Biography

Myles Standish, Born Where? The State of the Question: Part 1

by Jeremy Dupertuis Bangs

Far more attention has been given to speculation about where Myles Standish was born than to consideration of his military experiences in the Low Countries before his emigration on the "Mayflower" to New England. Yet it is rarely remarked that the answer to the unresolved question of his birthplace has no demonstrable bearing on what is known of Standish's post-natal career or of his interaction with other Pilgrims and their acquaintances. The question arose at the end of his life, when Myles in his will mentioned a lost inheritance. Myles' childhood circumstances remain obscure, however much some descendants might like to place him in one or another grandly named "hall."¹ One slight aspect of his early years can be inferred - that he went to school before joining the army. The mere existence of his library indicates that someone taught him to read. That might, nonetheless, have happened at home, either in his immediate family or with help from a local clergyman. Yet what occupies the attention of numerous writers is Standish's birthplace; therefore, some comments about their contradictory theories can be offered.

Lancashire or the Isle of Man?
Two possibilities have been proposed as answers to the question of where Myles Standish was born - Lancashire and the Isle of Man. These places have been named because, in his will, dated 7 March 1655 [Old Style = 1656], Myles asserted a claim to "all my lands" in Lancashire and in the Isle of Man, to which he said he was the legitimate heir but that he had been improperly deprived of them. Myles left them by will to his son Alexander. The complete text of that section of his will is this: "I give unto my son & heire apparent Alexander Standish all my lands as heire apparent by lawfull decent in Ormskirke Borscouge Wrightington Maudsley Newburrow Crowston and in the Isle of man and given to mee as Right heire by lawfull decent but Surruptuously detained from mee My great Grandfather being a 2cond or younger brother from the house of Standish of Standish. [signed] by mee Myles Standish."²

The question begins with its own answer: Myles must have been born into the Standish family that owned those specific pieces of property in those locations. While he may have been deluded about his claim to be the rightful heir to the property, unjustly deprived, it is safe to assume that his idea of his own descent, however imprecisely expressed, was generally correct. Relatives of his must have owned those properties.

Standishes of Lancashire
The Standish family are recorded at Standish in Lancashire since the thirteenth century.³ Their home, Standish Hall, rebuilt in 1574, was demolished in 1923. This original family are the Standishes of Standish from whom Myles said he was descended. A branch descending separately since the thirteenth century lived at Duxbury Hall, Chorley, Lancashire. Apparently there was continued contact and sometimes cousins married each other. The old hall of Duxbury was replaced in 1828 by a house that in turn was demolished ca. 1950. By the late fifteenth century, other descendants of the Standish of Standish family held land in Ormskirk in Lancashire. From the Ormskirk Standishes, a branch moved around 1540 or slightly earlier to the Isle of Man, acquiring property there, particularly at Ellenbane, Lezayre parish. To assert claims to any land in the Isle of Man, Myles Standish has to have been from the Standishes who lived and owned property there.

Additionally, Myles must have felt some close connection to the Duxbury Standishes, considering that one must assume that he it is who gave the name "Duxbury" to the town in Plymouth Colony that he helped to found and to which he moved around 1629. It has been suggested, on the other hand, that Myles Standish's wife might have been a cousin from the Duxbury branch of the family, and that Myles named his new home in honor of his wife's origins. Nothing, however, is known about the origins either of his first wife, Rose, or his second wife, Barbara, — not even their last names.⁴

All the various attempts at establishing a connected genealogy that would link Myles to known possessors of those properties have failed. In 1846, I. W. R. Bromley's attempts to lay claim to Myles' Lancashire inheritance, carried out at the urging of American descendants of Myles who were dazzled by the prospect of imaginary fortunes awaiting long-lost heirs, came to nothing, because Myles Standish's name cannot be found in any of the baptismal records in Lancashire where his name should be registered if he had been born there.⁵ The baptismal records at Standish are preserved undamaged, but Myles' name is not included. Baptismal records are also preserved at Ormskirk, undamaged. And at Chorley, the parish where the baptisms of members of the Standishes of Duxbury could be expected, Myles is not mentioned. The story was given out by Bromley that the parish register in Chorley shows signs of having been erased on what would be the appropriate page if the claim were true in the way he was attempting to prove. No pages are missing. According to Lawrence Hill, who made a careful inspection of the relevant pages in 1984, there were no erasures or other indications of tampering. Recent photographs of the relevant pages, however, do show damage that calls Hill's report into question.⁶ Even though damage of the pages is shown now, that in itself has little evidentiary value. No one in the past published photographic indications of such damage, and, obviously, anyone can misleadingly have abraded the page at any time, including relatively recently, to create a spurious proof to be used to support a claim of Lancashire as opposed to Manx place of birth. More neutrally, disintegrating paper damaged innocently by moisture may have been pulverized to an unsalvageable state before conservation attempts consolidated the remaining material. Present damage or erasure does not prove that the place abraded ever did show the baptism of Myles Standish.

CONTINUED

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¹ In Lancashire "hall" seems to have been used simply to indicate farmhouses larger than cottages, not necessarily with manorial administrative rights. The Chorley and District Archaeological Society records eighty-eight halls in the area. See their website, Chorley Halls They were not all manor houses. Standish Hall, however, was the manor house of Standish, Lancashire.

² Charles H. Simmons, Jr., Plymouth Colony Records, Volume 1, Wills and Inventories 1633-1669 (Camden, ME: Picton Press, 1996), pp. 312-314 and unnumbered illustration page between pp. 314 and 315. Simmons' transcription omits the word "in" before "Isle of man." The word is clearly shown in the illustration on the facing page. The omission in the transcription is significant because it might be interpreted to imply that "Isle of Man" is the last name in a series of places in Lancashire that in fact ends with "Crowston." That illustration, however, is not a photograph from the original document. It is a print from a microfilm of the original, and like many microfilm images it contains extraneous marks from the writing on the other side of the page. In note 4 of my article, "Strangers on the Mayflower" (New England Ancestors, 1 (2000), nr. 1, p. 63), I remark that in my introduction to Simmons's book I pointed out that Standish wrote "Ormskirke" (not "Ormistick"). This is true, although the illustration provided by Simmons is misleading and looks like "Ormistick." The dot that seems to be before the letter "s" has in fact bled through from the verso, as can be seen by examining the original, which I have done. Unfortunately, I did not receive page proofs of the introduction, and a confusing mistake intrudes, by which in another sentence I incorrectly wrote "Ormskirk" instead of "Ellenbane" as the name for Standish's birthplace in the Isle of Man. Simmons gives "Crawston" where I read "Crowston." The letters "a" and "o" can be indistinguishable in cursive writing except by context; in this case the modern town name is Croston. Simmons considers the letter "d" in "decent" to be capitalized, although it is in the middle of the sentence and does not differ from a non-capitalized "d" except, perhaps, in size (compare with the "d" in the witness's name, James Cudworth); and he italicizes the second occurrence of the word "mee" (apparently interpreting a dot under the word, that bled through from the other side, as an indication of emphasis). Finally, he gives "Borsconge" where I choose "Borscouge" because the present town name is Burscough. Admittedly, an "n" and a "u" are sometimes indistinguishable. In this will, the letter "u" is not provided with a line above it to differentiate it from an "n" (compare with the "u" in "Maudsley" that Simmons does not make into "Mandsley"). Simmons work is generally meticulous. His attempt to reproduce exactly what he saw on the microfilm is the reason that the texts of the manuscript pages are all made to fit on single printed pages, with no continuations. That also accounts for the notably misleading title of the book, which exactly reproduces the inscription on the ms. volume. Few people, confronted with "Plymouth Colony Records, Volume I" will suppose that volume two is part of the same book, starting on p. 261; and few bibliographers will notice that this is not the same as the first volume of Plymouth Colony Records edited by Nathaniel B. Shurtleff and David Pulsifer beginning in 1855. It is unfortunate that these extremely minor mistakes in the transcription of Standish's will, derived from using microfilm, might provide points of argument for the supposition that the will refers to the Isle of Man as if it were the last in a series of place names in Lancashire.

³ See Lawrence Hill, Gentlemen of Courage - Forward ... A history of the Standish family, Lancashire, from the Norman Conqeust in 1066 AD, within the context of English history to the Stuart period (Alderley Edge: Magnolia Publishing Co., 1987); T. C. Porteus, Calendar of the Standish Deeds, 1230-1575 (Wigan: Wigan Public Libraries Committee, 1933); G. V. C. Young, Pilgrim Myles Standish, First Manx American (Peel: Manx-Svenska Publishing Company, 1984.

⁴ That Barbara's maiden name was Standish is a possible inference from the entry in the 1623 division of land, where, among the names of passengers who arrived in the "Anne," she is listed as "Mrs Standish." The abbreviated title "Mrs" does not necessarily indicate that she was already married to Myles Standish; its expansion is "mistress" and it indicates a higher social rank than "goodwife." Other women are listed without either "mistress" or "goodwife" before their names, some with their first names. Comparison with other women in the same part of the list ("Allice Bradford, Robert Hickes his wife & children, Bridgett Fuller, Ellen Newton, Pacience & Fear Brewster, with Robart Long, William Heard, Mrs Standish") suggests that listing "Mrs Standish" here, with land of her own, rather than listing her with her husband, who was a "Mayflower" passenger, could indicate either that they were not yet married in 1623 and thus received separate land grants, or that they were already married but were listed separately because the distribution of land was carried out in groups by ship, arranged according to their order of arrival. "Allice Bradford" in the list is William Bradford's second wife; they were married in August, 1623. Presumably she had the social standing to be called "Mistress Bradford," but is not so listed. "Pacience & Fear Brewster" are daughters of William Brewster, both unmarried in 1623. The record is ambiguous and thus inadequate as a basis for secure assertion that "Mrs Standish" was not simply Mistress Standish, the wife of Myles, rather than Mistress Standish, a woman of some social standing on her own, not yet married but with the maiden name Standish. See David Pulsifer (ed.), Records of the Colony of New Plymouth in New England, Deeds, &c., Vol. I. 1620-1651 (Boston: William White, 1861), pp. 4, 6. According to John Davis, that Duxbury was named in allusion to Myles Standish is suggested in a history of Duxbury published in the Massachusetts Historical Society's Collections, vol. II, nr. 4 (1793). Davis, giving no solid reason, says "This appears questionable." See: Nathaniel Morton, New England's Memorial (1669; fifth edition, John Davis (ed.), Boston: Crocker and Brewster, 1826), p. 262-263. Davis' opinion is repeated verbatim in James Thacher's History of the Town of Plymouth, from its First Settlement in 1620, to the Present Time [...] (second edition, Boston, 1835, reprinted 1991, Salem (Massachusetts): Higginson Book Company), p. 106.

⁵ Bromley's research is reported briefly in Justin Winsor, A History of the Town of Duxbury, Massachusetts, with Genealogical Register (Boston: Crosby & Nichols, [and] Samuel G. Drake, 1849), pp. 96-97: "In the fall of 1846, an association was formed among the descendants of Capt. Standish for the purpose of making investigations, and upwards of $3000 were furnished to their agent, I.W.R. Bromley, Esq., who started on his mission in November of that year, and returned in October of the following year, without however accomplishing the object of his search. I have been favored with the perusal of some of his correspondence with the Corresponding Secretary of the Association, and some brief minutes which I have gleaned from them may not be uninteresting. The property, to which it was his object to prove the right of Capt. Standish, comprises large tracts of rich farming lands, including several valuable coal mines, and produces a yearly income of £100,000 or more. From a commission, which was found, appointing Standish to a lieutenancy in Her Majesty's forces on the continent, the date of his birth was found, as also from incidents of his life in New England, which have now become a portion of her history, and from other data in the possession of his descendants, which all led to the conclusion that the year 1684 [sic, should be 1584] must have been that of his birth. The family seats are situated near the village of Chorley in Lancashire, and the records of this parish were thoroughly investigated from the year 1549 to 1652. And here in connection comes an incident in the researches of Mr. Bromley, which deserves particular attention, and causes the fair conclusion, that Standish was the true and rightful heir to the estates, and that they were truly "surreptitiously destrained" from him, and now enjoyed by those, to whom they do not justly belong. The records were all readily deciphered with the exception of the years 1584 and 1585, the very dates, about which time Standish is supposed to have been born; and the parchment leaf which contained the registers of the births of these years was wholly illegible, and their appearance was such, that the conclusion was at once established, that it had been done purposely with pumice stone or otherwise, to destroy the legal evidence of the parentage of Standish, and his consequent title to the estates thereabout. The mutilation of these pages is supposed to have been accomplished, when about twenty years before, similar inquiries were made by the family in America. The rector of the parish, when afterwards requested by the investigator to certify that the pages were gone, at once suspected his design of discovering the title to the property, and taking advantage of the rigor of the law, (as he had entered as an antiquarian researcher merely,) compelled him to pay the sum of about £15, or suffer imprisonment. As it was said that the Captain married his first wife in the Isle of Man, this island was visited with hopes of discovering there his marriage registered, but without success, as no records of a date early enough were to be found. And thus it will be seen that on account of the destruction of all legal proof, the property must forever remain hopelessly irrecoverable."

⁶ Hill, Gentlemen of Courage [see footnote #3], p. 156; assurance to me in personal conversation with Hill that he examined the baptismal records; I have not been there. Referring to Bromley's story, Helen Moorwood writes "This claim of erasure was subsequently proved to be totally fallacious again and again." (see part two of her article, "Pilgrim Father Captain Myles Standish" [see footnote #36]. An article from the Chorley Guardian, from 1924, reports on a meeting of the Chorley and District Historical and Archaeological Society. Rev. P. J. Kirkby, Rector of Chorley, had brought the baptismal records to the meeting so that members could examine page 39, which Bromley had reported erased by pumicing. A local historian, John Wilson, had said "some years ago" that he had looked at the page and thought it had been tampered with. The article states that Kirkby "considered that it was rather difficult to reconcile the appearance of the leaf in the Register with the use of pumice stone on it. To him it looked as if a layer had been taken off the page or two thin pages had been stuck together." The newspaper article is republished online. Photographs of two facing pages from the register (38 and 39) are published online by the current rector, Rev. John Cree. The page on the left shows apparent water damage at the upper left, but it is unclear whether anything on that page has become illegible. The page on the right is damaged along three quarters of the top (an area I estimate as about three or four inches across by about two inches down at the left) and also at the lower left corner. The photo shows what looks like rice paper used as a conservation support. The photographs are of very poor quality, so that nothing can be read on the pages. Ed Fisher, of the Chorley St. Laurence Historical Society, answered my questions about the photographs with the information that the pages are paper, that the top of page 39 (right page) is missing, that the last legible date is August, 1584, and that the fragile pages have been conserved between thin tissue paper. (letter dated January 13, 2006).