Home » Writing & Publishing » Word Play » 17th Century English in the New World, part one

17th Century English in the New World, part one

© Sandra Linville

The founder of Rhode Island, Roger Williams is thought to be one of America’s most distinguished thinkers. In an article in the March 1999 issue of Journal of Church & State, writer Derek H. Davis surveys Williams’s enduring legacy as America’s first separationist on church-state controversies.

Although a Puritan preacher, Williams was an original proponent of the separation of church and state and wrote in 1644 that there should be a “hedge or wall of separation between the garden of the church and the wilderness of the world.” Eventually, Williams became too controversial with his belief in religious and personal freedoms as well as his belief in the rights of the Native Americans to keep their land. In 1635, he was banished for 300 years from the Massachusetts Bay colony.

He escaped deportation back to England and fled to what is now Rhode Island. With land he purchased from the Narragansetts he founded Providence. In some records it is reported that two Narragansett Indian Sachems, Canonicus and Miantonomi, deeded the land for Roger Williams’s colony. No money was exchanged, so in essence the two Sachems granted the land deed to Roger Williams.

According to the Britannica Encylopedia and other sources, the Narragansetts signed a deed for a small sum of cash and “the many kindnesses he(Williams) had continually done.”

Williams’s nonconformist philosophy also led to his great contribution of a significant record of language and culture. Williams’s close relationship with the Narragansetts provided him with a unique perspective of their language and culture. In 1643, he wrote what many consider to be the first extensive vocabulary and study of a Native American language printed in English. The book provides a rudimentary glossary of a Native American language, the Narragansett’s, and also presents an important commentary on New England’s indigenous culture “from their Birth to their Burialls.”

The Algonquin or Eastern Woodland tribes lived in New England when European colonization began and the Narragansett were a large and important group in southern New England around what is still called Narragansett Bay. In theThe Key into the Language of America Williams hoped to provide outsiders with an understanding of his allies’ lives.

He said: “My souls desire was to do the natives good, and to that end to have their language (understood)…God was pleased to give me a painful Patient spirit to lodge with them…to gain their tongue.”

He also offered this advice to his fellow Englishmen: “Boast not proud English, of thy birth & blood, Thy brother Indian is by birth as Good.”

The copyright of the article 17th Century English in the New World, part one in Word Play is owned by Sandra Linville. Permission to republish 17th Century English in the New World, part one in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.