♀Elizabeth Walker

Elizabeth Walker (before October 1583 – 2 October 1673) was the wife of the Mayflower passenger Richard Warren^W and, for forty years and more after his death, a widow at Plymouth in Plymouth Colony^W who settled land on each of her five daughters. In 1637 the colony’s court entered her as one of its Purchasers in her husband’s place, because she had completed the bargain he died owing. The Purchasers were the settlers who had bargained to buy out the colony’s London backers and so became the owners of its land. She was the tenth great-grandmother of Frederic Roger Curtis (1928–2007), through her daughter Mary Warren (about 1610–1683).

England and the crossing

Richard Warren probably married Elizabeth Walker at Great Amwell, Hertfordshire, on 14 April 1610. When Richard sailed on the Mayflower in 1620, Elizabeth and their five daughters, Mary, Anna, Sarah, Elizabeth and Abigail, stayed behind. They followed him in 1623, crossing on the Anne^W. Two sons, Nathaniel and Joseph, were born at Plymouth after she arrived. When the colony divided its cattle on 22 May 1627, the ninth lot fell to “Richard Warren & his companie”: his wife Elizabeth, the two boys, the five daughters and four members of the Billington and Soule households. Their share was one of the four black heifers that had come in the Jacob, “the smooth horned Heyfer”, and two she-goats.

Widowhood

Richard died at Plymouth, most likely in 1628, leaving her with five daughters and two young sons. The colony’s tax lists of 1633 and 1634 enter her as “Widow Warren”, next to her son-in-law Robert Bartlett. In October 1633, when the court gave her husband’s unbuilt homestead lot to Ralph Fogg, it required him to allow her the worth of “her fence remayning thereon”.

Richard had been one of the Purchasers but died before he had paid his part. Elizabeth carried the bargain through, and on 7 March 1636/7 the court agreed, “by the consent of the whole Court”, that she should stand as a Purchaser instead of her husband. At the same court it confirmed the lots of land she had given her sons-in-law Richard Church, Robert Bartlett and Thomas Little at their marriages to her daughters.

Her daughters married in turn: Mary to Robert Bartlett, Anna to Thomas Little in 1633, Sarah to John Cooke the younger in 1634, Elizabeth to Richard Church, and Abigail to Anthony Snow in 1639. On 7 February 1637/8, as “Elizabeth Warren of the Eele Riuer Widdow”, she gave Cooke eighteen acres at Eel River beside Robert Bartlett’s lot, and on 9 January 1639/40 she made over to Snow her house near Wellingsly, also called Hobs Hole, with eight acres of land.

Mistress of the household

In July 1635 her servant Thomas Williams was brought before the court for blasphemy. During a quarrel she had “exhorted him to fear God” and do his duty, and he answered that “he neither feared God, nor the diuell”. The court judged the words spoken in passion and let him go with a reproof, though the governor would have had him punished bodily.

In January 1635/6 Thomas Clarke sued her for a boat of his that she had borrowed, which an extraordinary storm carried away in the Eel River where she had left it. The jury acquitted her, finding the boat “laid in an ordinary place of saftie”, though for other considerations it gave Clarke a small sum.

Death

She outlived her son Nathaniel, who died in 1667. Elizabeth died at Plymouth on 2 October 1673, and the colony’s record of deaths entered her as “an aged widdow, aged aboue 90 yeares”, who, “haueing liued a godly life, came to her graue as a shoke of corn fully ripe”, an echo of the Book of Job. She was “honorably buried” on 24 October.

Notes

Her maiden name

The marriage of Richard Warren and Elizabeth Walker is known from the FamilySearch collection England Marriages, 1538-1973, an abstract of the Great Amwell parish register, which gives the couple as married there on 14 April 1610, with the bride’s name spelled Wallker. The will of Augustine Walker of Much Amwell, dated 19 April 1613, names his daughter Elizabeth, wife of Richard Warren, and her three children, written Marey, Ann and Sarey Warren; that will is known only from a transcript. The identification of this couple with the Mayflower Richard Warren and his wife was made in The American Genealogist, volume 78 (2003), pages 81-86. Older Mayflower genealogies said that her maiden name and origin were unknown, and the surname March, sometimes given for her, has no record behind it.

Some older writers read Bradford as describing two wives, with the daughters born to the first. The colony’s deed of 7 February 1637/8 calls Mary Bartlett “another of the said Mrs Warrens daughters”, and the 1613 will names a Mary, Ann and Sarah as Elizabeth’s own children.

Age, death and burial

Her birth before October 1583 is reckoned from her age at death, “aboue 90 yeares”. The death of 2 October and the burial of 24 October are both in Records of the Colony of New Plymouth in New England, volume 8. Bowman, in The Mayflower Descendant, volume 3, page 50, thought a gap of twenty-two days between death and burial unlikely and one of the two dates an error.

Sources

The court cases, her place among the Purchasers, the tax lists and the fence allowance come from the colony’s court orders in Records of the Colony of New Plymouth in New England, volume 1; the cattle division and her gifts of land to John Cooke and Anthony Snow come from its deeds in volume 12. Her husband’s death about 1628 is the year of the Mayflower Society’s compiled genealogy of the Warren family.