Thus for the English, a range of belief was possible, and different regions of the country tended to favor different doctrines. Puritans were especially numerous in East Anglia, which included Winthrop’s county of Suffolk along with Norfolk, Essex, Cambridgeshire and Lincolnshire. It was the richest region of England, with good agricultural land, excellent fisheries, a well-established cloth-making industry and many small towns such as Cambridge, then a center for Puritan theology, and urban Norwich, which was probably England’s largest city after London. Ports dot its long curving coast and, in an era when roads were often impassably muddy, these gave the region easy links to London and to Holland, just across the North Sea.

East Anglians raised large numbers of turkeys, geese, chickens and ducks in Norfolk and Suffolk. They fattened beef and grew mustard — England’s favorite condiment for serving with it. Hops for beer-making flourished in Suffolk, and saffron for dyeing cloth and flavoring traditional holiday cakes and breads grew around Saffron Walden in Essex. Like the cloth woven from local wool and the fish caught in the teeming North Sea, these products were easily shipped to London markets from East Anglia’s ports.

People could also easily get to London. John Winthrop studied and practiced law there, and honed his enthusiasm for a New World by witnessing the evils of the city. Other Puritans also found much to dislike. Lucy Hutchinson described the court as ‘a nursery of lust and intemperance’ and raged against ‘proud encroaching priests’ and ‘lewd nobility.’ Even the poet Ben Jonson, who served the court as masque-maker, derided the times as a ‘money-get mechanic age.’

Yet, if the greed and immorality of London inspired Puritan religious austerity, its opportunities filled their money chests and fueled their confidence. As the English grew more disaffected with the Stuart court, London became a center of Puritanism and of opposition to the extravagances of Charles I, with East Anglia as its rural counterpart. Puritan teaching about the importance of personal salvation and the centrality of reading the Bible had a secular analogue in ideals about work as a sacred calling, the idleness of the nobility as a sin and the rights of property owners to determine the laws of the country.

This did not mean that John Winthrop and his fellow Puritans were democrats; Winthrop described democracy as ‘the meanest and worst of all forms of government.’ The passengers on Arbella did not include any of the poor and huddled masses of London and East Anglia. The ship was named after Lady Arbella Fiennes, sister of the Earl of Lincoln, who was a passenger. With her were her brother, Charles; her friend, the poet Anne Dudley Bradstreet, who had grown up in the earl’s household; and two of the earl’s stewards, Simon Bradstreet and Thomas Dudley. Along with them were numerous members of the landowning gentry, clergymen, merchants, farmers and skilled tradespeople such as weavers, tailors, shoemakers and carpenters.

Less than 5 percent were laborers. This was the result of deliberate policy. Dudley had advised recruiting only ‘godly men…endowed with grace and furnished with means,’ while Winthrop, who became governor of Massachusetts, told his son John — later governor of Connecticut — not to allow people of ‘the poorer sort’ to come to America. ‘People must come well provided, and not too many at once,’ he wrote. In all, 17 ships packed with Puritan immigrants traveled the ocean in 1630. By 1641, 200 ships had arrived with around 21,000 immigrants. Among them were 129 clergymen and theologians with strong connections to Cambridge University, especially Emmanuel College, where a third of them had studied; and to East Anglia, where many had held parishes or had family connections.

As historian David Hackett Fischer explains in Albion’s Seed, Massachusetts immigrants were atypical, and not just in their religious faith and material prosperity. ‘To a remarkable degree,’ he wrote, ‘the founders of Massachusetts traveled in families — more so than any ethnic group in American history.’ Thus, while immigrant groups elsewhere were made up mostly of young, single men, in Massachusetts 40 percent of newcomers were mature adults, many with children. Noting that more women than men fulfilled the stringent requirements for church membership, Fischer points out that ‘It would be…statistically correct to say that many Puritans led their husbands to America.’

From the beginning, then, life in Massachusetts was domestic, often following familiar English patterns with accommodations to Puritan beliefs. People typically married in their mid-20s, but while a quarter of English people never found the wherewithal to marry, virtually all New Englanders married, since failure to find a spouse suggested the withdrawal of divine grace. Marriage was not an indissoluble sacrament as it was in England, but a legal contract breakable by divorce — a Dutch idea that William Bradstreet described as ‘the laudable custom of the low countries,’ where so many Puritans had taken refuge. Couples could not marry without their parents’ consent, but parents could not willfully withhold permission.

Contrary to stereotype, the Puritans were not joyless; love and sexuality were central to marriage, though unlicensed sexuality was disapproved of. Similarly, Puritans abhorred drunkenness but were delighted to find grapes growing wild in the New World because they enjoyed wine. They liked food, too, and they brought with them the East Anglian tradition of baking. While they dressed in browns and grays, they approved of the English idea that community leaders should denote their status by finer clothes. As for festivity, they loathed the rambunctiousness of the English Christmas because it was a religious occasion, but they had many thanksgivings when games and feasting were the order of the day.

Many families were related before they left England, and after they arrived they intermarried, creating an oligarchy of prominent families with names such as Winthrop, Dudley, Mather, Saltonstall, Hutchinson and Davenport. The children of clergymen tended to marry each other, and a clerical elite was perpetuated over generations, as, for example, Cotton Mather followed his father Increase Mather and his grandfathers Richard Mather and John Cotton into the ministry.

Large families were typical, and groups of families quickly spread beyond the coastal settlements, creating towns named after places they had known in England. The port cities of Boston, Hull and Lynn recall the major ports of eastern England. Thirty-six towns in all were named after English towns, at least 20 of which were in East Anglia. Later towns such as Winthrop, Dudley and Leverett were named after Puritan leaders, while Milton commemorates the English Puritan poet John Milton.

Massachusetts also developed an economy similar to that of East Anglia. Unlike many New World economies based on mines or plantations, it depended on fishing, agriculture and trading. As early as 1645, the towns of the Connecticut Valley of Massachusetts were shipping thousands of bushels of grain. Like 17th-century England, which Peter Laslett described as ‘a large rural hinterland attached to a vast metropolis’ of London, Massachusetts quickly became a region of farming villages served by small seaports attached to the metropolis of Boston.

With all its freedom from the license, laxity and oppression of England, Massachusetts did not suit everybody who went there. The early days of living in tents and huts were harsh. Massachusetts is a rainier climate than East Anglia, and its winters much colder. Lady Arbella’s husband Isaac Johnson noted that things were ‘dolorous’ at first, and many regretted their ‘voluntary banishment.’ When the immigrant ships sailed for England, hundreds of would-be settlers returned home.

Those who did not fit in with the Puritan social order were sent to other colonies or back to Britain. In 1641, when the English Civil War began, some immigrants returned to fight on the Puritan side, and when the Puritans won, many resumed English life under Oliver Cromwell’s more congenial Puritan sway. Of these, Hugh Peter, minister of Salem and a founder of Harvard University, was executed for his wartime activities when Charles II regained the Stuart throne in 1660.

But returnees were a minority. Most immigrants used their funds and their energies to make prosperous lives, creating a New England that wove East Anglian habits, Puritan convictions and North American contingencies into a vibrant cultural tapestry, distinctly American, yet still recognizably English in its underpinnings.

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This article was written by Claire Hopley and originally appeared in the September 2005 issue of British Heritage. For more great articles, subscribe to British Heritage magazine today!

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