Religion and the Avalon Settlement


In the textbook we read that in Lord Baltimore's seventeenth-century settlement at Ferryland Anglicans and Roman Catholics existed side by side. Let us explore this religious experiment of George Calvert or Lord Baltimore a little further. Two items deserve special attention: 1. the religious name of his settlement; 2. the tolerant charter that allowed Roman Catholics to practice their religion.

Avalon, the Place Where Christianity is to Be Preached in the Newfoundland


Lord Baltimore

George Calvert was a very educated and important man during the reign of King James I of England. He was one of the two Secretaries of State and helped the king not only in political matters but also by translating theological writings for him into Latin. In private life, he had accumulated considerable wealth through investments and saw Newfoundland first as just one more investment opportunity. Eventually, however, he took out a charter that would have made him Lord of Avalonia, a colony in Newfoundland, extending from Ferryland to Petty Harbour near St. John's in the east and Placentia Bay in the west. He even visited twice, the last time in a party of 40 that included his family. But the inclement weather drove him from Newfoundland.


Calvert's Avalon. Courtesy Gillian Cell

In the charter of 1623, he writes that he was going to establish a settlement and "call it Avalon, or ye Province of Avalon, & soe hereafter will haue it Called." The name Avalon is quite significant religiously, because important ancient traditions and lore are associated with it. Avalon is the area near the community of Glastonbury in Somersetshire where Joseph of Arimathea is said to have preached the gospel in England for the first time. According to the New Testament, Joseph of Arimathea was a Jewish councillor and follower of Jesus. He was only a minor figure during Jesus' lifetime but achieved fame after Jesus' death because he asked Pilate for permission to bury Jesus in his own grave. Later legend has him collect some of the blood shed by Jesus in the same cup that Jesus drank out of during the Last Supper. That cup was also called the Holy Grail, and Joseph is said to have brought it back with him to England. According to some other legends, his coming to England to preach the gospel was not his first visit, since he had been there before as a Jewish businessman and had brought the young Jesus with him on some of his trips. The poet William Blake wrote about this in his famous poem Jerusalem. Joseph of Arimathea was buried in Glastonbury (Avalon), where also according to legend another famous Briton, King Arthur, was buried. Over their graves the famous Benedictine monastery of Glastonbury is said to have been built.

We see that Avalon was an important place, associated with the spread of Christianity in the Old World. Father Simon Stock, a Roman Catholic Carmelite monk and advisor of George Calvert, wrote in his letters to Rome that the Avalon plantation of Lord Baltimore in Newfoundland was named after old Avalon in England. The same point is also made in a seventeenth-century biography of Lord Baltimore, which states that Avalon in Newfoundland was "called Avalon from Avalon in Somersetshire where Christianity was first received in England." It is therefore safe to assume that when George Calvert called his settlement Avalon, he had in mind a place where Christianity would be preached in the New World, just as it had been for the first time in England's Avalon. Simon Stock, Lord Baltimore's advisor in England, went even a step further and saw in the Avalon settlement the hub for future missions in the New World. Stock hoped that the Colony of Avalon would not only be a place where Christianity would be preached but also a gateway to other missions in America and in the Far East. Why the Far East? It was hoped that soon the North-West Passage would be established. It would allow easy access for travellers to Asia.

A Very Tolerant Charter


Ceremonial Cross found in Ferryland. Courtesy Hans Rollmann

One thing that made it possible for Roman Catholics to come to Newfoundland at a time when they were forbidden to worship freely in public in England was the liberally phrased charter of George Calvert. Calvert had laid down in this charter all the rights and privileges he had. Similar charters were also issued for other colonial establishments, such as those in Virginia and New England as well as for the first settlement in Newfoundland at Cupids, where John Guy and his party first settled in 1610. If we compare the two charter's, John Guy's and George Calvert's, the religious requirements are quite different.

John Guy's charter reflects the penal laws of his day, which did not permit practising Roman Catholics to settle in the colony. In fact, they were required to swear the Oath of Supremacy, which asserted that the British monarch and not the pope was the spiritual head of the Church of England. The charter issued to Guy and the Newfoundland Company read:

We would be loth that any person should be permitted to pass that We suspected to affect the superstitions of the Church of Rome, We do hereby declare that it is our will and pleasure that none be permitted to pass in any voyage from time to time to be made into the said country but such as first shall have taken the Oath of Supremacy ...

Here we have a document that states that the Roman Catholic religion is superstitious and requires of any future colonist an oath that denies that the pope is the head of the church.

How different and lenient, however, is the charter of George Calvert. It merely states that

Provided alwayes that no Interpretation be admitted thereof, whereby Gods holy & true christian Religion, or the allegiance due to vs, our heires, & successours may in any thing sufferr, any prejudice, or diminution ...

Bishop Raymond Lahey, a historian of Newfoundland Roman Catholicism, who has written on religion in Lord Baltimore's Avalon, thinks that "the absence of restriction on Roman Catholic colonization in the Avalon charter is indeed remarkable" and highly unusual for that time.

If we see how lenient the charter of Avalon was in comparison with that of John Guy, it becomes clear that even if Calvert had no Roman Catholic settlement in mind when he drafted the charter, later on it was so much easier for Roman Catholics to come and live in Newfoundland.


I remember to have seen at Glastonbury on a stone cross ... a bronze plate,  on which was carved an inscription relating that Joseph of Arimathea came to Britain thirty years after Christ's Passion, with eleven or twelve companions: that he was allowed by Arviragus the king to dwell at Glastonbury, which was then an island called Avalon, in a simple and solitary life.    --William Good (1527-1586)

The New Jerusalem

William Blake

And did those feet in ancient time
Walk upon England's mountains green?
And was the holy Lamb of God
On England's pleasant pastures seen?

And did the Countenance Divine
Shine forth upon our clouded hills?
And was Jerusalem builded here
Among these dark Satanic Mills?

Bring me my bow of burning gold!
Bring me my arrows of desire!
Bring me my spear! O clouds, unfold!
Bring me my charriot of fire!

I will not cease from mental fight,
Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand
Till we have built Jerusalem
In England's green and pleasant land.



Pages about Avalon

The Colony of Avalon website:

 http://www.heritage.nf.ca/avalon/default.html

Hans Rollmann, Anglicans, Puritans, and Quakers in Eighteenth-Century Newfoundland:

 http://www.mun.ca/rels/ang/texts/ang1.html

 Isle of Avalon website:

 http://www.isleofavalon.co.uk/index.html: