The Uprooted or 'Worlds in Motion': East Anglian founders of New England 1629-1640

Abstract

The Uprooted or *Worlds in Motion': East Anglian founders of New England 1629-1640 During the seventeenth century somewhere between a third and a half of a million people left Britain and settled overseas. The bulk of these emigrants went to Ireland, the West Indies and North America. In the long run, this amazing diaspora of English-speaking people must rank alongside the domestic political, social and economic developments within the realm as a crucial, though often neglected, event in early-modern English history.1 This essay is concerned with the contribution of one English region, the Greater East Anglian counties of Lincolnshire, Norfolk, Suffolk, Essex and Cambridgeshire (the heartland of the Parliamentary Eastern Association of the 1640s) to one aspect of the British diaspora, the justly named 'Great Migration' to N e w England during the 1630s. This decade saw a rising surge of up to 20,000 men, women and children pouring across the North Atlantic and settling towns in Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, N e w Hampshire and Maine. N o other colonial plantation could match such a powerful initial current of emigration. In 1640 the tide stopped abrupUy, never to regain its previous flood. This was in marked contrast to the steady flow of British emigration throughout the century to such colonies as Virginia. Yet such was the social cohesion of most of these N e w England settlements, that their 1700 population, largely replenished by later immigrants, equalled or even outstripped that of Virginia, founded a generation earlier.2 1 M y interest in this topic arose from research in the court records of Middlesex County, Massachusetts, for the latter half of the seventeenth century. The clerk and later magistrate of the county court from 1649 to 1699 was Thomas Danforth of Cambridge, M A . H e had emigrated from Framlingham in eastern Suffolk in 1635 with his father Nicholas Danforth and five siblings, as a devoted follower of Rev. Thomas Shepard, a sufferer from the Laudian persecution of puritan ministers. Investigation of the Danforth family in England revealed that the family home, N e w Street Farm, still survives and that from its chamber windows can be seen the village of Saxtead where Thomas's mother (who died in 1629) had been born and raised. The Danforth family, on the evidence of 1 H. A. Gemery, 'Emigration from the British Isles to the New World', Research in Economic History 5 (1980), 179-231. 2 R . Archer, 'New England Mosaic', William and Mary Quarterly (WMQ) 47 (1990), 477-502. P A R E R G O N ns 11.2, December 1993 2 R. Thompson probate and local records had been resident in the Framlingham neighbourhood since before 1512, and they left behind in the area a tangled web of kinsfolk. This evidence of ancestral longevity in one neighbourhood and of persistent local intermarriage conflicted with the picture of English society that American colonial historians were painting. The opening chapter of Bernard Bailyn's Peopling of British North America, entitled 'Worlds in Motion', typified this portrait. It described early modern Englishmen as restlessly mobile from place to place and suggested that the move across the Atlantic was 'nothing extraordinary' given emigrants' prior rootlessness. Recently Jack Greene depicted the average English parish as a place through which people flowed. This view of N e w Englanders' antecedents has been widely accepted.4 In trying to check on the typicality or atypicality of the Danforth family history, I quickly discovered that little large-scale, systematic research had been done on the English backgrounds and roots of emigrants to N e w England.5 I therefore decided to undertake an inquiry into the personal and ancestral histories of as many members of the Great Migration contingent from the eastern counties as I could find. I set myself three questions: (i) H o w geographically mobile or stable were the prior personal experiences of the emigrants? (ii) H o w long or short a time had their families been settled before emigration in their neighbourhoods (defined as an area ten miles in radius, a small cluster of parishes)? (iii) How, once transported across the Atlantic, did these new arrivals...