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In 1616, John Smith admonished Englishmen to "gaine to our Natiue mother-countrie a kingdom to attend her" that would at the same time provide "imployment for those that are idle" (Description 343). Smith boasted that "Virginia doth afford many excellent vegitables and living Creatures" in such abundance that colonists--both master and servant--"may ake with hooke or line what he will" (Map 151; Description 343). Smith's narratives, in concert with the writings of adventurers Thomas Harriot and Thomas Morton, and religious refugees William Bradford and John Winthrop, reflect the varied experiences of middling men who are often associated with what Benjamin Franklin later described as a "general mediocrity" in America. The majority of seventeenth-century colonial immigrants, however, were neither adventurers nor refugees, and most did not share Smith's or Bradford's middling status. Of the more than 198,400 people who immigrated to the English American colonies in the seventeenth century, 67 percent (132,100) were indentured servants, slaves, and felons--all of whom were unfree, and of whom at least 96,600 were indentured servants. Unfortunately, few archival artifacts remain to attest to the conditions of their lives or to identify them as individuals (Fogleman 44). (1) Four remarkable exceptions are the letters of Richard Frethorne, the most familiar of which are those written to his parents from Virginia in 1623. Frethorne's often ignored letter to a Mr. Bateman is, however, of much more significance because it reveals that Frethorne was indentured by his parish under the provisions of the English Poor Law of 160l and was not, as is commonly assumed, a voluntarily indentured trade apprentice. The information about Frethorne's parish indenture introduces important details about his life and the context of his servitude that reshape our under standing of Frethorne and alter our pedagogical and scholarly engagement with his letters. Richard Frethorne arrived in Virginia around Christmas in 1622 on the Abigail, a ship overloaded with passengers and armor, but little food. The Abigail arrived ten months after raids by the Powhatan Indians destroyed crops and killed hundreds of English settlers, so the passengers on the Abigail knew that they were repopulating a war-torn colony. Frethorne was sent to Martin's Hundred, a settlement especially hard hit by the Powhatans. In March and April 1623 Frethorne wrote four letters, three to his parents and one to Mr. Bateman. In the letters, Frethorne painted a dire portrait of his life in Virginia: he was hungry, he had insufficient clothing, and he lacked consistent access to shelter. Textual analysis of the letter to Bateman identifies Frethorne as a parish-indentured poor child and his direct appeal indicates that Bateman was the churchwarden with administrative control of Frethorne's Virginia indentures and thus the person authorized to redeem his contract. Archival evidence confirms this analysis. English churchwardens maintained Poor Law records in conjunction with other human events in the parish--baptisms, marriages, and burials--that made parish poor children visible as civic and historical beings. Unfortunately, the Virginia Company maintained few servant records during the early years of the colony. Ship manifests recorded the numbers of servant passengers, but only in rare instances were names attached. The dearth of data nearly cleansed parish-indentured poor children from the evidentiary record. Ironically, Frethorne's letters, and the indifferent treatment of indentured servants he conveyed, survived because they were politically advantageous to the aristocrats who oversaw colonial operations, including those who championed for children like Richard Frethorne to be "disposed of" in Virginia. The letters written by Frethorne thus provide unique insights into the plight of a substantial, unfree colonial population. In 1623, in the depths of despair and ravaged by hunger, Richard Frethorne begged that his parents, Bateman, and his parishioners in London "doe not forget me" ("Letter to His Parents" 60). …

"Doe Not Forget Me": Richard Frethorne, Indentured Servitude, and the English Poor Law of 1601