soon overtook them.   On Christmas Eve, 1620 Solomon Prower died.  Christopher Martin died January 8, 1621 to no one’s surprise (given his sickly appearance) and to the relief, surely, of some.  AMB’s mother, Marie, died the following week.  All told, approximately half of the Mayflower passengers died before settlement work could begin the spring of 1621. Historians believe scurvy, pneumonia and TB – each coupled with near starvation — took most of them.  For Alice, she would never again see the loved ones who had taken her on this terrifying voyage.  She was truly alone.

We should dissuade ourselves of the notion that our ancestors who did survive the first winter were well-prepared for the New World.  Eagle Scouts they were not.  By trade, Nathaniel Philbrick writes, “They were weavers, wool carders, tailors, shoemakers, and printers, with almost no relevant experience when it came to carving a settlement out of the American wilderness” (p.19).  They did not know how to properly grow corn or beans, catch fish and fowl or navigate the waterways and woods.  Governor Bradford recalled that during this first year there were often less than a dozen healthy (healthy enough) persons to tend to the sick and keep the community alive with minimal food and firewood (Hodgson 90).

Of the fewer than fifty persons who survived 1620/1621, Alice must have been placed with someone, possibly as their adopted daughter.  She had already suffered a great deal of trauma: her parents and siblings died, not to mention all the other people Alice witnessed dying in such cramped quarters.   Alice may have well wondered, constantly, if she would be next.  We can fairly presume that the ship’s voyage had been physically and emotionally taxing for the child.  Certainly, stories of marauding Indians (obviously, an inaccurate portrayal of a people’s land that had just been invaded) and exotic wildlife could have frightened her young mind. By November 1621, fewer than one dozen women (or near adult women) survived.  Who was caring for Alice?

The damage such events had on a child’s psyche can only be estimated from our contemporary lenses hued by psychological studies and measurements of trauma.  However, just because her colonial peers do not mention Alice as a child or note any psycho-social maladaptation, we should not presume those were not present in Alice.  Certainly, the Pilgrims had greater concerns, namely trying to stay alive and building their new community.  Yet, it is precisely because Alice was likely without concerted and consistent, nurturing adult care that deep psychic wounds did not heal. 

If we momentarily place Alice in twenty-first century America, the evidence of trauma would seem obvious.  She was abandoned in unfamiliar territory, defenseless save for the largesse of adults she did not know well, and had watched her family die – all at the tender age of four.  Today, Alice would have the benefit of social welfare agencies and counseling to help her navigate her grief and fears.  In 1621, Alice had none of these. Of course, all of the Mayflower children (“all” being the handful who survived the first year) lived in dire circumstances, witnessed violence and death and none of them later engaged in filicide.  But if Alice had an underlying mental illness, these events could have antagonized it.

End Notes:

The Mayflower Society does not recognize Christopher Martin or Marie Prower since they died before the actual settlement of Plymouth began.  Alice Martin Bishop is also not listed.

Christopher Martin is buried on a hill near the original Plymouth landing site.