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Over 50 years of research into the Stratton, Schneider, King, and allied families—from colonial Massachusetts to Indiana and beyond. Built by Bill & Karen Stratton.
Strattons of Massachusetts Bay
Running Through the Sands of Time
The Long Line: A Stratton Chronicle — Chapter Two
Great Barford to Hinwick, Bedfordshire — c. 1577
Alice Pigott came from Great Barford, which is a village on the River Ouse in the flat agricultural heartland of Bedfordshire — a different country entirely from the chalk downs above Shrivenham. Where Berkshire was open ridge and sheep pasture, Bedfordshire was heavy clay and river meadow, the fields darker and wetter, the horizon closer, the light different in a way that Berkshire men noticed when they crossed the county line.
John Stratton noticed it when he arrived, sometime around 1577, somewhere near the age of fifteen or sixteen — young enough to still be forming his impression of what farming country was supposed to look like, old enough to recognize that this country was good even if it was unfamiliar. He had come for Alice, or he had come for her family’s connections to the land at Hinwick, or both — the record does not say, and in 1577 the two things were probably not separable in any man’s mind. You married a woman because she suited you and because the land suited you and because the combination of the two made a future possible.
Alice was about twenty years old. She was Bedfordshire born and bred, the daughter of a family with standing in the county, and she had the particular confidence of someone who knows the ground she stands on. John had left the only ground he had ever known and come east into her world, which was either humility or ambition depending on how you read it. Probably both.
They married. They took the Hinwick holding. They began.
Hinwick is a hamlet — barely more than a cluster of farms — within the parish of Podington, which sits in the north of Bedfordshire near the Northamptonshire border. The parish church, St. Mary the Virgin, stood at the center of Podington village a mile or so from Hinwick, its tower rising above the flat fields in the way that English church towers do, marking the community’s center of gravity from a distance. John and Alice would walk to it every Sunday of their married life, in all weathers, for fifty years.
The farm they built at Hinwick was built from scratch. John had brought the knowledge his father William had given him — how to read a field, how to manage a holding, how to deal with neighbors in a way that did not create enemies — and he applied it to Bedfordshire soil, which had its own temperament and its own requirements. The clay held water differently than chalk. The drainage was a different problem. The crops wanted different attention. He learned it the way farmers always learn a new piece of ground: by watching it through one season, and then another, until the land’s habits were as familiar as his own.
Alice already knew the land. She taught him what she knew, and he had the sense to listen.
Podington, Bedfordshire — 1580s to 1610s
The sons came first — Samuel, born in October of 1592, and then the others at their own pace, William and Robert and Francis, the four boys who would carry the Stratton name forward in their different directions. There were daughters too, three of them eventually, though the record does not preserve their names. They were Pigotts in their faces, probably, or Strattons, or some combination that Alice could read and John could not quite.
Samuel was the eldest and the most documented — which may mean he was the most restless, since restless people tend to generate more records. He was born in Bedford Borough, which was the nearest market town, suggesting either that Alice traveled there for the birth or that the family had enough standing to call for a midwife from the town. He grew up at Hinwick knowing the farm the way farm children know things — from the inside, in the body, before they know it in words.
The parish organized the family’s year in the way it organized every family’s year in Jacobean Bedfordshire: christenings and marriages and burials at St. Mary the Virgin, the feast days and fast days, the church rates and tithes, the vestry meetings where the yeomen of the parish managed local affairs with the careful democracy of men who have to live next to each other for the rest of their lives. John served in the vestry, as his standing required. He paid his tithes. He appeared when summoned and did what was asked of him.
He was a yeoman of Podington. That meant something.
In 1605, when Samuel was thirteen, the news came through of the Gunpowder Plot — the Catholic conspiracy to blow up the Parliament and the king in a single catastrophic stroke. It did not succeed. The conspirators were caught, tried, and executed with the deliberateness that the Jacobean state applied to treason. But it sent a current of anxiety through every Protestant parish in England, a reminder that the religious settlement was not as settled as it appeared, that the old wars were still smoldering somewhere beneath the surface of ordinary life.
John Stratton, a yeoman of the established Church in a parish that had been Protestant for sixty years, would have felt that anxiety the way everyone felt it — as a cold reminder of how quickly things could change. He had been born into Elizabeth’s England and had lived all his life in its relative stability. The Gunpowder Plot said the stability was not guaranteed.
In 1611, the King James Bible arrived in English parishes. The old Geneva Bible — the Protestant translation that the Puritans preferred, the one that had been read in English churches for decades — was replaced by a new translation commissioned by the king himself, executed by scholars, polished to a standard of English prose that would not be matched for centuries. John would have heard it read at St. Mary the Virgin in its first year, the cadences new and strange and gradually, over months, becoming the only cadences that mattered. The Lord is my shepherd. In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. His son Samuel would carry that language across the Atlantic. It would ring in Massachusetts Bay meeting houses in John’s own lifetime, translated to a new world that John would never see.
Bedford and Northamptonshire — c. 1615–1632
Four sons in a yeoman’s holding is a problem with a familiar shape: the land is enough for one, and there are four.
John had faced a version of this problem himself. He had come to Bedfordshire because Shrivenham had not had room for him. Now the Hinwick farm was his, solid after forty years of careful work, but it could not be divided into four pieces and still feed anyone. One son would stay. The others would need to find their own ground elsewhere.
Samuel had understood this for years. He had also understood something his father had not quite reckoned with: the ground he was looking for was not in Bedfordshire.
By the early 1620s, Samuel was the kind of man the Puritan movement collected — capable, practical, seriously religious, and convinced that England under the Stuarts was not going to become the country it ought to be. The movement had been building for decades, argued out in meetinghouses and pamphlets and the long uncomfortable silence of people who believed the Church of England had not finished reforming itself and probably never would. Samuel knew these arguments. He attended to them with the same quality of attention his father brought to the farm — not as abstract theology but as practical questions about where a man ought to live and how.
He had also been acquiring a different kind of knowledge.
Somewhere in the years before 1633 — probably through connections in Bedford or Northampton, possibly through men who had already looked toward New England and come back with reports — Samuel learned to use the instruments that the new world required. The back-staff, which a trained man could hold to his eye and take a noon sun-sight from, reading latitude from the angle of the sun above the horizon. The surveyor’s compass, called a circumferentor, for running lines across unmapped ground. Gunter’s chain — sixty-six feet of linked iron, the standard measure of English surveying — for calculating acreage in a country where the courts would eventually require documented claims to everything.
He had a feel for land from childhood — every farm child does — but he trained himself in the formal measurement of it, because a man who could survey in the colony was a man the colony needed. In Massachusetts Bay, every grant of land required someone to run the lines. A yeoman’s son from Bedfordshire who arrived with that skill in his hands would not want for work or standing.
He also, around this time, met Alice Beebe.
She was from Great Addington, in Northamptonshire — three miles across the county border, close enough to Podington that the families likely knew each other through the ordinary network of market days and parish connections. She was born in 1594, two years after Samuel, and she had her own quality of steadiness — the sort of woman who makes up her mind and then does not revisit it. They married in England, probably in the mid-1620s. Their son Samuel Jr. was born on the tenth of February, 1625, in Podington — in John and Alice Pigott’s parish, suggesting the young couple was living close to home while the plans took shape.
By 1632, with his father’s health declining and the Massachusetts Bay Company’s ships making regular crossings, Samuel had decided. He would go first, alone. He would secure land in the colony, make arrangements for its working in his absence, and return to England for his family. It was the methodical approach of a man who had spent a decade preparing for something and intended to do it right.
He was forty years old. He had a wife, a seven-year-old son, and enough accumulated capital to do what he planned: cross the Atlantic, claim ground, and come back for the people he was crossing it for.
John Stratton saw his eldest son making these preparations and understood what they meant. The boy he had raised on Bedfordshire clay was going to an unmapped coast three thousand miles away. There was nothing to say about that which the farm had not already taught them both: you go where the land is, and you work it when you get there, and you trust the people you trained to carry on after you.
William and Robert and Francis — the three younger sons — were their own men in their own ways, and the record is quieter about them. They worked the Hinwick farm with their father through the last years when John was slowing, when the heavy work required a younger back, and John received their labor the way old farmers receive it: as information about what his body could and could not do anymore.
What John said to Samuel before Samuel left for the first time, the record does not preserve. What the record says is that John died with his affairs in order and his eldest son’s name first on the will — which is the yeoman’s way of saying he knew where the family was going, and he was not afraid of it.
Podington, Bedfordshire — November 1626
She died on the eleventh of November, 1626, after fifty years of marriage and more than sixty years of living in the county of her birth. She was buried in Bedfordshire — the record says no more than that — and John was left in the farmhouse at Hinwick with the particular silence of a place where someone who was always present is suddenly not.
He was about sixty-four years old. He had known Alice since he was fifteen. She had been the ground under his feet in Bedfordshire for his entire adult life: the person who knew the parish before he did, who understood the Pigott connections and the local history and the names of every family for ten miles, who had taught him the clay soil’s temperament while he was still learning it. He had come to her county as a young man from Berkshire and she had made him a Bedfordshire man. Without her he was, for the first time since his youth, in some sense a stranger.
The sons came home after the burial and then went back to their lives. The daughters — already married, already established in their own households — came and did what daughters do: they organized and cleaned and cooked and made sure their father was not going to die of neglect in the first winter. John thanked them and let them do it and then, when they were gone, sat down to reckon.
The winter of 1626–27 would have been the longest he had lived through. Bedfordshire winters are not gentle — the clay holds the cold the way it holds water, and the flat landscape does not break the wind. He would have worked the farm because the farm required working regardless of grief, and because work was what he knew, and because a man with sixty-five years of habit does not stop in winter simply because his reason for not stopping has died.
He made it to spring.
In June, with the fields under cultivation and the worst of the winter far enough behind him, he called the scrivener.
Hinwick, Bedfordshire — June 3, 1627
The scrivener came from Podington or perhaps from Wellingborough, the nearest town of any size, and he brought his quill and his ink and the particular professional patience of a man who has sat at many tables and listened to many old men account for everything they had built.
John Stratton had been thinking about this for months. Possibly longer — a yeoman in his sixties, watching his wife’s health fail, would have been running the arithmetic in his head long before he said it aloud. The farm was the center of it. After that, the smaller things: the Bible, the household goods, the money that had accumulated over forty years of careful management.
Samuel would receive his portion. He was the eldest, and the most likely to leave — John had understood that for years, even if Samuel had not yet said where he intended to go. William and Robert and Francis would each receive what was fair, what a yeoman’s estate could provide when divided among four men, which was enough to start with if a man had sense and industry. The daughters had already been settled at their marriages, their portions paid, their futures as established as his provision could make them.
And then there was the brother Hulls.
He had been part of John’s world for so long that the word brother had become accurate in everything but blood. Perhaps he was Alice’s brother, her family name absorbed into the relationship. Perhaps he was a neighbor of such long standing that the parish no longer distinguished between what the two men were to each other and what they called themselves. Whatever the truth of it, John remembered him in the will — a small bequest, a gesture, the kind of thing a man does when he wants the record to know that someone mattered.
The scrivener wrote it all down. John made his mark — or signed his name, if he was among the yeomen who had learned to write, which many of them had. The witnesses were called and witnessed. The document was folded and sealed.
It was dated the third day of June, 1627.
John Stratton had been a yeoman of Podington for fifty years. He had built a holding out of clay soil and marriage and forty years of labor. He had raised four sons and three daughters and buried a wife. He had watched England change around him — the Gunpowder Plot, the King James Bible, the beginning of Charles I’s troubled reign, the rumblings of something none of them had a name for yet — and he had farmed through all of it, the way yeomen did, the way his father had done and his father’s father before that.
The will was done.
He did not have long to wait.
Podington, Bedfordshire — October 25, 1627
The church of St. Mary the Virgin has stood in Podington since the twelfth century, its tower of warm ironstone rising above the flat fields of north Bedfordshire in the way that all the old churches of the Midlands rise — as though they grew up from the ground rather than being built on it. John Stratton had walked to it every Sunday of his married life. He had carried his children to it for their christenings. He had buried Alice from it the previous year. He knew every stone of it the way a man knows what he has seen ten thousand times.
He was buried there on the twenty-fifth of October, 1627. The sons would have carried him from the farmhouse at Hinwick along the road to the village, the way the dead were always carried, and the parish would have gathered as parishes did — not out of duty only but out of the genuine compact of people who have managed one piece of ground together for generations. John Stratton had been part of Podington for fifty years. The parish knew him.
Samuel stood at the graveside.
He was thirty-four years old, the eldest son of a yeoman farmer who had come from Berkshire before he was born and made a life here that would outlast all of them in ways none of them could see yet. He had his mother’s directness in him and his father’s patience — the two qualities that a man needs when he is going to do something difficult — and he had been thinking about Massachusetts for longer than he had told anyone.
He would not cross the Atlantic for another six years. He would spend those years in Bedfordshire, settling his portion of the estate, making arrangements, preparing in the way that careful people prepare. But the thought was already there, as he stood in the churchyard of St. Mary the Virgin with the Bedfordshire wind coming off the flat fields and his father in the ground beside his mother.
The old world was ending. The line was about to cross an ocean.
John Stratton of Podington had done his work. He had brought the family from Berkshire to Bedfordshire. He had handed it forward, the way his father had handed it forward, and his father’s father, all the way back to the chalk downs and the Roman road and the name that meant Street-town.
He had done enough.
John Stratton of Hinwick (c. 1562–1627), yeoman of the parish of Podington, Bedfordshire, is buried at St. Mary the Virgin, Podington. His will, dated 3 June 1627 and proved 23 August 1627, names four sons — Samuel, William, Robert, and Francis — and is the oldest documentary link between this family and the line that crossed the Atlantic. His son Samuel Stratton Sr. (1592–1672) emigrated to Massachusetts Bay Colony by 1647 and is the subject of Chapter Three: The Crossing.
—Wm. F. Stratton, May 2026
Over 50 years of research into the Stratton, Schneider, King, and allied families—from colonial Massachusetts to Indiana and beyond. Built by Bill & Karen Stratton.
If you are tracing a Stratton line, start here. Harriet Russell Stratton’s two-volume Book of Strattons is the most comprehensive Stratton genealogy ever compiled—both volumes are free and fully searchable online.