Edward Skidmore of Southwark, Surrey, and by 1657 of Anne Arundel County, Maryland.1

Occasional Papers, no. 22. EDWARD SKIDMORE OF SOUTHWARK, SURREY, AND BY 1657 OF ANNE ARUNDEL COUNTY, 1 MARYLAND. By Warren Skidmore Edward Skidmore of Maryland still presents a few problems to an inveterate puzzle- solver. Either he, or one of his wives, seems also to have been nearly related to the family of Henry Howard of Anne Arundel County and the Howards give Edward Skidmore an oblique connection back to the Grocers Company in London. A complete transcript of his will and that of Henry Howard are both added in an appendix. Both remember the other’s family (and what were probably their cousins or kinfolks) but neglect to specify their exact relationship. Henry Howard was an aging bachelor, and the three sons of Edward Skidmore (who were born with at least pewter spoons in their mouths) frittered away their inheritances and left no recent male posterity. When I was a student at St. John’s in Annapolis back in the 1940s I did a bit of research on this family at the Maryland Hall of Records (then on campus) hoping to find that they were related to my own family in Connecticut and on Long Island. I satisfied myself that they were not, but the notes I then made have been lost with other juvenilia. So this piece, on an interesting family, has been done from scratch. It may be taken as likely that the Moss family of Maryland are Edward (I) Skidmore’s only living descendants. (WS) EDWARD (I) SKYDMORE was born about 1615, the youngest son of Richard Skidmore, a merchant tailor of London, and his wife Mary. He was apprenticed about 1629 to Timothy Richbell of the Grocers Company, probably at the usual age of about 13 or 14.2 He married his first wife 1Histories of this family have recently appeared in Colonial Families of the Eastern Shore of Maryland by Robert W. Barnes and F. Edward Wright and in the First Families of Anne Arundel County, Maryland 1649-1658 by Donna Valley Russell. A good deal of information has been collected that improves these published accounts of Edward Skidmore and his family, largely an academic exercise, since his posterity (at least in the male line) has long been extinct. 2The Worshipful Company of Grocers was a small fraternity of merchants who dealt in pepper and spices. Their records survived the Great Fire of 1666 (which did destroy the Grocers’ Hall), and are now on loan to the Guildhall Library in London. The control of the spice trade, already in a decline, was taken over after 1666 by the Custom and Excise Department. Whether Edward finished his term of apprenticeship (and was granted the freedom of the city) is not presently known. His master, Timothy Richbell, lived at Southwark St. Olave, as did Edward’s elder brother Thomas Skidmore who died a very young man there in 1619. Thomas had been apprenticed in 1608 to a −1− Mary somewhere in England, and may have perhaps brought over his second wife Alice Smythe from the same place.3 He was in Maryland before 10 November 1657 when he acquired a plantation of 103 acres on the north side of the South River from Thomas Tolley.4 He had a grant on 9 January 1659 from Lord Baltimore for a plantation which he named Scuddamore , but which was subsequently known as either Scidmore or Skidmore. The grant noted that it was due him both by the assignment of Thomas Tolley and Jonathan Neale for 200 acres of land, but also for the transportation of himself, Alice Smith (“for the time of her service” who became his second wife), Mary Thorndon (who married his eldest son), together with 50 acres due also for the service for his [deceased] first wife Mary.5 Scuddamore was formally surveyed for him on 27 October 1662.6 He purchased another 175 acres called Bluntwell which adjoined Scuddamore. It had been originally taken up by his cousin Richard Blunt on 30 June 1671.7 Bluntwell was then merged into Scuddamore for a total of 525 acres which probably became his abode.8 The boundaries and the member of the Drapers’ Company, and had barely finished his apprenticeship when he and his young wife were both struck down by the prevailing plague. The brothers (and their sister Anne, to be noticed later) were the grandchildren of a Giles Skydmore who is found earlier at High Wycombe in Buckinghamshire. For their ancestry see my book The Skydmore Era at Burnam, Buckinghamshire now in preparation. 3The marriage to his first wife Mary and the christening of their son Edward (II) Skidmore in the 1650s remains to be found. They were perhaps once on record in the registers of one of the churches in London lost in the Great Fire of 1666. 4Thomas Tolley had arrived by 1650 in Maryland when he proved the transportation of himself and his wife Margaret. It seems likely, but unproven, that he was the Thomas Tooly who married Margaret Clark in 1632 in London at St. Mary le Strand, Westminister. His patent on 8 July 1651 for 100 acres was called New Worcester or Tolley’s Point. The Thomas Tolley of Maryland was a Quaker in matters of religion, and had a son Thomas born before 1635 probably in England. 5It is probably significant that Edward never claimed a headright on his sister Ann Skidmore, which suggests that she and her husband William Tolson of Tolchester plantation were also married in England before emigrating to America.. 6Patents, 4, 55; Q, 233. Until it was repealed in 1663 the planters had a grant of 50 acres for every servant they brought into the province. 7It seems certain that Richard Blunt was the grandson of an earlier Richard Blunt, a chandler of Berkhamsted, Hertfordshire. He had married a daughter of John Skydmore of High Wycombe, Buckinghamshire and was called a brother by Giles Skidmore in his will of 1569. The Richard Blunt of Kent County, Maryland was buried on 16 September1669 leaving a wife Ann (who he had married by 1654) and several young children. His widow married secondly Richard Nash, who died about 1680 leaving Ann [formerly Blunt] a widow once again. Two minor children that Nash had by her were given over to the guardianship of Samuel Wheeler. See my forthcoming book The Skydmore Era at Burnham, Buckinghamshire, now in preparation, for the Berhamsted family. 8Edward Skidmore was also the first brief owner of the tract called Hambleton on the north side of the South River at the mouth of Muccubin’s Cove in Middle Neck Hundred of Kent County. It was patented for him on 4 August 1665. (Calvert Rent Rolls, 198.) He sold Hambleton to Patrick Duncan, the elder, for 6000 lbs. of tobacco in 1669. (Anne Arundel Land Records, IHI, 196-8). −2− descent of the title of Bluntwell is given in a case tried in the Court of Chancery in 1676. It had been granted to Richard Blunt “by Patent under the Great Seale of this province” and he sold it soon after to Nathaniel Styles.9 Styles may also have been Blunt’s cousin, a son of Mary (Skidmore) Styles of Little Missenden, Buckinghamshire. Styles also sold Bluntwell, and it was acquired after another quick conveyance or two by Edward Skidmore It has to be remembered that population grew in the early mid-Atlantic colonies by the importation of indentured servants. New England was settled differently, largely at first by Puritans who came over from England already with some proven trade or skill. A case decided in 1675 shows the usual customs of indenture in Maryland. An Elizabeth Hiccoks asked the Provincial Court to declare her free from her indenture to Edward Skydmore. She showed the Court a certificate that she had from a certain English official “for Enrolling consents of servants in England & their agreemt with their Masters undr the seale of the said office” that showed that she was to serve only four years in America.”10 She also told the court that she had been first bound to Captain Thomas Harwood, a mariner, who had sold her to Edward Skydmore. The court looked sympathetically at her evidence and decided that she was in fact free, and ordered Skydmore to give her the corn and clothing to which she was entitled by law.11 Edward Skydmore was also credited with the transportation of Rhys Bazill, Henry Lloyd, Saunders Simmons, Ellinor Abraham, Ursula Duffe (Doffe), and Elias Godfrey to Maryland. Some part of these indentured servants may have been known to him in England, but is more likely that he purchased their servitude at Annapolis from the captains of ships who had brought them over from England and sold them at that port to repay their expenses on the voyage and also for a profit. Once sold they worked off the cost of their transportation to America by serving as laborers on tobacco plantations, a task taken over later by slaves brought from Africa who were subject, not to a term, but to a lifetime of servitude.. He also acquired another plantation called Skidmore across the Chesapeake Bay in Anne Arundel County on the south side of Fishing Creek which contained 200 acres. It was surveyed for him on 21 April 1663 and descended eventually to the Moss family. His first wife Mary (who he had married by 1655) and their son had joined him in Maryland by 1658. She may have been kin of Henry Howard, a bachelor of Anne Arundel County, who left most of his personal estate in 1683 to be divided equally among Theophilius Hacket and Edward Skidmore’s four children, Edward, Michael, Samuel, and Elizabeth Skidmore.

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