In 1975 a portion of the archive of the Christian Faith
Society (CFS) was transferred to the Borthwick Institute from Lambeth
Palace. The transferred records concerned
the manor of Brafferton in Yorkshire, which had been purchased in 1694 as a landed endowment by the
trustees of what would later become the CFS.
The Brafferton papers contain many of the items you might expect to find
in such an archive; deeds, surveys, rentals and other papers detailing the
business of the estate and the development of Brafferton village. However included among them are three
documents that highlight a surprising link between this small Yorkshire village
and the history of America in the 17th and 18th centuries; one which gave a name to a colonial college
building in Virginia and set a legal precedent in a groundbreaking court case
following the American Revolution.
The CFS was created through the charitable bequest of Robert
Boyle. Born in Ireland in 1627, Boyle
was the youngest son of the Earl of Cork and a celebrated natural philosopher,
chemist, and physicist in his own right, with a keen interest in theology. He financed the publication of an Irish
language bible in the 1680s and donated money to various missionary societies
working in the East where he himself had interests as a director of the East
India Company.
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| The Shannon Portrait of the Hon. Robert Boyle, F.R.S. (1689). Reproduced with permission of The Chemical Heritage Foundation |
Boyle died in 1691 and in his will he directed that £4,000
from his estate be used for the advancement ‘or propagation of the Christian
religion amongst infidels.’ His
trustees, which included the Bishop of London, used the bequest to purchase Brafferton and in 1693
a large portion of the annual income of the estate was awarded to the newly founded College
of William and Mary in Virginia, America.
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| Copy of enrolment of bargain and sale of the manor and advowson of Brafferton, in trust for the propagation of the Gospel in Virginia, 31 August 1695 (CFS 39) |
The choice was not as strange as it might appear. At this time Virginia was still a British
colony under the spiritual authority of the Church of England, as vested in the
Bishop of London. It was his commissary
in Virginia, Reverend Doctor James Blair, who travelled to England in 1691 to
petition King William III and Queen Mary for the establishment of a college in
the colony and there heard of the Boyle legacy.
Blair appealed to the Bishop of London and the money was duly granted to
the new College – it was perhaps in deference to the Boyle bequest that the
college pledged in its 1693 foundation charter to propagate the Christian faith
‘amongst the Western Indians, to the glory of Almighty God.’
In keeping with this pledge, and Boyle’s wishes, the College
established an Indian School where, in return for annual payments from the
Brafferton estate, they would keep ‘Indian children in Sicknesse and health, in
Meat, drink, Washing, Lodgeing, Cloathes, Medicine, books and Education from
the first beginning of Letters till they are ready to receive Orders and be
thoughts Sufficient to be sent abroad to preach and Convert the Indians.’
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| Excerpt from an appeal to the Lord Chancellor from Masters and Professors of the College of William and Mary, Virginia, against the Bishop of London and Mayor and corporation of the same concerning timber at Brafferton, 1773 (CFS 13) |
The governor of the colony enlisted Indian
traders to take the news to the local tribes, but they proved resistant to the
offer of European education until 1711 when Governor Spotswood offered to remit
the tributes they owed if they sent their male children to the school. As a result of this policy, the Indian School
had 20 native boys by the summer of 1722, including members of the local
Pamunkey, Nansemond and Chickahominy nations.
The students were taught English reading and writing, arithmetic and
catechism, as well as drawing, for which they were said to have a ‘natural’ and
‘excellent genius.’
Initially the boys were housed in the town and their classes
were held in temporary quarters, but in 1723 the income from the Yorkshire
estate was used to build The Brafferton, a two storey brick ‘House and
Apartments for the Indian Master and his Scholars.’
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| The Brafferton c.1907. P1979.1051, University Archives Photograph Collection, Special Collections Research Center, Swem Library, College of William and Mary |
Classes were held downstairs, with the boys
sleeping in dormitories on the first floor.
Despite this improved accommodation, student numbers soon dropped again
and would remain low for the remainder of the life of the school. Without coercion, native tribes remained
unwilling to part with their children.
In 1744 an Iroquois speaker declined one such invitation to provide
students, saying ‘we love our Children too well to send them so great a Way,’
while other children who were sent to the college simply ran away, or completed
their education only to return to their own people and take up their previous
way of life – to the great frustration of the colonists. From
the 1750s onward the school could only maintain an enrollment of between 3 and
5 students.
The outbreak of war between the American Colonies and the
British Crown in the 1770s brought an end to the college’s Indian School and to
the Boyle endowment they had enjoyed for some eighty years. At first the war had merely disrupted payments
from Brafferton, but after America declared its independence from Great Britain
in 1776 the College attempted to reclaim its lost rents, with the accumulated
arrears, prompting Bielby Porteous, then
Bishop of London, to challenge their
claim in the Court of Chancery. It was a
pioneering legal case. As the bishop
himself later wrote, ‘the question was, whether they, being now separated from
this kingdom, and become a foreign, independent state, were entitled to the
benefit of this charity. It was the
first question of the kind that had occurred in this country since the American
revolution, and was therefore in the highest degree curious and
important.’
Chancery eventually ruled against the College and the income
from the Brafferton estate was instead diverted to the conversion and religious
instruction of slaves in the British West Indies, a particular cause of Bishop
Porteous.
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| 'The township of Brafferton...the Estate of the Society for the conversion and religious instruction of the negro slaves in the British West Islands, by John Tuke, 1796' (PR/BRAF/44.1) |
With its principle source of
income severed, the Indian School had ceased to function by 1777 and in 1785
The Brafferton building was repurposed by the College. While it is hard to see the Indian School as
anything but a failure for its colonial founders, it was not always so for the
native students who were sometimes able to use the language skills and the
knowledge of British culture they acquired to serve as interpreters between
their own people and the colonists.
The Brafferton estate was broken up in the 1950s. Today the Christian Faith Society continues
to direct its income to the training and religious instruction of clergy and
laity in the West Indies. Meanwhile the
estate’s namesake, The Brafferton, is still standing. Having had much of its wooden interiors torn
out for firewood and fortifications in the American Civil War, it was extensively
restored in the 1930s and is now the second oldest building to have survived at
the College of William and Mary, housing the offices of the college president
and provost.
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| The Brafferton today (courtesy of Wikimedia commons) |
Sources
Helen C. Rountree, ‘Pocahontas’s People: The Powhatan
Indians of Virginia Through Four Centuries’ (Oklahoma, 1990).
Margaret Connell Szasz, ‘Indian Education in the American
Colonies, 1607-1783’ (Nebraska, 2007).
Irvin Lee Wright, ‘Piety, politics, and profit : American
Indian missions in the colonial colleges. A thesis submitted in partial
fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Education Montana
State University’ (Montana 1985).
‘The Indian School at William and Mary’ (http://www.wm.edu/about/history/historiccampus/indianschool/index.php).
