individuals and to posterity, were calculated to diminish their own means of living and their pleasant diversions. The dislike of the "commoners" to the work of the "participants" led to frequent riots, and many of Vermuyden's Flemings were maltreated. He endeavoured to allay discontent by employing local labour at high wages; and was courageous enough to pursue his task despite loss of money, wanton destruction, and many other discouragements.[1] Ebullitions of discontent on the part of fractious Fenlanders did not cease till the beginning of the eighteenth century.
A very simple calculation shows that the great-grandfather of the first Matthew Flinders would probably have been contemporary with Sir Cornelius Vermuyden's reclamation works. He may have been one of the "participants" who benefited from them. The fact is significant as bearing upon this conjecture, that no person named Flinders made a will in Lincolnshire before 1600.[2]
It is, too, an interesting circumstance that there was a Flinders among the early settlers in New England, Richard Flinders of Salem, born 1637.[3] He may have been of the same family as the navigator, for the Lincolnshire element among the fathers of New England was pronounced.
The name Flinders survived at Donington certainly for thirty years after the death of the sailor who gave lustre to it; for in a directory published in 1842 occur
- ↑ See Calendar of State Papers, Domestic Series, for 1619, 1623, 1625, 1638, 1639 et seq; and White's Lincolnshire page 542.
- ↑ See C. W. Foster, Calendar of Lincoln Wills 1320-1600`, (1902).
- ↑ Savage, Genealogical Dictionary of the First Settlers of New England, (Boston, U.S.A. 1860).
