early modern migration
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Early Modern MigrationAuthor(s): Roger ThompsonSource: Journal of American Studies, Vol. 25, No. 1 (Apr., 1991), pp. 59-69Published by: Cambridge University Press on behalf of the British Association for American StudiesStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/27555423
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State of the Art
Early Modern Migration
ROGER THOMPSON
Since the nineteenth century,a central subtext of much
writingabout the
early
modernperiod
has been the debate about "modernization."
When, whyand how
didpeople
shed their traditionalsuperstition, fatalism, parochialism,
conservatism
and communitarianism and don such modern characteristics as rationalism,
entrepreneurship, internationalism, adaptabilityand individualism?
Following
Marx'sepoch-making contribution, three seminal works
engenderedwide
rangingdiscussion: Ferdinand T?nnies's
Gemeinschaftund
Gesellschaft (1887),
Frederick Jackson Turner's "The Significance of the Frontier in American
History" (1893)and Max Weber's "Die
protestantischeEthik und der 'Geist'
desKapitalismus" (1904-5).1 Though differing fundamentally
on the causation
andchronology
of the process, allagreed
that aprerequisite
of modernization was
theuprooting
ofpeople
from ancestral ways andplaces.
In the words of
sociologist Wilbert E. Moore:
If one were to attempta one-word summary of the institutional requirements
for economic
development, that word would be mobility. Property rights,consumer
goods and laborers
must be freed from traditional bonds and restraints, from aristocratic traditions, quasi
feudal arrangements, paternalistic and other multi-bonded relations.2
After World War II interest indeveloping
nations led historians to seek to
harness the insights and methods of anthropologists, sociologists, economistsand
demographersto their own
explorationsof
changein
premodernmentalities.
Thisfillip
to modernization studiespopularized investigations
of domestic and
Roger Thompsonis a Reader in the School of English and American Studies, University
of East Anglia, Norwich NR4 7TJ, England. He would like to thank Professor Robert
Ashton, Professor A. Hassell Smith and Dr. B. A. Holderness for help with this article.
Short titles only have been used in footnotes.
1Most easily accessible in Community and Society (New York: Harper, 1963); George
Rogers Taylor (ed.), The Turner Thesis (Boston: Heath, 1956); The Protestant Ethic and
the Spirit of Capitalism (London: Un win, 1971).2"The Social Framework of Economic Development,"
inRalph Braibanti and Joseph
J. Spengler (eds.), Tradition, Values and Socio-Economic Development (Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 1971), 71.
fourna I of American Studies, 25 (1991), 1, 59-69 Printed in Great Britain
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6o Roger Fhompson
internationalmigration.3
Inparticular,
itproduced
a colourfulscholarly flowering
among historians inEngland
and NewEngland.
II
The career of Bernard Bailyn,as remarkable for its intellectual fertility
as for its
geographical immobility, providesan excellent
starting pointfor a brief survey
of early-modern mobility studies duringthe last thirty years.
Near itsbeginning
hepublished
aprovocative essay called Education in the
Forming ofAmerican Society:Needs and
Opportunities for Study} Defining education
broadlyas the transmission from one
generationto the next of
practicaland
intellectual skills, he took as his thematic
challenge
the then
extraordinary1647
school-provisionlaw in Massachusetts. Why did education shift from an old
fashioned extended-family responsibilityto a
new-fangledinstitutional one? His
answer, derivedpartly
from culturalanthropologists
likeMargaret Mead5 and
partlyfrom Turnerian environmentalism, was that the initial Atlantic frontier
rendered eldersincapable
oftraining
anddisciplining children. Whereas in the
stable, nay static, traditional societyof old
England, ways ofdoing things barely
altered fromgeneration
togeneration,
the NewEngland climate, topography
and
wilderness demandedadaptation, mobility and
experimentation.These were
essentially qualitiesof the young. Suddenly elders lost their natural
authority-
the confidence ofsuperiority
fromhaving
trimmed ahedge
or sheared asheep
or
ploughed
a line or adzed a beam more often and therefore more
expertly.
Experienceno
longertold. With different materials and unfamiliar
problems,it
could become aliability
rather than an asset. Underminedby
the destabilized
societyof the frontier, the older
generationsummoned the state to their aid. The
school, asproxy parent, exerted
authorityand exacted obedience where
theyno
longercould.
3Excellent introductions are:
Cyril E. Black, The Dynamics ofModernisation (New York:
Harper, 1967); Richard D. Brown, Modernisation : The Transformation of American Fife
(New York: Hill and Wang, 1976); Thomas Bender, Community and Social Changein
America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982).4
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, i960). Bailyn's essay opens with a
synopsisof Edward
Eggleston'sThe Transit
ofCivilisation
(Boston: Appleton, 1900)which saw
migrantsto New England
asgenerally conservative and tradition-bound. Its
identification with the Herbert Baxter Adams "germ" school led to its swamping in
rising Turnerian seas.Listings of emigrants may be found in Norman C. P. Tyack,
"Migration from EastAnglia
to NewEngland
Before 1660" (University of London
Ph.D. dissertation, 1951), Appendix B; John Camden Hotten, Original Listsof
Persons
ofQuality who went to the American Plantations (Baltimore: Genealogical Publishing,
1962); Charles E. Banks, Topographical Dictionary of 288'/ English Emigrantsto New
England (Philadelphia: Bertram, 1937); idem, The Winthrop Fleet (Boston: Houghton
MifBin, 1930); Charles B. Jewson, "Transcription of Three Registersof
Passengers
1637-39," Norfolk Record Society, 25 (1954). The New England Historic Genealogical
Register (NEHGR) (1846- ) is a treasurehouse of genealogical research. The New
EnglandHistoric
Genealogical Societyof 101
Newbury Street, Boston,is
sponsoringThe Great Migration Project (director Robert C. Anderson)
tosupersede James
Savage, Genealogical Dictionary ofNew England (Boston: Little Brown, 1860-62).5
And Keep Your Powder Dry (New York: Morrow, 1942).
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Early Modern Migration 61
This
challenging depiction
of a lurch from tradition to
modernizing change,from
stabilityto
mobility,from
hierarchyto
anarchy,caused
byenforced
adaptationto an alien environment, set many young minds furiously
to work.
Thetesting
of theBailyn
thesisproduced
a series ofjustly
famous local studies
by scholars like John Demos, Philip Greven, Kenneth Lockridge, Daniel Scott
Smith, Richard Bushman and Michael Zuckerman.6 Subsequently, synthesizing
review articles by John Murrin and James Henretta evaluated theirfindings.7
They respectfully pronouncedthe Bailyn Thesis a dead duck. Far from the
restless, disjointedand disordered society posited
in Education in theForming of
AmericanSociety,
most of the local studies found theirtownships extraordinarily
stable for the first three or fourgenerations. Corporatism, consensualism,
communalism,cohesion
typifytheir
portraits.Elders seemed
adeptat
usingtheir
control ofcapital
tokeep
their financially dependent juniorsin line. There was
littlesign
ofyouth
at the helm in town orcolony government. Religion
exerted
apowerful
counter to the economictemptation
todisperse.
So did the
impenetrableforest cover, fear of the Indians and of
corruptingwilderness
incivility. David Grayson Allen went so far as to describe NewEngland planters
as ultra-traditionalist, clingingto
English ways in the wilderness likedrowning
men to flotsam.They
resembled theraj
in India, more British than the British,
not the inventive, individualistic, opportunisticTurnerian frontiersman, the
archetypal modernizer.8
Meanwhile, research inEngland
seemed todig
agrave to
burythe
corpse.
Even before Bailyn's book appeared, E. E. Rich had argued in 1950 from theevidence of
changingsurnames in successive Elizabethan muster rolls, lay subsidy
rolls and heralds' visitations thatEnglish people
moved about far more than the
mythof a static, traditional society suggested.9
Laslett and Harrison'sanalysis
of
6John Demos, A Fittle Commonwealth (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970);
Philip Greven, Four Generations (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1970); Daniel Scott
Smith, "Population, Family and Society in Hingham MA 1635-1880," (University of
California, Berkeley,Ph.D. dissertation, 1975); Richard Bushman, From Puritan to
Yankee (New York: Norton, 1970); Kenneth Lockridge, A New England Town (New
York: Norton, 1970); Michael Zuckerman, Peaceable Kingdoms (New York: Knopf,
1970);Susan
Norton, "PopulationGrowth in Colonial America:
Ipswich MA,"Population Studies, 25 (1971), 433?52.
7John Murrin, "Review Article," History and Theory,
11(1972), 226-75 ;James Henretta,
"TheMorphology
of New England Society," Journal of Interdisciplinary History,2
(1971-72), 379-98.8
Murrin, "Review Article," 231 ;David Hackett Fischer, Growing Old inAmerica (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1977); John Demos, "Old Agein
Early New
England,"in
John Demos and Sarane Boocock (eds.), Turning Points (London:
University of Chicago Press, 1978), 248-87; Ralph J. Crandall, "NewEngland's
Second Great Migration," NEHGR, 133 (1975), 349; David Grayson Allen, In English
Ways (ChapelHill: University of North Carolina Press, 1981); idem, "Both
Englands,"
in David D. Hall and David Grayson Allen, (eds.), Seventeenth-Century New England
(Boston:Colonial
Societyof
Massachusetts, 1984).9E. E. Rich, "The Population of Elizabethan England," Economic History Review, 2nd
Series, 2(1950), 247-65. Cf. E. J. Buckatzsch, "Constancy of Local Populations and
Migrationin England before 1800," Population Studies, 5 (1951) 62-69.
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6 2Roger Thompson
seventeenth-century
local censuses at the midland
parishes
of
Clayworth
and
Cogenhoeseemed to show
astonishingrestlessness. Of
Clayworth, theywrote:
"A settled, rural, perfectly ordinaryStuart community could
changeits
composition bywell over half, getting
on in fact for two-thirds, in a dozen
years."10 Equally surprisingwere E. A.
Wrigley'sconclusions that the
phenom
enalpopulation growth
of London between 1550 and 1700 must have been fed
by immigrantsto the
cityfrom all over the British Isles. One in
eight peoplemust
have had someexperience
of London life in the first half of the seventeenth
century, he claimed. This was far more than in theallegedly
mobilepresent.11
The received truths of the 1940s and 1950s had been notsimply
called into
question ; theyhad been reversed. The assumed settledness of old worlds and
restlessness ofnew were
replaced by theirexact
opposites.This revolution is
clearlyrecorded in
Bailyn's recently publishedThe
Peopling
ofBritish North America. His own
vigorous prose best reflects his vividportrayal
of "Worlds in Motion":
Nowhere in this thinly settled land[England] did stable communities approach Malthusian
limits topopulation growth; yet people
moved continuouslyas
thoughthere were such
pressure.
The peopling of British North America was an extension outward and anexpansion in
scale of domestic mobility in the lands of the immigrants' origins, and the trans-atlantic
flow must be understood within the context of these domestic mobility patterns.
If there is one uncontroversial fact that has emerged from the past three decades, it is
that traditional society of the early modern period was a mobile society - a world in
motion.
Echoing Rich, Bailyn concludes that,
In the context of the mobility of the time, the familiar puritan exodus... as anorganized
migrationwas
nothing remarkable.... Most puritan emigrantswere normal
Englishmen
acting normally. For some the worst part of the journeywas the road journey
across
England ; their troubles ceased when theywere embarked. The Atlantic had ceased to be
a barrier and had already become ahighway.12
Instead of stolid, unchanging peasants hittingthe wilderness and
going wild,
this neworthodoxy implied
that habitualfidgets
moved to America for a rest. To
describe traditional society as amobile society looks like a contradiction in terms.
Emigration,in this new mould, seemed to throw the process of modernization
into reverse.
The revolution inmobility studies, roughly
sketched here, fitsneatly
with
otherscholarly
revisions. Oneexample
is the contention thatEnglish puritans
wereessentially conservative, reacting against Laudian, Arminian innovations
liketaking communion at a railed-in altar at the east end of the church, bowing
at the name of Jesusor
diminishingthe role of the sermon.
They emigratedin
order to conserve the purer, pre-Laudianfaith and
liturgy,and to return to the
10Peter Laslett and John Harrison, "Clayworth and Cogenhoe," in H. E. Bell and R. L.
Ollard(eds.),
HistoricalEssays Presented
toDavid Ogg (London: A.
&C. Black, 1963).11
E. A. Wrigley, "A Simple Model of London's Importancein
Changing English
Society and Economy," Past and Present, 37 (1967), 45-63.12
(New York: Knopf, 1986), 17, 20, 25-6.
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Early Modern Migration 63
primitive.13
The
stability
and social
discipline
of New
England
towns could be
explainedas a reaction to and relief from the conflict and incoherence of old
world life. Even thegrowing provincialism
of erstwhilereligious
radicals could
have arisen from the calm permanence of colonial communities-
"peaceable
kingdoms
" ?in
sharpcontrast to the
modernizing, metropolitanenthusiasms of
the mothercountry.14
Is it so far-fetched to take American Revolutionaries at
their own valuation aspreservers, custodians of
principles longsince
jettisoned
back home and brakemen on themodernizing
slide to selfishness and
corruption?15
Thediscovery
of apparent English volatility helpsto
explain other
contemporaryconcerns more
satisfactorily.The obsession shown
bycentral
government, parliamentand local
justiceswith
requiring settlement,with
hobbling
people'srestless movement, becomes more
comprehensible.16The
literary
fashion for thepicaresque,
for satires aboutinvading Scotsmen, Welshmen and
rustics in thebig city
or broadsides about country lassescorrupted by
urban vice,
likewise fall into context.17Again,
Puritancampaigning for a reformation of
manners andgovernmental
fears of disorder could well reflectheightened
social
andgeographical instability,18
as could contemporary worries about therising
incidence of melancholia andpsychic disorder.19 Perhaps
all this adds upto a
portrayalof the Great
Migrationas the
flightof dyed-in-the-wool traditionalists
frompolluting modernity.
13Robert
Ashton,"Tradition and Innovation in the Great
Rebellion,"in
J.G. A.
Pocock (ed.), Three British Revolutions (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980);
Nicholas Tyack, The Anti-Calvinists (Oxford: Clarendon, 1987); T. D. Bozeman, To
Five Ancient Fives (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985).14
T. H. Breen and Stephen Foster, "Social Cohesion in Seventeenth-Century New
England," Journal ofAmerican History, 60 (1973-74), 5-22; Michael Zuckerman, "The
Fabrication of Identity in Early America," William and Mary Quarterly (WMQ), 34
(1977), 194.15
Bernard Bailyn, Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 1967); John Adams, "Dissertation on the Canon and the Feudal Law,
No. 4," in Robert J. Taylor (ed.), The Papers of John Adam, 5 vols. (Cambridge,MA:
Belknap, 1977), 2, 123-8; Edmund Burke," Speechon Conciliation with the Colonies,
22 March1775,"
in F. G.Selby (ed.),
Burke'sSpeeches (London: Macmillan, 1895),
79-85.16
A. L. Beier, Masterless Men (London:Methuen, 198 5) ;J. F. Pound, Poverty and Vagrancy
in Tudor England (London: Longman, 1971).17
Roger Thompson, Unfit for Modest Ears (London:Macmillan, 1979) ; idem, (ed.), Samuel
Pepys's Penny Merriments (London:Constable, 1976) ;Margaret Spufford, Small Books and
Pleasant Histories (London: Methuen, 1981).18
Keith Wrightson, "The Puritan Reformation of Manners" (University of Cambridge
Ph. D. dissertation, 1974); idem, English Society ij8o-i68o (London: Hutchinson, 1982);
idem and David Levine, Population and Poverty in anEnglish Village
:Terling (London
:
Academic Press, 1979); Paul Slack (ed.), Rebellion, Popular Protest and Social Change in
Early Modern England (Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 1984); Peter Clark and
Paul Slack
(eds.),
Crisis and Order in
English
Towns
(London: Routledge, 1974).19 Robert Burton, Anatomy ofMelancholy (London: Dent, 1961); L. C. Knights, Drama and
Society in theAge of Jonson (London:Chatto, 1937) ;Michael Macdonald, Mystical Bedlams
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981).
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64 Roger Thompson
III
Despitesuch
satisfying coincidences, the new counter-modernization synthesis of
mobile old world?stable new has not met with universal acceptance. Two
alternative responses havedeveloped:
one hassought
toquestion
research
sources, methods and conclusions, and toquantify just
how mobile thepopulation
of early modern Britainactually
was ; the other has retested thealleged stability
of NewEngland society. Between them, these two revisionist groups have
produceda far more varied and
complicated picture.
Amajor problem
with the use ofpopulation listings
of any kind is thatthey
aresimply snapshots. They
tell how communities were constituted atspecific
moments in time. Where there are subsequent censuses, we rarely know where
the new faces in the group photographhave come from, nor where
missingfaces
havegone.20 Only by piecing together
thebiographies
of individuals can we
answerquestions
like: How far and how often didthey
move andwhy?
Were
someage groups
moreprone
tomoving
than others ? How did other factors?
economic, political, social, intellectual, religious, geographical?
affectmobility?
How didmobility affect the individual, community
andsociety?
On the English side, historians like Peter Clark, Julian Cornwall, Virginia de
John,David Hey, Margaret
and PeterSpufford
have demonstrated that the
simple kaleidoscopic pictureinferred
originally becomes agreat deal more
complexwhen viewed at local level.21
Apartfrom movement to London, where
Wrigley's model has so far stood the test of time, it has emerged that most people
travelledonly short distances. The vast
majority stayed well within a radius of
twenty miles, a knowableneighbourhood.
Astoday, young people, students,
servants-
living-indomestics or farm hands
employed by the yearor
apprentices-
and recently qualified journeymen tended to be most restless.22Marriage
requireda move
byone
party, usually the wife. Thereafter, however, "settling
down" was the norm. The amount of movement has been put into truer
perspective. Thechanges
inClayworth, it has been shown, depended
more on
natural causes like birth and death than ongeographical mobility.
In the average
20MirandaChaytor, "Household and
Kinship: Ryton," History Workshop Journal,10
(1980), 27-34.21
Peter Clark, "The Migrantin Kentish Towns 1580-1640," in Clark and Slack (eds.),
Crisis and Order; Peter Clark and Paul Slack (eds.), English Towns in Transition (London:
Oxford University Press, 1976); Peter Clark (ed.), The Transformation of EnglishProvincial Towns 1600-1800 (London: Hutchinson, 1984); Julian Cornwall, "Evidence of
Population Mobility in the Seventeenth Century,
"Bulletin of the Institute of Historical
Research, 40 (1967), 142?52; Virginia De John, "To Pass Beyond the Seas"(University
of East Anglia M.A. dissertation, 1978); David Hey, An English Rural Community:
Myddle (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1974); Margaret Spufford, ContrastingCommunities (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974); Peter Spufford, "Population
Mobility
in
Seventeenth-Century England,"
Focal
PopulationStudies, 4
(1970),41-50.
22Ann Kussmaul, Servants inHusbandry in Early Modern England (Cambridge
:Cambridge
University Press, 1981).
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Early Modern Migration 65
decade
only
one in twelve
people
were newcomers to the
village
and the same
proportion departed, perhaps only temporarilyor to a
nearby parish.23 Typesof
movers have beenspecified. Young people
who moved tonearby
towns and
settled were often what Peter Clarke has called "BettermentMigrants";
those
whom authority harried asvagabonds, however, were "Subsistence
Migrants,"
vagrant workers, criminal gangs, trampsand discarded women.24 John
Patten has
distinguishedrelative
magneticfields of different kinds of destinations, from the
feeblepull
ofvillages only
as far asneighbouring communities, through
the
attraction of market, industrial orport
towns to the broader field ofprovincial
capitalslike Norwich or Bristol. Over all, of course, loomed the southeastward
magnet of London.25 Different kinds of husbandryand land tenure induced
variedmigration patterns
too.People
belowyeoman
rank incereal-growing
regionswere more
likelyto have to move
(because of economicpressures)
than
their counterparts withcushioning by-employments
and securer tenures in the
wood-pastureor
fenland-edge districts.26 Finally,economic
depressions,such as
occurred in the 1620s and 1630s, had short-term effects onpopulation
movements.
Anthony Salerno, surveying emigrationfrom Wiltshire to America in the 1630s
and 1650s, concludes that for the young unmarried voyagers the usualEnglish
safety valves, the pasture areas, local towns, or, ultimately, London, were all
closed because economicdepression
hadalready
led to saturation. America was
the nextstep
in bettermentmigration.27
As well asage, motives and tenures, the
perspectivesof different classes and
occupational groups need to be distinguished. Gentlemen, graduate clergymenand
entrepreneursin the cloth trade would have wider
perspectivesthan semi
literate tenant farmers or labourers.They
could beexpected
to be more
"modern" than the peasantry,more
open tochange
and morelikely
to travel
around a wider area both in theirprofessional
and familialcapacities.
Certain
occupations,like doctors, carpenters
orglaziers, depended
onmobility.
Even
farmers had to go to market. Residence also affects mind-set. The range of
contacts of a craftsman in acity
or aninnkeeper
on ahighway
would begreater
than a weaver's in a market town and greater still than a servant maid's on an
isolated farm.Finally religion
affected mindsright
down the social scale, as recent
studies ofpopular
belief andunderstanding
have shown. Puritanism, inparticular,
often widened perspectives. Not only did Puritan ministers frequently travel
over wide areas topreach
and lecture, but thelaity
were known togo up
totwenty
23W. R. Prest, "Stability and Change
in Old and New England: Clayworth and
Dedham,"
Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 6 (1976), 359?74.24
Clark, "Migrant in Kentish Towns."25
John Patten, "Patterns of Migration and Movement of Labour to Three Pre-Industrial
East Anglian Towns," Journal of Historical Geography,2
(1976), 111?29; idem,
"PopulationDistribution in Norfolk and Suffolk," Journal of the Institute of British
Geographers, 65 (1975), 45-65.26
Margaret Spufford, Contrasting Communities-, Alan Everitt, "Farm Labourers," in Joan
Thirsk (ed.), The Agrarian History of England, 7 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge
UniversityPress,
1967),4, 464?78.
27Anthony Salerno, "Social Background
toSeventeenth-Century Emigration
to
America," Journal of British Studies, 19 (1979), 31-52. The author also pointsout that
the centres from which Wiltshiremen emigratedwere hotbeds of religious radicalism.
The Modern Republicans 245
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66 Roger Thompson
miles to hear the sermons of favourite divines. This kind of movement needs to
bedistinguished
fromresponding
either to the urbanpull
or the financialpush.28
These detailedfindings certainly
call into doubt theprevious picture
of the
British Isles in constant ferment. For most individuals there would belong
periodswhen residential stasis was the rule
?throughout childhood, for instance,
or for much of married life. Movement usuallycame
duringadolescence and,
perforce,for the few who achieved it, old age. Furthermore, those who left home,
youngwomen who married out of their
parishesor
apprentices learninga trade,
normally stayed within familiar territory. It wasonly the underclass of subsistence
migrants (whose numbers may well have beenexaggerated)
who weregenuinely
rootless. Eventhey
were tethered or beaten back to their homeparishes by poor
laws and local officials.
These refinements and restatements also coincide morehappily
with the
conclusions of scholars inneighbouring
fields. For instance, theconcept
of the
traditional county communityand the
phenomenonof
"persistent localism,"
which seem tofly
in the face ofinstability
andvolatility,
can be moreeasily
reconciled with thefinding
that mostmigration
was adolescent and small-scale.29
Along-term stability
ofmiddle-aged
marriedcouples
would likewiseexplain
the
persistenceof
strong community control, family disciplineand the maintenance
ofrelatively high
moral standards bythe great majority of the
population.Their
decline is often taken as a clearsign
of the onset of-modernization.30
IV
Conclusions about the extent of colonialrerooting
were never so clearcut, as
Bailyn recognizes. Despitethe agreement by
several scholars on the essential
stabilityof New
England townships,others have arrived at
conflicting
conclusions. Sumner Powell, John Demos, Linda Bissell, Timothy Breen and
StephenFoster uncovered considerable amounts of
outmigrationand
dispersal,
especially by younger people.31 Reanalysisof Dedham's records found that its
28David Hey, Family History and Local History (London: Longman, 1987) has an excellent
survey and exhaustivebibliography
of recentEnglish
research. See also Peter Clark and
David Souden(eds.), Migration
andSociety
inEarly
ModernEngland (London:
Hutchinson, 1987). Alan Everitt, "The Marketing ofAgricultural Produce," in Thirsk
(ed.), Agrarian History, 4, 467?537.29
The classic pioneeringaccount is A. M. Everitt, The Community of Kent and the Great
Rebellion (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1966); idem, Change in the Provinces
(Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1969). For the colonies, T. H. Breen, "Persistent
Localism," WMQ, 32 (1975), 3-28.30
Peter Laslett and Karla Oosterveen, "Long-term Trends in Bastardyin
England,"
Population Studies, 2.7 (1973), 255?84; Peter Laslett, Family Life and Illicit Love
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977); P. E. H. Hair, "Bridal Pregnancy,"
Population Studies, 20(1966), 233?43; idem, "Bridal Pregnancy Further Examined,"
Population Studies, 24 (1970), 59-70; Edward Shorter, The Making of theModern Family
(London: Collins, 1976);Lawrence
Stone,The
Family,Sex and
Marriagein
England,1j00-1800 (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1977).31
Sumner Chilton Powell, PuritanVillage (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press,
1963); Demos, Fittle Commonwealth; Linda Auwers Bissell, "From One Generation to
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Early Modern Migration 67
statistical appearance of
greater
rootedness was
entirely
due to its inhabitants
living longerthan their
Clayworth counterparts.32 Community studies by
Stephen Innes, Daniel Vickers and ChristineHeyrman
have thrown into
questionthe
utopianism, corporateness and evenChristianity of
fishingand
frontier towns.Exploitation
of land, sea and poorer neighbours by capitalist
entrepreneursseems much more the order of the
day.33Researchers
seekingto
explainthe
long-termcauses of witchcraft accusations have
dislodgedhornets'
nests ofgrudges and feuds within New
Englandtowns.
Boyer and Nissenbaum
associated the vendetta at SalemVillage
with conflict between traditionalists and
modernizers.34 JohnWalters saw
transplanted English regional rivalries,
exacerbated bydifferent levels of
development,as another source of new-world
conflict.35 The volume ofpeople returning
toEngland, beginning
witheighty
from the Arbella fleet andswelling
after 1640, alsochallenges
the claims of
contentment and settledness made for the colonists.36According
to Andrew
Delbanco, many were beset with thefrustrating
sense ofhaving
missed the
apocalypticboat
bytoo
hastily boardingthe transatlantic one.37
New-world conservatism has beenquestioned
too.Although migrants
from
Hingham, Norfolk, might respondin
English ways to localchallenges
in
Hingham, MA, genuineradical reforms also occurred in New
England.
Magistratesand townsmen were not
usuallyelected in
England.The
Massachusettslegal
coderepresented
agiant leap
forward fromEnglish
practice.38The colonies
dispensedwith church hierarchies, lay patronage of
incumbents, ecclesiastical courts and clerical pluralism. These changes were
impressiveinnovations to set
againsta
clingingto the past. The
puritans may
Another: Windsor CT," WMQ, 31 (1974), 79-110; T. H. Breen and Stephen Foster,
"Movingto the New World," WMQ, 30 (1973), 189-222.
32Prest,
"
Stability and Change.
"
33Stephen Innes, Fabor in aNew Fand: Springfield (Princeton
:Princeton University Press,
1983) ;Daniel Vickers, "Work and Life on the Fishing Periphery of Essex County MA,
1630-75," in David D. Hall and David Grayson Allen (eds.), Seventeenth-Century New
England (Boston: Colonial Society of Massachusetts, 1984); Christine Heyrman,
Commerce and Culture: Maritime Communitiesof
Colonial Massachusetts1690-ijjo (New
York: Norton, 1984).34
Paul Boyer and Stephen Nissenbaum, Salem Possessed (Cambridge,MA: Harvard
University Press, 1974): cf. John Demos, "Underlying Themes in the Witchcraft,"
American Historical Review, 75 (1970), 1311?26; idem, Entertaining Satan (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1982); Roger Thompson, "'Holy Watchfulness' and
Community Conformism,"
New England Quarterly (NEQ), 56 (1983), 504-22.35
John J.Walters, "Hingham,MA 1631? 61," Journal of Social History,
1(1967?68),
351-70.36
Harry S. Stout, "TheMorphology
of Remigration: New England University Men
1640-60," Journal of American Studies, 10(1975), 151?72.
37Andrew Delbanco, "The Puritan Errand Re-Viewed,
"
Journal of American Studies, 18
(1984), 343-60;idem, The Puritan Ordeal
(Cambridge
:Harvard
UniversityPress,
1989).38Bradley Chapin,
Criminal JusticeinColonial America (Athens, GA :
University of Georgia
Press, 1983); G. B. Warden, "Law Reform inEngland and New
England," WMQ, 35
(1978), 668-90.3-2
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68 Roger Thompson
have
despaired
of
achieving
the
cleansing they
desired while still in
England,
but
theseprophets
did much more thanmerely cry in the wilderness.
Nor should weslight
the enormouspolitical, religious
and economic ferment
of the firstgeneration.
NewEngland
was new, and, theoreticallyat least, new
placesare much more
opento
experiment,debate and
change.The Massachusetts
Charter wasadapted
almost out ofrecognition
within four years of arrival. It was
not soeasy in New
Englandas in old to silence
RogerWilliams or Thomas
Hooker orJohn
Cotton or a host of other clerical and lay radicals.39
However, the balance has beentipped
backrecently
towards traditionalist
motives forcrossing
the Atlantic. New research seems to cast doubt on the Great
Migration beingan extension of betterment
migrationwithin
England.Norman
Tyack, George Selement, Virginia Anderson,David
Cressy,Kenneth
Shipps,
TimothyBreen and
StephenFoster all make cases for
reassertingthe
religious
urgeas the main spur
to voyage westward.40 Evidence from church court cases
and from recently arrivedapplicants
for churchmembership
underlines the
argument that to artisans or established yeomenor minor gentry New
England
would morelikely spell
economic detriment than betterment. The Netherlands a
few hours across the North Sea wouldprovide
bothreligious
toleration and
greater economicopportunities,
it is claimed. Onlya
burningmission to conserve
a threatenedgod-centred society could have moved middle-class, middle-aged
migrantsto risk all in the wilderness.
Thevitality
ofearly
modernmigration
studies is confirmed bynew and
pending publications. Frank Thistlethwaite's Dorset Pilgrims, a finely craftednarrative of the Mary
andJohn migrants from the west country to Dorchester MA
and then Windsor CT, confirms the view that culturalbaggage weighed heavy
and that old-world outlooks survived thesea-change.41
Thisinterpretation
is
carried to its ultimate in David Hackett Fischer's Albion's Seed. Fischer's "seed"
is Herbert Baxter Adams's"germ"
in modern dress.Minimizing
theimpact
of
the new world, Fischer traces fourEnglish "folkways"
as thedistinguishing
culturalshapers
of colonial NewEngland, Virginia, the Delaware
Valleyand the
Appalachian backcountry.Their
legacy"remains the most
powerfuldeterminant
of avoluntary society
in the United Statestoday."
One would be more confident
of this ambitiousstudy
if it were less hidebound byits thesis and more familiar
with the English background.42 My forthcoming study of over 2,000 East
39Edmund S. Morgan (ed.), Puritan Political Ideas
(Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1965);
Robert E. Wall, Massachusetts :The Crucial Decade 1640-jo (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 1972); T. H. Breen, The Character ofa Good Ruler (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 1970).40
Norman C. P. Tyack,
"The Humbler Puritans of East Anglia and the New England
Movement," NEHGR, 138 (1984), 79-106; George Selement, "Meeting of Minds,"
WMQ, 41 (1984), 32-48; Breen and Foster, "Movingto the New World"; Virginia
De
John Anderson, "Migrants and Motives:Religion
and Settlement in Early New
England," NEQ, 58 (1985), 339-83 ;David Grayson Allen respondedwith "Matrix of
Motivation," NEQ, 59 (1986), 408-18; David Cressy, Coming Over (New York:
Cambridge UniversityPress,
1987);
Kenneth A.
Shipps,
"Puritan
Emigration
to New
England: A New Source on Motivation," NEHGR, 135 (1981), 83-97.41
(London: Barrie and Rockliffe, 1989).42
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1989).
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Early Modern Migration 69
Anglian emigrants
to New
England during
the 1630s has found that the
greatmajority
had come fromlong-settled
ancestries andpersonally
stable back
grounds. The trauma ofuprooting
and transatlantic relocation was minimized
bytheir
movingalmost
exclusivelyin groups, by
theirpersonal
and residential
longevityin New
Englandand by their
rapid sinkingof roots there. They were,
quite literally,settlers. Few of the different
occupational groups betrayeda zest
for modernization. Preservation of traditional norms and values was the aim of
their errand into the wilderness.
Mobilitystudies have been on the move
duringthe last
thirty years. The
presentconsensus holds that most
peopleabove the destitute in
Englandand
NewEngland
moved onlyshort distances and remained rooted in familiar
neighbourhoods.With
majornew studies in the
pipeline, however,we
maydoubt
whether this will remain the state of the art forlong.43
43Virginia De John Anderson's adaptation of her Harvard University Ph.D. dissertation
of 1987 is expectedin the spring of 1991; Susan Hardman Moore is completing
an
important study of remigration between 1640 and 1660; Stephen Fender has just
completeda
study of the rhetoric of early migration,to be published by Cambridge later
this year.