Donne's father died suddenly in 1576, and left the three children to be raised by their mother, Elizabeth, the daughter of John Heywood, epigrammatist, and a relative of Sir Thomas More.
In his solemn final sermon Death's Duel, Donne takes the link between Eve and Moses silently for granted, and refreshes it with the almost throwaway remark.
The first settlers were, then, contemporaries of Shakespeare (1564-1616), Bacon (1561-1626) and Donne (1572-1631), and would have spoken a similar dialect.