9 M. E. Finch, The Wealth of Five Northamptonshire Families, 1540-1640, NHANTRS 19 (1954-55, Oxford, 1958), 38; Lawrence and Jeanne C. Fawtier Stone, An Open Elite? England 1540-1880 (Oxford, 1984), 80-81.
10 Tinling, ed., Correspondence of Three Byrds, I, 122. If the old myths stressed the rural roots of these men, modern historians have made much of their mercantile and maritime careers. Some have argued that the founders of Virginia’s first families were really businessmen whose descendants only later acquired the culture and values of a rural gentry. The truth is more complex than either of these interpretations. One must study family backgrounds of these men (mostly younger sons of rural gentry) and their youthful careers (often mercantile and maritime), as well as expressions of value. Statements such as those of William Byrd I, quoted above, should not be explained away. One should also remember the central fact that these men abandoned mercantile and maritime careers for the life of a planter. To understand their values, one must study both their heads and their feet. For three excellent essays with somewhat different emphases, see Martin H. Quitt, “Immigrant Origins of the Virginia Gentry: A Study of Cultural Transmission and Innovation,” WMQ3 45 (1988), 629-55; Carole Shammas, “English-Born and Creole Elites in Turn-of-the-Century Virginia,” in Tate and Ammerman, eds., The Chesapeake in the Seventeenth Century, 274-97; Warren M. Billings, “The Growth of Political Institutions in Virginia, 1634 to 1676,” WMQ3 31 (1974), 225-42.
11 A few prominent Virginia families were descended from Puritan ancestors; the Harrisons even had a regicide in their family tree. Another unlikely “FFV” was the wayward Pilgrim Isaac Allerton, a London tailor’s son who emigrated in the Mayflower to Plymouth Colony and resettled in Virginia, ca. 1655, where he married into Berkeley’s ruling elite. So tightly connected were Virginia’s first families that many are qualified for the Society of Mayflower Descendants through kinship with Isaac Allerton.