1 - Intrat John Cruso

Summary

John Cruso was born in Norwich, the second city of the kingdom. It was the city which would form the backdrop to much of the action in his life, and with which he most closely identified. He signed his first published poem, a 1622 elegy, ‘I.C. Norvic’, with ‘Norvic’ being an abbreviated form of the Latin Norvicensis [of Norwich]. Furthermore, Cruso was born into the city's Dutch Stranger community, with which he would remain intimately connected throughout his life. This allowed him to retain a link with his Netherlandish heritage. As the prologue suggested, we must therefore consider Cruso in terms of hybrid identity. How he negotiated between the elements of this identity and indeed added to them is a theme that runs throughout this book. This chapter analyzes how Cruso came to be a member of the Dutch Stranger community in Norwich. It begins by introducing his close family members. It then proceeds to explore how the family came to settle in Norwich, and goes on to provide details of how John's father, Jan, set about establishing the Cruso family in Norwich, and more specifically, how he integrated himself into the structures of the city's Dutch migrant community. Jan's participation in the institutions of the community such as the Dutch church and militia would provide a template for his son John's subsequent participation in them.

RECORDS OF THE CRUSO FAMILY

John Cruso was baptized on 16 February 1592/3 [A^o 1592 decima sextadie mensis ffebr], having most likely been born only a few days earlier. We know this not from baptismal records, but from an entry made in Latin in the Norwich Mayor's Court Book on 16 May 1601, which resulted from the presentation of some documents to the court by his father. The Mayor's Court met regularly in the fifteenth-century Guildhall, completed in 1412, a symbol of Norwich's civic pride and self-confidence.

The entry in the Mayor's Court Book, made in the presence of the Lord Mayor, the grocer and mercer Alexander Thurston, tells us several other things. First, John was baptized in the Anglican church of St George, Colegate [in p[ar]ochia Georgij at Colgate], a striking fifteenth-century Gothic structure.