ue of trade, or--on the part of the people--to
escape from straitened circumstances at home, or to find a refuge from
religious persecution. In the settlement of New England none of these
motives were operative except the last, and that only to a slight
extent. The Puritans who fled from Nottinghamshire to Holland in 1608,
and twelve years afterwards crossed the ocean in the _Mayflower_, may be
said to have been driven from England by persecution. But this was not
the case with the Puritans who between 1630 and 1650 went from
Lincolnshire, Norfolk and Suffolk, and from Dorset and Devonshire, and
founded the colonies of Massachusetts and Connecticut. These men left
their homes at a time when Puritanism was waxing powerful and could not
be assailed with impunity. They belonged to the upper and middle classes
of the society of that day, outside of the peerage. Mr. Freeman has
pointed out the importance of the change by which, after the Norman
Conquest, the Old-English nobility or _thegnhood_ was pushed down into
"a secondary place in the political and social scale." Of the
far-reaching effects of this change upon the whole subsequent history of
the English race I shall hereafter have occasion to speak. The proximate
effect was that "the ancient lords of the soil, thus thrust down into
the second rank, formed that great body of freeholders, the stout gentry
and yeomanry of England, who were for so many ages the strength of the
land." [2] It was from this ancient thegnhood that the Puritan settlers
of New England were mainly descended. It is no unusual thing for a
Massachusetts family to trace its pedigree to a lord of the manor in the
thirteenth or fourteenth century. The leaders of the New England
emigration were country gentlemen of good fortune, similar in position
to such men as Hampden and Cromwell; a large proportion of them had
taken degrees at Cambridge. The rank and file were mostly intelligent
and prosperous yeomen. The lowest ranks of society were not represented
in the emigration; and all idle, shiftless, or disorderly people were
rigorously refused admission into the new communities, the early history
of which was therefore singularly free from anything like riot or
mutiny. To an extent unparalleled, therefore, in the annals of
colonization, the settlers of New England were a body of _picked men_.
Their Puritanism was the natural outcome of their free-thinking,
combined with an earnestness of character which coul