ABSTRACT
Agnes Beaumont, baptized in 1652, was the daughter of a Bedfordshire yeoman farmer, the youngest of his four children to survive infancy. A fresh storm arose on Tuesday night, for after Agnes and her father had retired to bed she awoke to hear him crying out in agony. Agnes did her best to help him, and then ran over the snow-covered fields in the dark to her brother's house to summon assistance. Agnes's ordeal reflects both the religious divisions of her age and the domestic tensions that recur in every generation as children reach maturity and press for some independence. Agnes's narrative, however, is far from a conventional conversion narrative. In the farmyard, at the coroner's inquest, in Biggleswade market, Agnes's narrative testified to her moral strength and physical courage. Agnes Beaumont's narrative, by contrast, remained unpublished for almost a century and carried no such male endorsements.
