Life in England
James Chilton was born before 1556 (age 63 in 1619) probably in Canterbury. Kent, England. The Chilton surname is an ancient one that appears in records from at least 1339, when his ancestor Robert Chilton was a Canterbury parliamentary representative.
James's grandfather Richard Chilton was of St. Paul’s Parish in Canterbury and in a will dated and proved in 1549, it named his deceased wife Isabel and bequeathed the bulk of his estate to his son Lyonnell. and served two years as churchwarden of St. Paul's Parish Church there.
In 1583 James Chilton, tailor, was listed as a freeman of Canterbury.
Just before 1587 James Chilton married possibly Susanna Furner, the daughter of his step-mother Isabella and her first husband Francis Furner.
James Chilton and his wife Susanna had seven children who were baptized in Canterbury. About 1600 the family moved to Sandwich, also in Kent, where three more children were baptized, including his youngest daughter Mary, who was baptized at 12th century St. Peter’s Church, Sandwich in 1607.
It is believed that here James met Moses Fletcher, who was also a Mayflower passenger, as well as other Separatists who later went to Holland, and so became part of the English Leiden religious company.Sandwich was becoming a center of Separatist activity, and was home to several future members of John Robinson's Leiden church.
The first evidence that the Chilton family had its own Separatist views appears in 1609. In late April, Chilton's wife was among four people that secretly buried a dead child, without having the Church of England perform its mandatory burial rites. For this defiant act, Chilton's wife and two of the others were excommunicated from the Church of England on 12 June 1609.
Read more about this topic: James Chilton (Mayflower Pilgrim)
Famous quotes containing the words life and/or england:
“For universal love is as special an aspect as carnal love or any of the other kinds: all forms of mental and spiritual activity must be practiced and encouraged equally if the whole affair is to prosper. There is no cutting corners where the life of the soul is concerned....”
—John Ashbery (b. 1927)
“The next Augustan age will dawn on the other side of the Atlantic. There will, perhaps, be a Thucydides at Boston, a Xenophon at New York, and, in time, a Virgil at Mexico, and a Newton at Peru. At last, some curious traveller from Lima will visit England and give a description of the ruins of St Paul’s, like the editions of Balbec and Palmyra.”
—Horace Walpole (1717–1797)