>From David Hackett Fischer, "Albion's Seed," Oxford University Press, 1989. Chris ======================= The East of England before the Great Migration Despite its poor resources, methods of farming were more advanced in the eastern counties than elsewhere in England. The agricultural revolution came early to East Anglia, as also it did to the Netherlands; "replenishing crops" were used as early as the mid-seventeenth century. The great reformer Arthur Young observed as he traveled through the eastern counties that England's best farmers lived on its worst soil. Agriculture in this region was mostly a regime of mixed farming, which supplied food for urban markets and wool for a local textile industry. Today, East Anglia seems very rural in comparison with other English regions. But in the early seventeenth century, it was the most densely settled and highly urbanized part of England, and had been so for many centuries. Norwich was England's second largest city in 1630—a dynamic center whose population had trebled in the preceding fifty years. In 1600, no fewer than 130 little ports of entry existed on the coast of Essex alone. Many inhabitants of East Anglia were artisans and skilled craftsmen. In 1630, half the adult population of Essex was employed in the cloth trade. Suffolk, Norfolk, Cambridge and Kent were also major textile centers, specializing in the manufacture of light woolens favored in southern Europe, and also in luxurious "Suffolk shortcloths," which were worn by the rulers of the Western world. This trade had been deeply depressed by wars with Spain (1625–30) and France (1627–29) and by a general depression of commerce in this period. As a result, unemployment and poverty were major problems in East Anglia on the eve of the great migration. In 1629, unemployed weavers besieged the courts at Braintree and Sudbury in search of work. Their suffering was deepened by a severe "scarcity and dearth of corn" in that year. Local scarcities were made worse by the wretched state of overland communications. Even short trips were so dangerous that the D'Ewes family left an infant with a wet nurse rather than expose it to the danger of even a single day's journey. Travel by land was slow and painful; but travel by water was cheap and easy. The sea linked East Anglia, Kent and Lincolnshire with each other, and also with the Netherlands, in a cultural nexus of great importance in the seventeenth century. At the same time, the sea also exposed East Anglia to many hazards. For more than a thousand years, sea raiders had fallen upon the English coast, and the memory of their depredations was very much alive in 1630. In that year, at least two towns in Essex and the village of Linton in Cambridge still had nailed to their church doors the human skins of marauding Danes who had been flayed alive by their intended victims. Raiders from the sea had attacked East Anglia as recently as 1626 and 1627 when the dreaded "Dunkirkers" came ashore—killing, looting and raping as so many other sea people had done before. Through the centuries, some of these many waves of raiders had remained to settle there, particularly the people known as Angles, and later those called Danes in East Anglia and Jutes (from Jutland) in Kent. It was in part the culture of these people that gave East Anglia and Kent their special character. As early as the sixth century, both East Kent and East Anglia were very different from Wessex, Mercia and the north of England in their comparatively large numbers of freemen, and small numbers of servi and villani. Also, in the words of historian K.P. Witney, they were special in "the greatly superior status enjoyed by the ordinary freemen." The eastern counties were also distinctive in their political character. Many rebellions against arbitrary power had occurred there—Jack Straw's Rising in Suffolk, Wat Tyler's Rebellion, John Ball's Insurrection in Kent, and Robert Kett's Rebellion in Norfolk … This region also became a major center of resistance to Charles I after 1625. When the Civil War began in 1642, Parliamentary forces found their greatest strength in the counties called the Eastern Association — the same area from which Massachusetts was settled. The religious life of this region also differed from other parts of England. It had been marked by dissent for centuries before Martin Luther. During the early fifteenth century, the movement called Lollardy found many of its followers in East Anglia … The Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century also flourished in East Anglia, more than elsewhere in England. The Marian martyrs — men and women executed for their Protestant faith in the reign of the Queen Mary — came mostly from this region. Of 273 Protestants who were burned at the stake for heresy during the counter reformation of the Catholic Queen (1553–58), no fewer than 225 (82%) came from nine eastern counties … Within East Anglia, the Puritan movement was strongest in the small towns whence so many migrants left for Massachusetts … The Puritanism of eastern England was not all of a piece. Several distinct varieties of religious dissent developed there, each with its own base. A special strain of religious radicalism which put heavy stress upon the spirit (Antinomianism) flourished among Puritans in eastern Lincolnshire. The more conservative and highly rationalist variant of Calvinism (Arminianism) found many adherents in London, Middlesex and Hertfordshire. In between were men and women from the counties of Suffolk, Essex and Norfolk who adopted a Puritan "middle way." Their faith became the official religion of Massachusetts for two centuries. East Anglia was also exceptional in its educational and cultural attainments. In the seventeenth century, rates of literacy were higher there than in other English regions … [FOOTNOTE: … if one compares the small number of religious writers whom Perry Miller drew together as The New England Mind, most came from Suffolk, Essex and Norfolk, and were educated at Cambridge. [pages 42–49]