Fashions o the Times
3 4"; Elizabeth Freake and Baby Mary; Artist unknown; Boston; 1671-74; Oil on canvas; 421/2 x 36/ Courtesy Worcester Art Museum, Worcester, MA.
thirds of the early settlers to Massachusetts were originally from that region. It is worth noting that the counties next to Boston, Massachusetts are Norfolk and Suffolk, the same names as those of the counties of East Anglia. Those English counties provided both leaders and followers for the Massachusetts Bay Colony. The leading figures of the exodus were wealthy merchants, churchmen, lawyers and Winter 1990
physicians. When transplanting to the new land they brought along large support staffs of like-thinking artisans, farmers and servants. "Puritan New England was a noble experiment in applied theology," says Daniel Boorstin; and this made them a practical, not a speculative people. Though almost all of New England's Puritans were drawn from the middle classes and a very high percentage of them were literate, only a very small
by Mimi Sherman
percentage were landholders or professionals. The others were indentured servants, soldiers, adventurous types and farmers who had been encouraged to better themselves spiritually and perhaps temporally as well. The arriving numbers are staggering. Five boatloads arrived in 1629 and seventeen more followed in 1630. Every year the numbers grew, and in those early years they may truly be said to have shared a vision. All had signed the Act of Supremacy to King Charles I, for their quarrel was originally less political than theological. "During the classic age of the first generation, at least, Massachusetts Bay was a community of self-selected conformists,"5 who agreed with Nathaniel Ward's Simple Cobbler ofAggawan(1647)that "all Familists, Antinomians, Anabaptists and other Enthusiasts shall have free liberty to keep away from us, and such as will come to be gone, as fast as they can, the sooner the better.' The settlers in Massachusetts Bay Colony had come to New England to create an opportunity to practice a purified theology. From the first, led by wealthy and committed souls, they sought to create their "City Upon a Hill!' Outrageously intolerant, all they wanted was to be left to their project. But they still saw themselves as Englishman — more self-righteous, perhaps, than others — and expected to continue following social patterns of their mother country. This was the setting into which, in about 1635, Thomas Clarke, a wealthy, East Anglian Puritan merchant, brought his family, and likely a fairsized support entourage. They settled in Dorchester, on the Massachusetts coast just three miles south of Boston, and proceeded to emulate their friends and neighbors in building houses like those they had known back across the ocean.(Some of these seventeenth century homes survive in New England today and their progenitive models can still be seen in East Anglia.) 35