Introduction

This chapter compares selected grammatical features found in southern United States speech with those found in an archive of early modern prisoners' narratives, the MS Minutes of the Court of Governors of the Royal Hospitals of Bridewell and Bethlem, viewable on microfilm in the Guildhall Library, London. The purpose of the exercise is to provide data for the very earliest states of Southern United States English, as many of the vagrants and petty criminals who passed through the court were transported to the new colony in Virginia. The speech that each transportee brought with him or her to the New World may very soon have been modified as they were deprived of their usual speech community and surrounded by speakers from elsewhere. However, vagrants and criminals kept on arriving from the London courts. The first prisoner to be sentenced to transportation by the Court of Bridewell was on 2 October 1607 (the Jamestown colony was founded on 13 May 1607), and prisoners continued to be transported officially into the 1640s, and unofficially thereafter, due to the lucrative illegal practice of “spiriting” or kidnapping. And other London courts continued transporting people into the 1700s.

Many people were sentenced to go to Virginia, but although the Court Recorders were meticulous about recording names and dates in the Court Minute Books, destinations were frequently merely “beyond sea” or “to a plantation.” It is certain that more Londoners were sent to Virginia from Bridewell than are explicitly stated as such in the Minutes.