The 'Half Moon' —— A Romance of the Old World and the New

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ISBN: 9781330822814 出版年：2016 页码：345 Ford Madox Hueffer Forgotten Books

My task became easier still when I found that Colman, the first European to die between the shores of the Hudson River, was a freeman of Rye — of that quarter of the world which I know and love best. For you could not have a better object lesson than Rye, in the seventeenth century, of what it was that made America. Rye then had many privileges that had descended to it from the Middle Ages; it had, like its sister towns of the Cinque Ports, its own laws, its own rights, its own nobility, quite apart from those of the rest of England. These laws and privileges pressed heavily on the poorer inhabitants and caused much unrest and discontent. Rye, too, had been almost depopulated by the Plague in the days of Queen Elizabeth, and, in consequence, a whole popula tion of foreign Protestants, Dutch, German and Huguenot, had been given leave to settle in Rye and around the walls.