families of Maryland, distinguished in colonial history, and active in the early commerce on the Chester, founders of New Yarmouth, patriots, soldiers, and councilors,—the Ringgolds of Chestertown, Huntingfield, and Fountain Rock,- maintained with signal pride and prodigality the social traditions of the Eastern shore. Their several homes were scenes of continual and delightful entertainment; and in race week, when the course at Chestertown competed for the honors with those of Marlborough and Annapolis, enthusiastic horsemen of the Ringgold name entertained the "gentlemen breeders," of Kent, Queen Anne's, and Talbot, and discussed pedigrees and "events" and coming matches for purses and cups. On November 24, 1766, "Yorick" of Virginia and "Selim" of Maryland, "the two best horses on the continent," ran on the Chestertown course for a purse of one hundred pistoles, subscribed by gentlemen of Kent. Yorick had won seven races, and Selim had never been beaten. The race attracted a gallant concourse of ladies and gentlemen from all parts of Maryland, Virginia, and Delaware, and was won by Selim.1

From 1720 to the breaking out of the Revolution one might have found bad spelling, bad manners, and bad language in the conduct, conversation, and correspondence of the colonists. Education was little better than a tramp, and religion, in the garb of the Establishment, was a slattern sadly given to drink. The schoolmasters were mainly derived from the class of redemptioners and convict servants, for the most part a disreputable lot of the hedge-priest sort, who had more of Latin and Greek than of the humanities or the Ten Commandments. In February, 1774, John Hammond advertises: To be sold, a Schoolmaster, an indented servant that hath got two years to serve"; and among the possible Eugene Arams of Prince George's County in 1754 were "Jeremiah Barry's indented servant, Enoch Magruder's, Samuel Selby's, and Daniel Wallahorn's convict servants & Thomas Harrison, a convict." Education was restricted to classes, and young women and girls had but small share in it. The wealthy planters sent their sons to England to be educated, knowing that honors and profits, under proprietary patronage, were first of all for graduates of Oxford and Cambridge, who were familiar with Epsom and Newmarket, and confident of the favor of an English governor. The gross and groveling pedagogue was the natural confrère and crony of the bibulous and licentious parson. The former was the creature of the vestry, and might be removed, but the latter held under the lord proprietary; the vestry might denounce him, the commissary 1 Scharf: "History of Maryland."

of the province under the Bishop of London might convict him, but still he held on, for his holding was an advowson.

The clergy of England at that time figured as courtiers, political pamphleteers, lawyers, usurers, police magistrates, Fleet parsons, foxhunters, umpires at dog-fights and wrestlingmatches, stewards of county squires, and tools of the place-holders-everything but gentlemen or decent citizens. Even so early as 1656, John Hammond, in his "Leah and Rachel" (Maryland and Virginia), writes: "Virginia savoring not handsomely in England, very few [clergymen] of good conversation would adventure thither, as thinking it a Place wherein surely the fear of God was not; yet many came, such as wore Black Coats and could babble in a pulpit, roar in a tavern, exact from their parishioners, and by their dissoluteness rather destroy than feed their flocks." This indictment applies with even more force to the imported clergymen of Maryland, where the holder of an advowson under Lord Baltimore was amenable to nothing short of the criminal law. Any one was thought good enough to serve the church in Maryland, so that a priest's willingness to emigrate to "the Plantations" was even regarded as a slur upon his character. In 1714 Governor Hart wrote to the Bishop of London: "There are some rectors in Maryland whose education and morals are a scandal to their profession, and I am amazed how such illiterate men came to be in Holy Orders"; and Dr. Chandler wrote to the bishop in 1753: "It would really, my lord, make the ears of a sober heathen tingle to hear the stories that were told me by many serious people of several clergymen in the neighborhood of the parish where I visited.”

One of the rarely devout and earnest rectors of the colony entertains his bishop with a pungent story of an erratic shepherd who had just been appointed to the care of a flock: "An Irish vagrant, who has strolled from place to place on this continent, now in the army, now school-teaching, now keeping a public house, now marrying, and presently abandoning his wife, always in debt, always drunk, always absconding, he is yet, without any change of heart or manners, inducted into holy orders, and sent to this province, where he is drunk in the pulpit, and behaving otherwise so disgracefully that finally he flees of his own free will."

Once, after a wedding at Wye House, a servant presented to the officiating priest a silver tray containing a goodly number of bright guineas, that he might help himself to two of them, the customary fee. But much generous Madeira and Burgundy had enlarged the parson's conception of his own need and the sur

rounding bounty; so he emptied the sparkling platter into the poke of his black coat. "Let your light shine so," said he; and everybody cried, "Amen!"

The people of Maryland, led by those able and honorable lawyers Stephen Bordley and Daniel Dulany, set their faces against "clericalism," and against the vestry system, which exacted fees for marrying and fined a man for not marrying, which taxed Catholics and Quakers to build chapels, buy glebes, fence churchyards, and support lazy parsons who seldom scrupled to keep a baptism waiting for a run with the hounds, or a death-bed for a cockpit. The people dodged and truckled, juggled and lied, to evade the "forty per poll" which went to the clergy; and, giving the slip to the mumbled service and the droned sermon, gathered gladly to hear those dissenters the Asburys and Strawbridges, "who prayed without book and preached without notes, who went on horseback to the people instead of waiting for the people to come to them"; who lived on £60 a year, and scorned fat glebes and advowsons. To such exemplary and beneficent worthies as Cradock, erudite and earnest among teachers, and Boucher, devout and intrepid in the ranks of the clergy, it must indeed have been a thankless task to stem the tidal wave of vice and venality that surged into Chesapeake Bay from the shores of Britain.

When Mr. John Weems contracted to build a certain church in Anne Arundel County, the vestry published in an Annapolis paper the following notice, which may be accepted as sufficient refutation to any charge of libel upon the works and ways of the colonial school

master:

Likewise Mr. John Weems has undertaken the building of a Breek Church in the sd. Parrish according to the draft of the Plan that was this day layd before the Vestry, and is to build the sd. Church att fourteen hundred pounds cur. without any further Charges to the sd. Parrish in any Shape whatever, in case that the Vestry git ann Act of Assembly for what Tob. will be wanting of the sum that is to build the sd. Church; for as they hant Tob. enufe in hand for the finniching of the sd. Church.

These churches were not warmed in winter. The worshipers sat through the long service and sermon, and shivered, after jogging over roads unspeakably bad the penitential miles that grew longer every Sunday. In the vestryhouse a glorious fire of logs from the forest roared up the great chimney; but the vestryhouse was detached from the church, and during the service all access to the hospitable blaze was forbidden, the key was turned in the lock, and no shivering sinner might warm himself. An order, posted by the vestry of St. James, Anne Arundel County, on January 14, 1737, provides that

Whereas sundry persons in time of Divine Service do make a practice of running in and out of the church to the fire in the vestry house, to the Great Disturbance of the rest of the Congregation; for prevention whereof have ordered the Sexton that before he tolls the Bell he shall lock the vestry house door and desire all to go out.

The mincing "exclusiveness" upon which the colonial gentry plumed themselves, that fine-drawn distinction of classes which sent the tradesman and his wife to the tavern kitchen, while the landed gentleman lounged and toped in the club-room and the parlor, was not more distinctly expressed in wig, knee-buckles, and sword, on the one hand, and leather breeches, shag jacket, and staff, on the other, than in the man's place in the congregation and the rank of miserable sinners in which he ventured to parade himself. There were the rector's, the wardens', and the vestrymen's pews, which none but those dignitaries or their guests might enter, and there were the "hanging pews," erected by families at their own charge. There were free pews for men and for women, and there were of these high-backed pens were locked, and the appointed places for the slaves. The doors intrusion into the seats of others was a misdemeanor with corporal punishment attached. In December, 1765, the vestry of St. James parish took summary measures for the protection of pew-holders:

The tarring of the ruff of the Church with Tarr and red oaker, and painting the head of the Church three times over with Clouded Blew, covering the Ruff of the new vestry house with Cypress shyngles, and having new spike-head Gatts and tarred Posts and Rales about the Churchyard; also causing diel Posts to be sot up.

The poll-tax, forty pounds of tobacco, for the supif the church.

a pare of Stocks shall be erected at the church for that Purpus.

The somewhat promiscuous character of the company who took lease of their long homes in the churchyard did not recommend that style of sepulture to persons of quality. These preferred the family burial-ground, which was to be found on every considerable estate an inclosed plot within sight of the " “great house," sometimes a corner of the garden or

rounding bounty; so he emptied the sparkling platter into the poke of his black coat. "Let your light shine so," said he; and everybody cried, "Amen!"

The people of Maryland, led by those able and honorable lawyers Stephen Bordley and Daniel Dulany, set their faces against "clericalism," and against the vestry system, which exacted fees for marrying and fined a man for not marrying, which taxed Catholics and Quakers to build chapels, buy glebes, fence churchyards, and support lazy parsons who seldom scrupled to keep a baptism waiting for a run with the hounds, or a death-bed for a cockpit. The people dodged and truckled, juggled and lied, to evade the "forty per poll"1 which went to the clergy; and, giving the slip to the mumbled service and the droned sermon, gathered gladly to hear those dissenters the Asburys and Strawbridges, "who prayed without book and preached without notes, who went on horseback to the people instead of waiting for the people to come to them"; who lived on £60 a year, and scorned fat glebes and advowsons. To such exemplary and beneficent worthies as Cradock, erudite and earnest among teachers, and Boucher, devout and intrepid in the ranks of the clergy, it must indeed have been a thankless task to stem the tidal wave of vice and venality that surged into Chesapeake Bay

from the shores of Britain.

When Mr. John Weems contracted to build a certain church in Anne Arundel County, the vestry published in an Annapolis paper the following notice, which may be accepted as sufficient refutation to any charge of libel upon the works and ways of the colonial school

master:

Likewise Mr. John Weems has undertaken the building of a Breek Church in the sd. Parrish according to the draft of the Plan that was this day layd before the Vestry, and is to build the sd. Church att fourteen hundred pounds cur. without any further Charges to the sd. Parrish in any Shape whatever, in case that the Vestry git ann Act of Assembly for what Tob. will be wanting of the sum that is to build the sd. Church; for as they hant Tob. enufe in hand for the finniching of the sd. Church.

These churches were not warmed in winter. The worshipers sat through the long service and sermon, and shivered, after jogging over roads unspeakably bad the penitential miles that grew longer every Sunday. In the vestryhouse a glorious fire of logs from the forest roared up the great chimney; but the vestryhouse was detached from the church, and during the service all access to the hospitable blaze was forbidden, the key was turned in the lock, and no shivering sinner might warm himself. An order, posted by the vestry of St. James, Anne Arundel County, on January 14, 1737, provides that

vice do make a practice of running in and out of Whereas sundry persons in time of Divine Serthe church to the fire in the vestry house, to the Great Disturbance of the rest of the Congregation; for prevention whereof have ordered the Sexton that before he tolls the Bell he shall lock the vestry house door and desire all to go out.

The mincing "exclusiveness" upon which the colonial gentry plumed themselves, that fine-drawn distinction of classes which sent the tradesman and his wife to the tavern kitchen, while the landed gentleman lounged and toped in the club-room and the parlor, was not more distinctly expressed in wig, knee-buckles, and sword, on the one hand, and leather breeches, shag jacket, and staff, on the other, than in the man's place in the congregation and the rank of miserable sinners in which he ventured to parade himself. There were the rector's, the wardens', and the vestrymen's pews, which none but those dignitaries or their guests might enter, and there were the "hanging pews," erected by families at their own charge. There were free pews for men and for women, and there were of these high-backed pens were locked, and the appointed places for the slaves. The doors intrusion into the seats of others was a misdemeanor with corporal punishment attached. In December, 1765, the vestry of St. James parish took summary measures for the protection of pew-holders:

The tarring of the ruff of the Church with Tarr and red oaker, and painting the head of the Church three times over with Clouded Blew, covering the Ruff of the new vestry house with Cypress shyngles, and having new spike-head Gatts and tarred Posts and Rales about the Churchyard; also causing diel Posts to be sot up.

1 The poll-tax, forty pounds of tobacco, for the support of the church.

a pare of Stocks shall be erected at the church for that Purpus.

The somewhat promiscuous character of the company who took lease of their long homes in the churchyard did not recommend that style of sepulture to persons of quality. These preferred the family burial-ground, which was to be found on every considerable estate an inclosed plot within sight of the "great house," sometimes a corner of the garden or