PART II Migration from the Three Kingdoms: England, Scotland, and Ireland4 English Migration into and across the Atlantic during the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries NICHOLAS CANNY The phenomenon of English migration into and across the Atlantic during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries has only recently come to be taken seriously as a subject worthy of historical investi- gation. The neglect of such an obvious subject is accounted for by a variety of factors. Those historians whose primary interest is English politics and society have traditionally displayed scant interest in people who have abandoned England to settle overseas, except sometimes to explain their departure. The other principal body of scholars who might have been expected to address the subject in its entirety were those concerned with the history of English settler society abroad. Until recently, however, such scholars have tended to concentrate upon one particular area of settlement, and have been interested in English migration only to the extent that it influenced social devel- opments in that particular area. Even more problematic is the fact that, until recent years, the overwhelming majority of scholars of Colonial British America have limited their attention either to societies on mainland North America which eventually became part of the United States or to colonies that continued to be part of the British Empire after the disruption of 1776. And to further com- plicate matters, historians with but a slight interest in migration have tended to lump together English, Scottish, and Irish settlers under the generic term ‘British’. Apart altogether from the bias or lack of interest of historians, the " N. Canny, “The British Atlantic World: Working towards a Definition’, Historical Journal, 33 (1990), 479-97. The popularization of the concept of Colonial British ‘America owes much to J. P. Greene and J. R. Pole (eds.), Colonial British America: Essays in the New History of the Early Moder Era (Baltimore, 1984).40 Nicholas Canny subject of migration has been hindered by the scarcity of sources that might shed light on it and by the lack of competence or disinclination of historians to study such sources as do exist. Instead of analysis and quantification, we have had listings of the various groups of free migrants who moved to various destinations on mainland North America, linked to descriptions of the societies in which they had their, origin, Some older books of this kind, such as Marcus Lee Hansen's The Atlantic Migration, 1607-1860, published in 1951, had the virtue of describing the European background of the various groups of migrants, but the shortcoming of being based on the assumption that movement across the Atlantic was the only logical course open to people in the Old World for whom economic oppor- tunity was shrinking. Such studies, therefore, had little to say about internal migration within European societies; nor did they recognize that emigration to the New World was but one of several moves open to Europeans in search of fresh opportunity during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.’ Scholars in yet another tradition were interested in the European background of migrants for the clues it provided to the various distinct cultural forms which, they believed, had existed and endured in the several regions settled by Europeans during the colonial phase of American history. This tradition, which can be associated with scholars such as Thomas Jefferson Werten- baker on Virginia and Perry Miller on New England, reached its apogee with David Hackett Fischer’s Albion's Seed, published in 1989. Although more sophisticated than the earlier works, Fischer’s book proceeds from the same assumption: namely, that Colonial British America was comprised of a number of distinct cultural segments each of which owed its distinctiveness principally to the European regional background of the dominant settler group.? While the general study of English migration over time has been 2M. L. Hansen, The Atlantic Migration, 1607-1860: A History of the Continuing ‘Settlement of the United States (Cambridge, Mass., 1951). For the more recent approach see the essays in this book and A. Fogelman, ‘The Peopling of Early America: Two Studies by Bernard Bailyn’, Comparative Studies in Socity and History, 31 (1989), 605-14, esp. 607, in which Fogelman makes the point that while 90,000 Germans emigrated to North America during 1683-1775, over 700,000 German-speaking Rhinelanders were involved in migrations within Europe. * TJ. Wertenbaker, Patrician and Plebeian in Virginia, or the Origin and Development of the Social Classes of the Old Dominion (Charlottesville, Va., 1910); P. Miller, The New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century (Cambridge, Mass., 1939); idem, The New England Mind: From Colony to Province (Cambridge, Mass., 1952); D. H. Fischer, Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America (Oxford, 1980).English Migration 4 sadly neglected, some notable work on particular migrations has been accomplished, some of it even before the late 1960s when interest in the subject quickened. Pride of place among early scholars must go to Norman C. P. Tyack, whose unpublished 1951 thesis on English migration to New England has been drawn upon by a great number of scholars.* Before Tyack, it was already assumed that this particular migration was confined to the single decade of the 1630s, and that it involved between 12,000 and 20,000 individuals. It was also widely presumed, and frequently stated, that it was essentially a movement of family groups who had previously enjoyed secure positions in England but uprooted themselves for religious reasons. Tyack chal- lenged those assumptions by pointing to economic and social, as well as religious, explanations for the great migration. His conclusions, which amounted to disputing the essentially Puritan character of the emigration, have been slowly absorbed into the mainstream literature on New England and would now seem to be challenged only by Virginia Dejohn Anderson.’ It is generally accepted that a high percentage of the migrants to New England were urban artisans, and some recent authors, such as David Cressy, have suggested that the economic rather than the spiritual motive was the prime, or even the sole, one in determining settlement in particular communities within New England. A total migration of 21,000 people, concentrated within a twelve-year time span has now also won general acceptance, as has the case for a continuing trickle of outward and return mig- ration after the 1640s. Allowance is now made for a higher propor- tion of men than was previously suggested in the literature, and those young single men among them are seen to have been primarily concerned with bettering their material rather than their spiritual lives. The picture that has emerged, after some decades of intensive study, is of a migration which was more diverse in composition than was previously thought, but still family-based. More important is 4 N.C. P. Tyack, ‘Migration from East Anglia to New England before 1660" (Univ. of London Ph.D. thesis, 1951). ° "The historiography is summarized in D. Cressy, Coming Over: Migration and Communication between England and New England in the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge, 1987); and D. G. Allen, In English Ways: The Movement of Societies and the Transferal of English Local Law and Custom to Massachusetts Bay in the Seventeenth Century (Chapel Hill, NC, 1981), esp.163~204. For a restatement of the traditional position see V. D. Anderson, New England's Generation: The Great Migration and the Formation of Society and Culture in the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge, 1991). 1 wish to thank Peter Mancall for alerting me to the Anderson book.2 Nicholas Canny the acceptance that this was a relatively minor movement of people when compared with the outflow of people from England to other destinations in and across the Atlantic during the seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries. The pioneering work of Norman Tyack on New England was matched by that of Abbot Emerson Smith and Mildred Campbell on white emigration to North American destinations other than New England. The broad subject investigated by Smith is suggested by his title: Colonists in Bondage: White Servitude and Comvict Labor in America, 1607-1776. Published in 1947, this book, like all works of its generation, is marred by Smith’s preference for literary over quantitative sources and by his tendency to advance broad gener- alizations on the basis of impressions gained from the literary sources he consulted. However, while impressionistic, the book marked a sharp departure from previous scholarship, first, in devoting attention to white migration to the British West Indies as well as to the colonies on mainland North America, and second, in drawing atten- tion, in the appendices, to the known surviving sources that seemed valid for compiling statistical data on free migration to Colonial British America. These were servant or emigration lists compiled in different English ports for several series of years during the seven- teenth and eighteenth centuries, a list of transported convicts com- piled for London and the Home Circuit for the years 1718-72, records of immigrants and land grants compiled in several American colonies during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and census lists drawn up in some colonies at different intervals. On the basis of a superficial examination of this data, Smith drew some conclusions about the trend and scale of servant migration during the two cen- turies, and identified the years just before and immediately after the Restoration of 1660 and the period 1770-75 as the two phases of greatest migration. Even this pinpointing was based on impression rather than a close analysis of data, and he explained his failure to move beyond conjecture to establish precise figures by his inability to disentangle English from Irish, German, and Scottish settlers who became more numerous in the eighteenth century. 7 © Cressy, Coming Over, S. Foster and . H. Breen, ‘Moving to the New World: The Character of Early Massachussetts Immigration’, William & Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 40 (1973), 189~222; S. Innes, Labor in a New Land: Economy and Society in Seventeenth- Century Springfield (Princeton, NJ, 1983); C. L. Heyrman, Commerce and Culture: The Maritime Communities of Colonial Massachussetts, 690-1750 (New York, 1984). 7 A, E, Smith, Colonists in Bondage: White Servitude and Convict Labor in America, 1607-1776 (Chapel Hill, NC, 1947; paperback edn., New York, 1971).English Migration 8 The long-term importance of Colonists in Bondage was therefore that it identified the several kinds of quantitative sources relating to free migration that a more statistically minded future generation of scholars would use to arrive at a more precise understanding of the settlement of Europeans in Colonial British America. Its immediate impact, however, derived from Smith’s judgemental depiction of the vast majority of indentured servants from England as ‘shiftless, hope- less, ruined individuals, raked up from the lower reaches of English society by emigrant agents, kidnappers, and officers of the law’.8 This and similar assertions provoked Mildred Campbell to scrutinize two of the sources cited by Smith, and her analysis of two seventeenth- century emigration lists led her to the conclusion that English emi- grants were, for the most part, young, highly skilled, ‘middling people’, as opposed to the rabble depicted by Smith.? More recent historians, notably David Galenson and David Souden, have chal- lenged Campbell’s analytic method, and have concluded, on the basis of their own examination of the same emigrant lists, that English emigrants of the seventeenth century were younger than Mildred Campbell believed and came from a position ‘towards the bottom of the middle ranks’ of the English social order. Even with this modifi- cation, Mildred Campbell would appear to have won her argument with Abbot E. Smith, in that it is now accepted that such lowly emigrants were economically useful to the host societies that absorbed them.!° The quality of the exchanges between Mildred Campbell and her younger adversaries did much to arouse interest in the wider question of emigration during the colonial period; the debate also enhanced the reputation of emigrant lists as sources for the study of migration from England to Colonial British America. One of the disputants, David Galenson, identified himself as a disciple of Abbot E. Smith, 307-37, 299-300. ° M. Campbell, ‘Social Origins of Some Early Americans’, in J. M. Smith (ed.), Seventeenth-Century America: Essays in Colonial History (Chapel Hill, NC, 1959; paper- back edn., New York, 1972), 63-89. Besides A. E. Smith’s conclusions, Campbell, set out to refute also those of R. B. Morris, Goverament and Labor in Early America (New York, 1936). 10’ Campbell, ‘Social Origins’, esp. 71-9, and for the ensuing debate: D. Galenson, “Middling People” or “Common Sort”?: The Social Origins of some Early Americans Re-examined’, William & Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 35 (1978), 499-524; M. Campbell, ‘Response’, William € Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 35 (1978), §24~40; Galenson, ‘Reply’, William & Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 36 (1979), 277-86; D. Souden, ‘Rogues, Whores and Vagabonds”? Indentured Servant Emigrants to North America and the Case of Mid-Seventeenth-Century Bristo?’, Social History, 30 (1978), 23-41“4 Nicholas Canny and his first book White Servitude in Colonial America followed Smith’s example in taking emigrant lists as its basic sources of information. In this book Galenson delineated the flow of one category of emigrants, indentured servants, from England to the British Atlantic colonies over the entire sweep of the seventeenth and cighteenth centuries, and to this end he made use of six lists of emigrants to transatlantic destinations who embarked from the ports of Bristol, London, and Liverpool during several series of years between September 1654 and March 1776.!! The portrait of the typical indentured servant drawn by Galenson from his analysis of the details relating to 20,657 emigrants from these six registers was not all that different from that which he and David Souden had agreed upon, on the authority of a much smaller database, during their debate with Mildred Campbell. The typical English migrating servant was young, of relatively low social status, with but modest skills. More significantly, Galenson’s analysis of his larger database revealed change over time in the character of the migration flow of indentured servants. For the seventeenth century, Galenson calculated that 23.3 per cent of migrating servants were women, whereas in the eighteenth century only 9.81 per cent of indentured servants were women.'? As regards the skills of the emigrants, Galenson again discovered variation, both over time and in relation to destination. Generally speaking, he identified rising skill levels over time, interrupted only by a dip in the early eighteenth century. He also discovered that, at least from the 1680s, those who headed for the Caribbean were older and more skilled than migrants to the mainland colonies. This he attributed to the fact that in the West Indies menial work was then being done by black slaves; but he found that, with the passage of time, slaves were trained to engage in skilled occupations, with a resulting tapering off of white servant migration to the Caribbean; first affecting Barbados, then Nevis, and finally Jamaica. The closing off, in about 1770, of the West Indies as a destination for white servants meant that the Chesapeake area became the most usual destination for servant migrants, with Penn- sylvania becoming increasingly important.'? Finally, Galenson con- "" D, Galenson, White Servitude in Colonial America: An Economic Analysis (Cam- bridge, 1981) 1 Thid., Appendix A: “The Servant Registrations’, 183-6, and 16-17, 23-33, 34-64, and 78. 13 bid. 51-64, 81-96.English Migration 45 cluded from the price paid for servants and the terms of indenture agreed upon, that the servants were themselves active partners in negotiating both their destinations and terms of service. The variables influencing the price paid for servants were the overall supply of servants, their range of skills, their sex, the time of the year when they offered themselves for embarkation, and the level of prosperity obtaining in their chosen destinations.'* Galenson’s investigations revealed more about the character of English servant migration than anything published previously, and book also drew attention to trends that had previously escaped notice. He made it clear, however, that he was not addressing the entire picture of migration, first, because he studied only those English emigrants who completed contracts of indenture, and second, because he had looked only to English, as opposed to Irish, Scottish, and continental, sources regarding emigrants to Colonial British America. Because this chapter is devoted specifically to English overseas migration during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the second deficiency is of no great concern here. The first shortcoming has recently been remedied, at least for the Chesapeake and the seven- teenth century, by James Horn in his consideration of what he calls free, as opposed to indentured servant, emigration from England. Horn is of the opinion that about 20 per cent of those who emigrated to the Chesapeake during the course of the seventeenth century went as free migrants, paying their own way and with sufficient cash in hand to establish themselves as planters or traders in the colonies. His analysis of letters and wills points to the fact that free migrants, like indentured servants, came from southern and central England and were predominantly single men. They were different from the servants, however, in being slightly older (in their middle to late twenties rather than late teens and early twenties) and equipped with a wider range of skills and family contacts. They also migrated in the knowledge that they could always return home if they wished, and Horn shows how they cultivated and sustained an English character to their settlements in the Chesapeake, both through correspondence with their contacts in England and their own regular passages across the Atlantic.'° 4 hid. 97-113, esp. 110-12. 15 J. Horn, ‘“To Parts Beyond the Seas”: Free Emigration to the Chesapeake in the Seventeenth Century’, in I. Altman and J. Horn (eds.), ‘To Make America’: European Emigration in the Early Modem Period (Berkeley, Calif, 1991), 85~136.46 Nicholas Canny While the work of David Galenson, and more recently that of James Horn, has increased our understanding of the kinds of English people who made careers for themselves in various colonies during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, it did not satisfy people’s curiosity about the number of English people who emigrated. His- torians were made all the more aware of their ignorance in this matter by the appearance in 1969 of The Atlantic Slave Trade: A Census by Philip Curtin. This book made it clear to historians that a reasonably full understanding of the economy and society of the British Atlantic world would be attained only if they could match Curtin’s precise information on African slave immigration in the colonies with some reasonable approximations regarding the scale and character of white immigration, and only if they could supple- ment both sets of figures with an understanding of mortality rates in the several areas of settlement. This could be achieved, it was believed, if due account were taken of population estimates compiled within the colonies together with lists and registers of those emi- grating from various European ports for colonial destinations. This conviction hastened the search for quantifiable data, and when such sources had been identified by J. H. Cassedy, the analysis of the figures compiled therefrom became a major preoccupation of historians.'¢ The first to take advantage of the newly identified sources was Robert Wells in The Population of the British Colonies in America before 1776. This study was more reliable statistically than anything pre- viously published on the subject, in that its authority rested on the analysis of ‘124 censuses covering 21 American colonies between 1623 and 1775’. These censuses enabled Wells to estimate the gross population of several regions of settlement at different times, and to show the wide diversity of demographic and familial experiences that obtained within the British Atlantic world. While using the censuses to reconstitute the total population of different colonies at particular moments, Wells maintained that they shed little light on the scale of emigration. This was so, he stated, because eighteenth-century com- pilers of population estimates were scarcely interested in the origins 16 P. D. Curtin, The Atlantic Slave Trade: A Census (Madison, Wis., 1969); J. H. Cassedy, Demography in Early America: Beginnings of the Statistical Mind, 1600-1800 (Cambridge, Mass., 1969). Another influential work was J. Potter, “The Growth of Population in America, 1700-1860’, in D. V. Glass and D. E. C. Eversley (eds), Population in History: Essays in Historical Demography (London, 1965), 631-88.English Migration 47 of the people they counted, and relatively few of the censuses dis- tinguished either between immigrants and native born or between those who were of English or of other nationality. Wells also recog- nized further problems in using census estimates of population to establish the scale of emigration required to build up this population, the principal ones being that origin, age, and sex ratio of emigrants varied considerably over time and that mortality rates within the different colonies had also varied dramatically.'7 Not all historians were as pessimistic as Robert Wells, and some remained convinced that the census data on the various colonies could be induced to reveal its secrets on emigration. The optimists can be broken down into two categories: those who believe that it is possible to disentangle the various ethnic elements that made up the colonial populations through an analysis of the surnames that appeared on the census returns and those who are convinced that it is possible to arrive at an understanding of the vital statistics of birth, marriage, and death for at least some of the colonies by linking close archival study with sophisticated numerical analysis. The first school has concentrated its attention on the first United States census of 1790, and its analysis of the surnames on this census has shed considerable light on the ethnic composition of the free population in the thirteen colonies that became the United States. This analysis is especially valuable for indicating the possible scale of emigration of peoples such as Germans, whose ethnic origin is immediately identifiable from their surnames and whose movement to the thirteen colonies took place close to the census date of 1790. Scholars engaged on this endeavour have run into controversy, how- ever, in their efforts to distinguish between Scottish, Irish, and Scots- Irish surnames; and the analysis is unable to provide even a rough estimate of the scale of English migration, because this migration persisted over the entire colonial period, and the disease environ- ments encountered during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries varied enormously.!® 1 R. V, Wells, The Population of the British Colonies in America before 1776: A Survey of Census Data (Princeton, NJ, 1975), €sp. 5, 267-8, 277. "8 Wells, Population of British Colonies, 5, 267-8, 277-8; H. F. Barker and M. L. Hansen, ‘Report of the Committee on Linguistic and National Stocks in the Popu- lation of the United States’, in American Historical Association, Annual Report for the Year 1931 (Washington, DC, 1932), i. 107-441; F. McDonald and E. S. McDonald, “The Ethnic Origins of the American People, 1790, William & Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 37 (1980), 179-99; T. L. Purvis, “The European Ancestry of the United States48 Nicholas Canny ‘The endeavours of the second school of historians have therefore been the more valuable for the understanding of English emigration to the Americas. Within this category of historians, those whose work has earned most respect are those who, both individually and collec- tively, have attempted to reconstitute the experience of living in the Chesapeake from the moment of first English settlement there in 1607, to the mid-point of the eighteenth century. Their research has shown that the earlier half of this period was a time of extraordinarily high mortality for European settlers in the Chesapeake, and they have demonstrated that an English community was kept in being there only through a continuous inflow of settlers. For the eighteenth century, the Chesapeake historians have arrived at the conclusion that the settler population in the Chesapeake was increasingly able to sustain itself through natural growth, and that migration from England to the agrarian economy of the Chesapeake tapered off correspondingly.'? In their effort to understand the migration phenomenon, these historians have first had to determine the prin- cipal cause of high immigrant mortality, which is now accepted as malaria, and then the means by which this lethal disease was over- come. After a protracted debate, it has become accepted that the high mortality rates were overcome at the point where more than half the settler community were people born in the Chesapeake who had developed a natural immunity to malaria while enduring the hazards of infancy. Having established the cause and trend of mortality rates, in the Chesapeake, historians of that area have moved to calculate the birth and mortality rates that obtained over the course of time. The critical information has been obtained from a close study of the Population, 1790', William & Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 41 (1984), 85-101; D. H. Akenson, ‘Why the Accepted Estimates of the Ethnicity of the American People, 1790, are Unacceptable’, William & Mary Quarterly, 41 (1984), 102-19; further contri- butions by these authors to ‘The Population of the United States, 1790: A Symposium’, William & Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 41 (1984), 119-35; A. Fogelman, ‘Migration to the Thirteen British North ‘American Colonies, 1700-1775: New Estimates’, Journal of Interdsciplinary History, 22 (1992), 691-709. 19 The results of the Chesapeake historians, who frequently collaborate, have been reported in a series of conference volumes: A. C. Land, L. G. Carr, and E. C. Papenfuse (eds.), Lam, Society and Politics in Early Maryland (Baltimore, 1977); T. W. ‘Tate and D. L. Ammerman (eds.), The Chesapeake in the Seventeenth Century: Essays on Anglo-American Society (Chapel Hill, NC, 1979); L.. G. Carr, P. D. Morgan, and J. B. Russo (eds:), Colonial Chesapeake Society (Chapel Hill, NC, 1989). See also D. B. Rutman and’ A. H. Rutman, A Place in Time: Middlesex County, Virginia, 1650-750 (New York, 1984).English Migration 49 MIDDLE ‘ATLANTIC COLONIES, THE CHESAPEAKE COLONIES, Atlantic ~ Ocean Jamaicass D> ..-. BRITISH WEST INDIES .. “Barbados . i ‘Map 4.1 English Adlantic destinations details that have been unearthed in the archives on the lives of hundreds of settlers in different parts of the region. From such studies of the lives of real people, it became possible for historians to construct hypothetical tables of life expectancy, which in turn made it possible to identify the statistical probability of birth and death in the Chesapeake during the colonial centuries. Then, by applying these birth and death rates to the actual number of people known from the census data to have lived in the Chesapeake at several moments during the colonial period, it became possible to advance a fairly reliable estimate of the total number of free whites who had migrated to the region. The estimate arrived at, which is now respected by all authorities, is that between 100,000 and 150,000 people, most of them from England, crossed the Atlantic to begin a new life in the Chesapeake during the period of high migration to that area.”° 20 LS, Walsh and R. R. Menard, ‘Death in the Chesapeake: Two Life Tables for Men in Early Colonial Maryland’, Maryland Historical Magazine, 69 (1964), 214-17; D. B. Rutman and A. H. Rutman, *“Now-Wives and Sons—in-Law”: Parental Death in a Seventeenth-Century Virginia County’, in Tate and Ammerman (eds.), Chesapeake, 153-82; R. R. Menard, ‘British Migration to the Chesapeake Colonies in the Seven- teenth Century’, in Carr et al. (eds.), Colonial Chesapeake Society, 99-132, esp. 10350 Nicholas Canny When a migration figure of this magnitude is placed beside the figure of 21,000 English emigrants to New England, it becomes immediately evident that the Chesapeake was an altogether more likely destination than New England for seventcenth-century English emigrants who crossed the Atlantic. This corrective to previous im- pressions has led to others, and it is now assumed, though not proved in any scientific fashion, that the demographic experience of Europeans in the Chesapeake was repeated in other known high- mortality regions such as the British West Indies in the seventeenth century and South Carolina in the eighteenth.2! Absorption of these facts and likelihoods has brought two factors home to historians of British migration: first, that free, white emigration was altogether more critical to the colonies in the seventeenth than the eighteenth century, and second, that the total number of people, black as well as white, who migrated to Colonial British America in the seventeenth century closely approximated the gross migration figure for the eight- eenth century. This suggests that the seventeenth, rather than the eighteenth, century was England’s great century of migration to Colonial British America overall. Such a conclusion was clearly established by David Galenson in relation to the West Indian colonies, but it is now being borne out by investigations of the ethnic composition of the white population in, and migration to, particular mainland colonies. The white population in all these colonies was overwhelmingly English at the end of the seventeenth century, and only the recently established settlements on the Delaware included significant non-English elements, these being Germans and Scots. Studies of the peopling of the mainland colonies during the eighteenth century have shown that the reverse was happening, with English settlers being a significant though decidedly minority element within a much more diverse European emigration to the mainland colonies Historians of the Chesapeake have shown that even as white immi- gration there was tapering off, Scots arrivals had become more numerous than English. The research of Marianne Wokeck and others into immigration through the port of Philadelphia is even 21 HA, Gemery, ‘Emigration from the British Isles to the New World, 1630-1700: Inferences from Colonial Populations’, Research in Economic History, § (1980), 179~ 231; J. J. McCusker and R. R. Menard (eds.), The Economy of British America 1607~ 1789 (Chapel Hill, NC, 1985), 117-88; J. P. Greene, Pursuits of Happiness: The Social Development of Early Modern British Colonies and the Formation of American Culture (Chapel Hill, NC, 1988), 124-70.English Migration 51 more significant in this respect, because Philadelphia became the major gateway of the eighteenth century to mainland North America. Wokeck and others have worked to establish the scale of arrivals through Philadelphia, and she has striven to disentangle the several different strands of immigrants who disembarked at that port. Her findings identify several streams of immigrants passing through Philadelphia in the eighteenth century, and she concludes that each clement in an increasingly diverse pool left their European homes for different reasons and satisfied different labour requirements in the Middle Atlantic colonies. But what is most apparent from Wokeck’s study of this region is that the English element among the immigrants, although economically important, was small in numbers, as compared to the Scots, the Irish, and German-speaking Rhinelanders.”” The diversity of the eighteenth-century migration flow to British ‘America is also acknowledged by Bernard Bailyn to have been its most salient feature. What has been published to date of his massive research project, which plans ultimately to treat of all passage of peoples to Colonial British America,” has related to migration from Britain during the period 1760-76 and even more specifically during the years 1773-6.2* The principal statistical base for his volume entitled Voyagers to the West is the register of emigration compiled by British customs officials during the years 1773-6, which includes details on the origin, age, status, competence, and intended desti- nation of 9,364 individuals bound as emigrants for Colonial British America. This register is well known, and has been examined by several previous historians, most notably David Galenson; but Bailyn breaks new ground because he tries to identify the previous experi- ence of all 9,364 migrants, not only the servants among them, and because he looks back to their places of origin for an explanation of their drastic moves.”* ‘This investigation, as well as his further study of the information % See M. Wokeck, ‘German and Irish Immigration to Colonial Philadelphia’, in S. E. Kleep (ed.), The Demographic History of the Philadelphia Region, 1600-1800, (Pro- ‘ceedings of the American Philosophical Society, 133/2 (Philadelphia, 1989), 128-44; idem, ‘Promoters and Passengers: The German Immigrant Trade’, in R. S. Dunn and M.M. Dunn (eds.), The World of Wiliam Penn (Philadelphia, 1986), 259-81. 28 B, Bailyn, The Peopling of British North America: An Introduction (New York, 1986). 2 B. Bailyn, Voyagers to the West: Emigration from Britain to America on the Eve ofthe Revolution (London, 1986), 728. 5 Thid. 67-83, 271-95.52 Nicholas Canny that can be gleaned from merchants’ records on the recruitment and disposal of immigrants, enables Bailyn to speak with greater certainty than any previous historian about the quality of those who migrated from Britain to the American colonies during the years before the American Revolution, The most dramatic of Bailyn’s findings is that not one but two migration flows are recorded in this single source. The first group had their origins in the southern half of England and took ship from either London or Bristol, whereas the second group came either from Scotland or from the northern half of England, usually Yorkshire. Those in the first category were typically young, single, skilled adults who travelled in small groups and were destined to take up artisan employment (usually in the timber or iron- processing trades) in long-settled areas of Pennsylvania, Maryland, or Virginia. Those in the second category were also young, but their previous experience was usually limited to agricultural activities, and as many as 40 per cent were women. They usually travelled in groups of up to fifty emigrants, which included some families and many from the same area. They were typically bound for recently developed areas of New York or journeyed southwards along the Appalachian mountain chain, where they hoped to establish themselves as frontier farmers. Bailyn found that people in his artisan group decided to emigrate cither because they were experiencing shrinking oppor- tunities for their skills at home or because they knew that their skills would command higher wages in the New World. Those in the northern group were usually fleeing from an erosion of their living standards, frequently associated with rack-renting.”° This adumbration of a dual migration will unquestionably be sub- jected to future refinement by Bailyn himself or by his critics, and some writers have already suggested that more Scots settled in Pennsylvania than his model allows for’ ‘The principal significance of Bailyn’s findings for present purposes is that it shows that English migrants to the mainland colonies, like those identified by David Galenson to the islands of the British West Indies, were becoming more highly skilled and specialist in the eighteenth century. English migrants were still travelling to a wide range of American desti- nations, as in the seventeenth century, but only a trickle of those on the 1770 register were travelling to the island colonies, and hardly 28 hid. 126-203. 27 Wokeck, ‘German and Irish Immigration’; Fogelman, ‘Peopling of Early America’English Migration 53 any to the coastal areas of the Chesapeake; the vast majority were bound for the more economically sophisticated areas of the Middle Atlantic colonies. Despite these very considerable advances in our understanding of the quality of English migrants to America during the eighteenth century, conventional historians have proceeded with less certainty in estimating their quantity. This task, for the seventeenth as for the eighteenth century, has been left largely to scholars with special expertise in quantification, because only they are confident in their ability to wrest such information from unpromising sources. Fore- most among the quantifiers is Henry Gemery, who, like the historians of the Chesapeake, uses data from the census returns to posit esti- mates of emigration, but to all the colonies and over the entire colonial period.* For the seventeenth century Gemery had made his impact with an influential paper whose title describes its purpose: ‘Emigration from the British Isles to the New World 1630-1700: Inferences from Colonial Populations’? In it Gemery proceeded from the assumption that we can arrive at a series of fairly reliable estimates of population in the several British Atlantic colonies towards the end of the seventeenth century. Then, taking this population as a stock, he saw it as possible to infer the total number of migrants required to replenish this stock, once allowance has been made for the different birth and death rates that prevailed in the several colonies. Then, by adding together these inferred figures, Gemery estimated a gross figure of British transatlantic migration in the seventeenth century. In the case of the Chesapeake, Gemery took the birth and death variables that had been derived from the life tables devised by the Chesapeake historians. Then, proceeding on the assumption that white mortality was even higher in the tropics than in the Chesapeake, he sought to arrive at variables of his own for the white population in the British West Indies. These variables he derived from the known demographic history of black slaves in the British West Indies, and from the statistics relating to such diverse groups as 28 Gemery, ‘Emigration from the British Isles’; idem, ‘European Emigration to North America, 1700-1820; Numbers and Quasi-Numbers’, Perspectives in American History, NS 1 (1984), 283-342; idem, ‘Markets for Migrants: English Indentured Servitude and Emigration in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries’, in P. C. Emmer (ed), Colonialism and Migration: Indentured Labour Before and After Slavery (Dordrecht, 1986), 33-54. ‘As in'n, 21.54 Nicholas Canny white traders in West Africa and British troops in the West Indies who confronted a disease environment similar to that probably ex- perienced by white settlers in the island colonies. Gemery was keenly aware that ‘evidence’ drawn from such sources is necessarily ten- tative; he was also conscious that census figures were less reliable for the British West Indies than for the mainland colonies. For these reasons he posited only ‘probable ranges’ for the migration flow from Britain during the seventy-year period 1630-1700. On this basis he concluded that a minimum total migration of 378,000 was necessary to make up the colonial population of 1700, of whom, he believed, more than half, or 222,000, were required to establish a viable white population stock in the British West Indies, where mortality was particularly high. He also concluded that more than 116,000 people migrated to the Chesapeake region. By comparison, only an insig- nificant 39,000 people were estimated by Gemery to have migrated to the northern and Middle Atlantic colonies. Of these, he assigns 15,500 to the New England migration of the 1630s, and the bulk of the remainder to Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and New York in the post-Restoration decades. The most significant of Gemery’s conclusions is the size of the total migration he posits. Moreover, he makes clear that this estimate is a conservative one, based on the assumption that the initial ‘gate- way mortality’ in the West Indies and the Chesapeake became less lethal over time. Therefore, as he puts it when commenting on his estimate of 378,000, the total migration ‘cannot have been less’ than a quarter of a million, and ‘may have been more’ than half a million. ‘The second most startling conclusion is the huge migration to West Indies destinations that he posits, and this concentration on West Indies destinations emerges even more starkly when Gemery breaks down his figures chronologically. Of his total of 378,000 for the entire period, he calculates that more than half, or 210,000, emi- grated to the colonies during the decades 1630-60. Of these, he believes that at least 144,000 were required in the Caribbean region to make up the total white population of 43,000 that existed there in 1660. This leaves him with an estimate of something less than 50,000 migrants to Chesapeake destinations during the same three decades. Both Gemery and those who have commented on his work realize that it is based on pretty slim foundations where data on the Carib- bean are concerned, and his conclusions have won general acceptance only because of the high regard in which his work on the ChesapeakeEnglish Migration 55 is held.*° The figures that he advances for that region conform closely to those arrived at by the Chesapeake historians, and it seems plausible that white mortality rates in the Caribbean were higher than those which obtained in the Chesapeake, and fertility rates lower. Historians therefore have no option but to accept the ranges which he infers until more reliable evidence on the Caribbean destinations comes to light. His figures seem all the more credible because they are consistent with the figure of 495,000 posited by E. A. Wrigley and R. S. Schofield as the maximum possible outflow of people from England and Wales during the years 1630-1700. Indeed, it is his respect for this figure which suggested to Gemery that he should keep his own estimate low; for he believes that migration to the colonies during the seventy years covered by him came primarily from England and Wales, and even more exclusively from there during the three decades of peak migration 1630-60. Gemery has not been able to use his method to calculate similar ranges for British (much less English) transatlantic migration during the eighteenth century, because migration was then more diverse, making it difficult to disentangle any one clement from the general body of migrants. The problem of establishing the scale of English emigration during the eighteenth century is also rendered difficult, if not impossible, by the fact that the range of destinations, and there- fore the demographic experiences of the migrants, were altogether more varied than they had been in the seventeenth century. Another consequence of the more varied emigration and immigration pattern of the eighteenth century is that the basic archival research required to establish such variables as fertility and mortality rates in particular areas of settlement has not yet been carried out. Because of these difficulties, some of which are intractable, Gemery has been able to calculate only gross estimates of migration from the census returns of the eighteenth century, not the numbers of migrants in any one ethnic category.*? His figure for gross migration (black as well as white) to the mainland colonies (excluding Canada) during the years 1700-90 is 600,000, and he allows for a migration flow to the British 3° D, S, Smith, ‘The Estimates of Early American Historical Demographers: Two Steps Forward, One Step Back, What Steps in the Future’, Historical Methods, 12 (1979), 24-38, esp. 28. aE, A. Wrigley and R. S. Schofield, The Population History of England, 1541-1871 (London, 1981), esp. 219-22. % Gemery, ‘European Emigration’.56 Nicholas Canny West Indies of something less than 200,000 people (mostly black) during the same period.>> Gemery’s method does not facilitate anything more precise than these crude figures for the eighteenth century, and some have despaired of making any meaningful progress towards obtaining figures for particular groups by working with gross estimates of population. These people seek instead to arrive at an understanding of the precise nature of population movement by analysing what is known of those areas that have been studied intensively. The most venturesome in pursuing this line has been Bernard Bailyn, who can proceed with confidence from his own investigation of the Register of Emigrants for 1773-6, and can relate what he can speak of with authority to what has been posited by Gemery for the total movement of people.** Seeking to disentangle those who had their origins in Britain and Ireland from the whole, he concludes that a total of 125,000 people ‘from the British Isles alone’ settled in the mainland colonies during the period 1700-60, of whom he believes that 55,000 were Protestant Irish, 40,000 Scots, and 30,000 English. He arrives at these figures by assuming that the rate of migration from Britain and Ireland for the entire period of peace 1763-76 was the same as he knows it to have been during the years 173-6.°° This figure of 30,000 English emigrants for the eighteenth century pales beside the estimate of roughly 400,000 English emigrants to all American destinations during the seventeenth century, and Bailyn emphasizes that the importance of this later English migration lay in its quality and its significance for the development of a manufacturing sector in the Middle Atlantic colonies.°° ‘This review of the secondary literature makes it possible to sum- marize the existing state of knowledge regarding British Atlantic migration and England’s place within it, before proceeding to suggest some modifications that may be required because of factors that have not been taken into account. The estimate given by Gemery for the total British migration of the seventeenth century has now been absorbed into the literature, and rounded to 400,000. It is now generally assumed, as it was by Gemery, that these were mostly English migrants; and it is also accepted that they were usually young, & Ibid, esp. 304-5. 3 Bailyn, Vojagers to the West, 67-84 L 24-7. 3 Ibid. 271-95.English Migration 57 single people, predominantly male, who had been geographically mobile in search of work in England before they crossed the Atlantic. No great claims are made for the skills of these people, but it is accepted that their previous work experience in English agriculture or manufacturing would have been more than adequate to equip them for the generally rudimentary work associated with tobacco and sugar production or domestic service. It is also accepted that some highly skilled work was associated with all these activities and that artisans or entrepreneurs were recruited to meet these labour needs in the colonies. More general recruitment, however, is attributed to ship captains in the English ports, especially London and Bristol. Never- theless, it is thought that the individual migrant exercised some choice as to destination, and that the choices made were based ‘on some information or hearsay previously available to potential mig- rants. This factor is invoked to explain the shift in the migrant flow first from the West Indies to the Chesapeake, and then to the Middle Atlantic colonies towards the close of the seventeenth century. The work of Bernard Bailyn has confirmed that this concentration upon the Middle Atlantic colonies was sustained well into the eighteenth century. There and in the developing frontier regions along the Appalachian mountain chain, settlers could expect to live a normal European life span, as opposed to the hazardous existence that had confronted English settlers in the West Indies and the Chesapeake during the seventeenth century. The acclaim with which Bernard Bailyn’s Vayagers to the West has been received adds authority to his assertions relating to both the quality and the scale of English migration, and his conclusions stand as the received wisdom on the subject as far as the eighteenth century is concerned. His general characterization of the migration flow during the short interval 1773-6 is certain to endure, and all his- torians accept his contention that white migration to Colonial British America was altogether more diverse in the eighteenth than the seventeenth century and that the inflow to the mainland colonies varied greatly in ethnic composition at different times. On the other hand, Bailyn’s work has been criticized because it implies greater exclusivity in migration during particular decades than actually existed, and because it takes insufficient account of the peaks and troughs in the flow of migration from Europe to Colonial British America during the course of the eighteenth century. Some variation in flow was clearly caused by warfare, which disrupted commercial58 Nicholas Canny traffic on the Atlantic on innumerable occasions in the eighteenth century; but some would have resulted from economic conditions in Europe, with fewer people motivated to undertake a journey into the unknown when conditions were favourable at home.*” Because he takes insufficient account of such variables, it is contended, Bailyn exaggerates the total number of free migrants. His tendency to in- flation is well illustrated by Louis Cullen, in Chapter 6, in which he takes Bailyn to task for his assumption that the rate of migration documented in the British Register of Emigrants for the years 1773- 6 had been constant since 1760. Cullen also makes it celar—and he is supported in this by Wokeck—that Bailyn overestimates the scale of eighteenth-century Irish migration to the mainland colonies; it is also evident from the work of other recent scholars that Bailyn places undue emphasis on the purely Protestant character of this Irish migration. Such criticisms combine to suggest that Bailyn (and, by impli- cation, Gemery also) overstates the scale of European free migration to British America during the eighteenth century, and that he exaggerates both the scale and the predominantly British character of the migration for the period 1760-75. On the other hand, when we look more narrowly at purely British, or more specifically English, migration, it is probable that Bailyn offers too low an estimate for the scale of English and Scottish migration over the entire eighteenth century. This is because he makes no allowance for a Scottish and English clement among the migrants during the poorly documented years 1700-60, and because he takes no account of the number of English convicts transported to America during the period 1718-75. A. Roger Ekirch, who is the leading authority on the transportation of convicts, believes that as many as 36,000 convicts were transported from England to America during those years, and that over go per cent of them were bound for Virginia, Maryland, and Pennsylvania, with most of the remainder destined for the West Indies. Not all these convicts were English, but the majority certainly were; and when convicts are added to voluntary migrants, it seems plausible to think of a total movement of 50,000 English to the mainland colonies during the course of the eighteenth century. Their departure from England would have been spread fairly evenly over the century when- 57 See esp. Fogelman, ‘Peopling of Early America’, and Wokeck, ‘German and Irish Immigration’.English Migration 59 ever traffic was not interrupted by war, and a short sharp burst occurred only during the brief interval 1773-6 when economic cir cumstances in Britain were especially difficult.>® The case made by Bailyn for the skilled nature of the English among these late migrants seems above dispute, but the presence of significant numbers of convicts among the English migrants over the entire eighteenth century dictates that we proceed with caution before generalizing from the particular migration of 1773-6. The figures—a total of 50,000 English emigrants out of a grand total of 262,000 migrants to the mainland colonies over the period 1700-75—make it clear that the eighteenth-century English con- tribution was more significant in terms of quality than quantity. ‘The seventeenth century was the one in which England lost most people through emigration, but it will now be suggested that Gemery has erred in his appraisal of this seventeenth-century movement, both in exaggerating the total number of English people who went to the West Indies and in underestimating the number of very highly skilled people who left England during this century. The exaggeration becomes apparent when account is taken both of the very significant Irish Catholic presence among the settlers in the West Indies during the seventeenth century and of the even more significant English presence in Ireland which, when added to Gemery’s estimate of 378,000 English emigrants to all transatlantic destinations, implies an English seventeenth-century exodus well in excess of the figure allowed for by demographers. Evidence of an Irish Catholic migration to the British West Indies during the seventeenth century is presented by Louis Cullen in Chapter 6. The contribution organized by Irish Catholic merchants focused on fringe islands such as St Christopher’s and Montserrat, where members of these families had themselves acquired plan- tations. The Irish Catholic presence was already on such a scale in St Christopher’s in the 1630s that people could consider drawing upon it to stock an Irish Catholic colony in the Amazon basin under the protection of the Portuguese monarchy.°° Irish Catholics who made 38 See L. M. Cullen, Ch. 6 of this book; D. N. Doyle, Jreland, Irishmen and the American Revolution, 1760-1820 (Dublin, 1981), 51-76; A. R. Ekirch, Bound for America: The Transportation of British Convicts’ to the Colonies, 1718-1775 (Oxford, 1987), 22-4, 112-14. % J. Lorimer (ed), English and Irish Setlement on the River Amazon, 1550-1642 (London, 1989), 446-59.60 Nicholas Canny their way to the West Indies under Irish sponsorship were joined by others who were conveyed in English ships that stopped at Irish ports to collect provisions and settlers on their way to the island colonies. ‘There is no systematic record of this traffic, but the frequency of reports in the High Court of Admiralty records suggests that it was conducted on a regular basis. The usual stopping-off places would have been the ports of the south coast, where ship captains would have hoped to draw upon the sizeable English settlement that had developed in that region. When the number of English volunteers was insufficient, however, the captains were ready to recruit Catholics as settlers, and any would-be servants taken aboard in Dublin or in the ports of the west coast would almost certainly have been Catholic.” There was therefore an Irish Catholic element even on the ‘English’ island of Barbados almost from the moment of settle- ment; and this was greatly added to in the 1650s by the forced migration of Catholics sponsored by the Cromwellian regime in Ireland. This, like the previous Catholic migration, is impossible to quantify, but it was on a sufficient scale to leave a lasting impression on the folk memory of Irish Catholics.*! It was also on a sufficient scale to make Irish Catholics a conspicuous element within the white population of Barbados, and, as has been amply demonstrated by Hilary Beckles, the possibility of Irish Catholic servants and ex- servants joining forces with black slaves against their common English oppressors remained a constant nightmare for planters on Barbados.*2 Their fears must have been all the greater because, as Cullen has shown (Chapter 6), Irish Catholic voluntary migration to the marginal islands was increasing during the 1650s and 1660s when English emigration to the West Indies was significantly reduced. The evidence of an Irish Catholic presence in the British West Indies (there were also some Scots) makes it clear that Gemery has been rash in supposing that all whites on the islands were of English origin. His exaggeration of the numbers of English who went to the islands also becomes apparent when due account is taken of the English who went to settle in Ireland over the course of the seven- * D, O. Shilton and R. Holworthy (eds.), High Court of Admiralty Examinations (MS vo. 50 16:7-8 (New York, 1932), ep. enres 16,108, 290 334, ‘A. Guynn, . J., ‘Documents Relating to the Irish in the West Indies’, Analeca Hibernia, 4 (1932), 233-5. ‘McD. Beckles, White Servitude and Black Slavery in Barbados, 1627—r715 (Krome ‘Tenn, 1989), 79-114English Migration 61 teenth century. This movement has been largely ignored by his- torians, who like to think that it was principally Scots who went to settle in Ireland. Contemporaries were keenly aware of the passage of people from England and Wales into Ireland, however, and Carew Reynal, in his frequently quoted observation of 1674, considered it to have been on a scale at least equal to that of transatlantic mig- ration. Reynal’s comment came in the context of his bemoaning the economic collapse of England and the decline in its population, which he explained as follows: our people were consumed mightily in these late years, some three hundred thousand were killed in these last Civil Wars; and about two hundred thousand more have been wasted in repeopling Ireland; and two hundred thousand lost in the great sickness, and as many more gone to plantations? ‘The 200,000 that Reynal assigned to Ireland must have been those associated with the Cromwellian conquest and resettlement of the country. What the precise number of these settlers was is a subject that has been strangely neglected by historians, who have not yet come to terms with the putative ‘Census’ of 1659, which conveniently distinguishes between Protestant and Catholic adult males in each of the townlands it treats of.“ Even if this listing of heads of house- hold was properly tabulated, it would not disclose the scale of the Cromwellian immigration, because it docs not distinguish between Protestants newly arrived in Ireland and those already settled in the country before the insurrection of 1641. The only person to make such a distinction between what he described as ‘Old Protestants’ and ‘New Protestants’ in Ireland was Sir William Petty, and his tabulations allow for the presence in Ireland in 1672 of 122,176 Protestant people who had not been there before 1641. When al- lowance is made for such factors as natural increase and continued “8 C. Reynal, The True English Interest (1674), quoted J. Thirsk and J. P. Cooper (eds), Seventeenth-Century Economic Documents (Oxford, 1972), 758. 'S. Pender (ed.), A ‘Consus’ of Ireland circa 1659 with Supplementary Material from the Pall Money Ordinances, 1660-1661 (Dublin, 1939). For an appraisal of this source see R. C. Simington, ‘“Census” of Ireland, c.1659—the term Titulado’, Analecta Hibemica, 12 (1943), 177-8; N. J. Pilsworth, ‘Census or Poll Tax’, Journal of Royal Society of Amtiquaries of Ireland, 73 (1943), 22-43 W. J. Smyth, ‘Society and Settlement in Seventeenth Century Ireland: The Evidence of the ‘1659 Census””, in W. J. Smyth and K. Whelan (eds.), Common Ground: Essays on the Historical Geography of Ireland Presented to T. Jones Hughes (Cork, 1988), 55-83.62 Nicholas Canny migration to Ireland in the interval between 1660 and 1672, Petty’s calculations suggest a Cromwellian migration to Ireland of 100,000 English and Welsh people, over and above the return to Ireland of those British Protestants who had fled the country in the aftermath of the 1641 rising. This Cromwellian settlement, which was almost entirely English and Welsh in composition, was superimposed upon an existing settler population made up of Scots as well as English and Welsh, which Petty believed to have been as sizeable as 225,538 people in 1641.*° This figure seems excessively high, even when allowance is made for natural increase, and my own suggestion that approximately 100,000 people migrated from Britain to Ireland during the years 1603- 41, although conservative, has won general acceptance. As many as 30,000 of these migrants (but probably fewer) would have been Scots migrating to Ulster, which leaves us with an estimate of 70,000 English and Welsh migrants to Ireland before 1641, with the great bulk of these making the move during the 1610s and the early 1620s.47 When added to the Cromwellian figure, this estimate indi- cates a total migration to Ireland of 170,000 English and Welsh and 30,000 Scots before 1672. What happened immediately after that date is unknown, because the social history of Ireland in the second half of the seventeenth century has yet to be written. However, the earlier belief that, once the Cromwellian influx was over, Ireland ceased to be an attractive destination for English migrants other than artisans with rare skills seems unsustainable. Recent research by Raymond Gillespie on the records of the Brownlow estate in Ulster provides evidence of a steady inflow of English tenants during the * Sir William Petty, The Political Anatomy of Ireland {1672] (London, 1691), 17-18. Here Petty suggested a population of 1,466,000 people for Ireland in 1641 and 1,100,000 in 1672. He contended that 2/13 of the 1641 population (ie. 225,538) and 3/14 of the 1672 population (ie. 235,714) was Protestant. He also suggested that 112,000 of the original Protestant population had been killed or had died in the interval. Thus he believed that only 113,538 of the 235,714 Protestants of 1672 were original settlers. This subtraction provides the figure of 122,176 for new settlers. Petty himself, when breaking down the population of 1672 into Catholic, Protestant, and Presbyterian did so in the proportions of 8:2: 1. © See the tabulation in n. 45. 47 N. Canny, Kingdom and Colony: Ireland in the Atlantic World, 1560-1800 (Balti- more, 1988), 69-102, esp. 96; R. Gillespie, Colonial Ulster: the Settlement of East Ulster, 1600-1641 (Cork, 1985); M. Perceval-Maxwell, The Scottish Migration to Ulster in the Reign of James I’ (London, 1973); M. McC. Morrogh, The Munster Plantation, 1583— 1641 (Oxford, 1985).English Migration 63 decades after the Restoration, giving way to Scots only towards the end of the century. What held true of this single Ulster estate probably obtained elsewhere, and there was certainly an increase in the number of English people in the expanding urban centres of Ireland during the later decades of the seventeenth century.*® It would therefore seem safe, if conservative, to allow for a further 10,000 English and Welsh settlers in Ireland during the last three decades of the seventeenth century: a figure which looks paltry beside the 60,000 Scots who, as Christopher Smout has estimated, moved into the province of Ulster alone during these same three decades.” This allowance for 180,000 English and Welsh migrants to Ireland over the full course of the seventeenth century—and this is a very conservative estimate—can only be reconciled with Gemery’s cal- culations if we suppose that a substantial number of those he counted as English migrants to the West Indies were in fact Irish Catholics or Scots. Once we make such a supposition, it becomes possible to advance revised estimates of English migration into and across the Atlantic (see Table 4.1), before proceeding to a discussion of the type of migrants who went to the several destinations at different times during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Table 4.1, like all previous calculations, reveals that English Atlantic migration was on an altogether greater scale in the seventeenth than in the subsequent century. This difference suggests that the seventeenth-century migration was one of desperation, whereas the recent publications of Bailyn have consolidated the opinion of Galen- son that the great bulk of English migrants who crossed the Atlantic voluntarily in the eighteenth century left home not because they were desperate but because they knew their skills would be more highly valued in the colonies than they were in England. To these, however, must be added the very sizeable number of English convicts, perhaps half the entire number who went to America, whose skill levels would have been mixed. Historians of the seventeenth century, most notably James Horn, who have related transatlantic migration to English internal migration, have presented powerful supporting evidence for the view that the overwhelming majority of English migrants to 48 R. Gillespie (ed.), Settlement and Survival on an Ulster Estate: The Brownlow Legsebook, 1667-17 (Bellast, 1988). See Ch. 5; also A Naw History of Ireland iv. Bighteenth Century Ireland (Oxford, 1986), 14, 133~4, where the usual figure of 50,000 families is cited for the Scottish ‘movement to ireland at this time.64 Nicholas Canny Tapte 4.1. English Atlantic migration Seventeenth century ighteenth century (pre-1776) Destination Rough estimate Destination Rough estimate ‘West Indies 190,000 (mostly West Indies 20,000 pre-1660) Ireland 180,000 (mostly Mainland America 50,000 post-1640) Chesapeake 116,000 (mostly Ireland 10,000 post-1660) Middle Atlantic 23,500 (entirely post-1660) New England 21,000 (1630s) Total 530,500 80,000 America were then young, single people with but a modest level of skills. Horn’s more recent work, which has identified those who went to the Chesapeake as entrepreneurs or for religious reasons, has done little to disturb the prevailing impression that those Puritans who migrated to New England were as exceptional in their skills and in the previous comfort of their lives, as they were in their religious commitment.°° Now, however, the integration of Ireland into this general portrayal of English overseas migration necessitates some modification to this view, because preliminary investigations have shown that the English who migrated to Ireland, or at least the 70,000 who went there in the decades before 1641, were an extremely accomplished group of people and that their material achievements probably outstripped those of any other English settler community during the first half of % Souden, ‘Rogues, Whores and Vagabonds’; J. Horn, ‘Servant Emigration to the Chesapeake in the Seventeenth Century’, in Tate and Ammerman (eds), Chesapeake, 51-95; R. R. Menard, ‘British Migration to the Chesapeake Colonies in the Seven- teenth Century’, in Carr et al. (eds.), Colonial Chesapeake Society, 99-132; J. Horn, “Adapting to a New World: A Comparative Study of Local Society in Engiand and Maryland, 1650-1700", in Carr et al. (eds.), Colonial Chesapeake Society, 133-75; Greene, Pursuits of Happiness; P. Clark and D. Souden (eds.), Migration and Society in Early Modern England (London, 1987).English Migration 65 the seventeenth century. These assertions can be made in the light of a detailed study of the depositions taken in 1642 from some of the Protestant settlers in Ireland who had endured the assault made upon them by their Catholic neighbours during the previous winter. His- torians of settlement in Ireland have previously made little use of this source, and have concentrated instead upon the surveys of plantation, which provide musters or enumerations of the settler population in particular areas. Such surveys have the merit of accuracy when it comes to estimating the size of the settler community in the planted areas, but they tell us little of the skills, activity, or even names of the individual settlers.°' The depositions, on the other hand, while but a partial record of settlement, with only something over 3,000 heads of household making depositions, have the merit of providing details on the lives and occupations of settlers from all parts of the country, not only from those regions where formal plantations were instituted. All individuals who came forward to make depositions identified them- selves by name, social status or occupation, and precise address in Ireland. Most gave details of their experiences at the moment of attack, and all provided an estimate of what they had lost in the rebellion usually in the form of a list of their goods and chattels and the debts due to them. Such inventories, we can presume, maximized or exaggerated the value of what had been lost; but they have the merit of providing details of the activities, living conditions, and material possessions of this cross-section of the settler community. Another less obvious benefit of the depositions as a source is that deponents made mention of other settler neighbours, either because they had been killed or brutalized during the attack or because they were indebted to them, and such references enable us to gain some impression of the micro-communities that developed within the larger settlement.5? An analysis of the depositions relating to three counties in Ireland— County Cork on the south coast, Queen’s County (now county Laois) 51 For a critical appraisal and use of such surveys and musters see T. W. Moody, The Londondery Plantation, 1609-1641 (Belfast, 1939); Perceval-Maxwell, Scottish Migration; M. Morrogh, Munster Plantation; P. Robinson, The Plantation of Ulster: British Settlement in an Irish Landscape, 1600-1670 (Dublin, 1984). 52 A. Clarke, “The 1641 Depositions’, in P. Fox (ed.), Treasures of the Library of Trinity College, Dublin (Dublin, 1986), 111-22; N. Canny, “The 1641 Depositions as a Source for the Writing of Social History: County Cork as a Case Study’, in P. O'Flanagan and C. G. Buttimer (eds.), County Cork: History and Society (Dub- Tin, 1993), 249-308.66 Nicholas Canny in the Irish midlands, and County Fermanagh in Ulster—reveals that settlement everywhere had common features as well as subtle dif- ferences.°? Those who dominated the settlement in each region were large landowners who had come into possession of thousands of acres, spread over several counties, which they sublet in blocks of hundreds of acres to tenants-in-chief. Some, but by no means all these proprietors, were from moderately high social background in England, but almost all had found themselves in straitened economic circumstances before seeking their fortunes in Ireland. These for- tunes by 1641 usually amounted to a rental income of several thousands of pounds per annum; and the success of these individuals was symbolized by elaborate mansions, extensive ornamental grounds, fully equipped home farms and coats of arms. Such spectacularly successful individuals clearly had no equivalent in Colonial British America in the seventeenth century, but they had had little to do with the detailed development of settlement in Ireland, because their rapid economic and social advancement meant that they had inevitably become involved in political affairs in Ireland and Britain, while maintaining only a supervisory role over their estates. Responsibility for development rested rather with the tenants-in-chief, who placed tenants to farm their agricultural properties, and with manufacturing entrepreneurs, who were given responsibility for promoting urban settlement. These were key individuals whose previous skills were suited cither to the agricultural conditions of the particular region or to the processing of the raw materials of the country. The result, therefore, was a patchwork of micro-communities within each region of settlement, with each tenant-in-chief or urban entre- preneur taking responsibility for the recruitment of specialist workers who would generate wealth for themselves, pay rent to their superiors, and enhance the value of the property they rented through improve- ment. Recruitment of artisans, with a resulting development of urban manufacturing, seems to have occurred in each of the three counties studied, but with more dramatic consequences in County Cork and Queen’s County than County Fermanagh. The remoteness of the Ulster county from a dynamic centre of trade seems to have limited the opportunities open to the artisans, who appear to have concen- trated on providing for the manufacturing needs of the local society. 53 Canny, ‘1641 Depositions’; idem, “The Marginal Kingdom: Ireland as a Problem in the First British Empire’, in B. Bailyn and P. D. Morgan (eds.), Strangers within the Realm: Cultural Margins of the Fist British Empire (Chapel Hill, NC, 1991), 35-66.English Migration 67 Those in Cork and the midlands, whether textile and leather workers or involved with iron smelting and timber processing, made use of internal waterways to reach markets in the south of England and the Netherlands. Their enterprises flourished as a consequence, and their success was manifested both in the expansion of the urban sector within the settler society and in the spill-over of the urban sector into the surrounding rural community. This spill-over occurred when the urban artisans entered into commercial arrangements with the native rural population or when they invested their profits in the leasing of farms within close proximity of the towns. ‘Access to outside markets may also explain why more settlers were attracted to County Cork and Queen’s County than to County Fermanagh. In each of the first two counties, communities of settler farmers with skills appropriate to local circumstances were drawn from England; some of them were experts in tillage farming, others were specialists in stock raising, and still others had previous experi- ence in dairy or fruit farming. Planters and tenants-in-chief in County Fermanagh appear to have experienced difficulty in attracting skilled farmers to their properties, and where they did procure settlers from abroad, they were from Scotland and north-west England, where the rural economy was hardly more advanced than that of Gaelic Ulster. Where these were not available, the principal proprietors had to take on natives as farmers, and the combination of these factors meant that advanced agriculture in Fermanagh was exemplified only on the home farms of the landowners, their tenants-in-chief, and the Pro- testant clergy.** ‘The experience of these three Irish counties covers the range of settlement that was established in Ireland during the first half of the seventeenth century. It will be clear even from this brief summary that settlement in Ireland differed from that which came into being at the same time in Colonial British America in terms of both scale and diversity. Of the various settlements in Colonial British America, only those in New England attracted the range of farmers, textile workers, butchers, fishermen, and tanners that were drawn to Ireland, and in far fewer numbers than in Ireland. The inventories drawn up by farmer and artisan deponents in Ireland suggests that they prospered more than their New England counterparts; only the very occasional New England entrepreneur such as John Pynchon could have 5 Tid.68 Nicholas Canny matched the wealth accumulated by enterprising manufacturers in Ireland like Henry Turner of Bandonbridge and Isaac Sands of Mountrath.5° In the West Indies before 1650 only the more success- ful tobacco planters and those moving into sugar production func- tioned on a level comparable to that of the proprietors, tenants-in- chief, merchants, and manufacturers in Ireland, and even then for more modest returns. The West Indies was then beginning to employ a small number of personnel skilled in sugar refining, and these were handsomely compensated, but the vast bulk of the white population, whether involved with tobacco or with sugar cultivation, eked out a miserable existence at bare subsistence level. As such, their condition compared unfavourably with that of the yeomen and husbandmen of the rural settler population in Ireland and with the artisans who had made their homes in the towns.*° This same point can be illustrated for the Chesapeake by com- paring the condition of some of the more humble settlers in Ireland with that of some settlers in Virginia for whom inventories of goods were compiled either before or after death. The vast majority of settlers in the more intensively developed areas of Ireland were yeomen and husbandmen in the rural sector and artisans in the towns. Taking some typical examples of such deponents from County Cork, we find that they enjoyed a secure, albeit not affluent, position in society. John Greenfield, a yeoman from the parish of Murragh, for example, estimated his wealth in 1641 at £35, which he accounted for as follows: livestock, comprising cows, heifers, bulls, mares, and swine, which he valued at £27. 6s. 8d.; ‘household stuff which he valued at £1. 16s.; hay and ‘garden fruits’ worth £2. ros; and a further £3. 12s. which he had paid as an entry fine and ‘laid out’ to improve his farm. No specific mention was made by Greenfield of his house or outhouses, but we can take it that he lived in comfortable if modest circumstances, and his inventory makes it clear that he was 55 On John Pynchon see Innes, Labor in a New Land, esp. 30-1, where he points out that Pynchon marketed skins in London to the value of £1,860 in 1654. Henry Tumer of Bandonbridge (on whom see Trinity College, Dublin, MS 824, fols. 118-19) was a manufacturer of broad cloths, which he exported to Mr John Quarles of Amsterdam at an estimated profit of £400’a year. Isaac Sands was a Servant to Sir Charles Coote, and was in charge of the textile works at Mountrath in the Irish midlands, where looms and finished cloth for the export market, valued at £560, were lost in the 1641 rising. 5° R. Dunn, Sugar and Slaves: The Rise of the Planter Class in the English West Indies (Chapel Hill, NC, 1972), 1-83; F. C. Jones, ‘The Pre-Sugar Era of European Settlement in Barbados’, Journal of Caribbean History, x (1970), 1-22.English Migration 69 principally engaged in pastoral farming.*” So also was Richard Pearl, a husbandman from the town and parish of Coole in the eastern sector of County Cork. He estimated his wealth in 1641 at £288. 1os., of which £60. 10s. was accounted for in losses of livestock, made up of cows, heifers, horses, and swine; £8 in household stuff, one fowling piece, and a rapier; £20 in corn in the haggard, and £200 in the loss of farms which he held on leases of eighteen, seven, and fifteen years. Pearl was clearly more enterprising than John Green- field, and the fact that he held leases on three farms indicates that his superiors trusted in his ability to succeed.°* We find the same variation when it comes to artisans in County Cork. John Rice, a weaver from Mallow, clearly stuck to his trade, estimating his wealth at £65, of which £20 was accounted for in losses of wool and woollen yarn, £15 in the implements of his trade, £20 in household stuff, and £10 in the loss of his house, which had been burnt.? By way of contrast, Giles Dangar, a tanner from the parish of Temple Martin, had diversified into farming, and only £24 of his total estimated loss of £146. 12s. was directly related to his tanning activity.°° There were presumably servants and other poorer settlers who did not come forward to make depositions in Ireland, and we know that others who went to Ireland as settlers failed to get off to a successful start and subsequently returned to Britain or made their way to some of England’s transatlantic settlements. However, the essential point is that the more developed settlement regions in Ireland contained a sizeable farming and artisan population, whose wealth and comfort far exceeded that of the average settler in the Chesapeake during the first half of the seventeenth century. What we know of the circum- stances of the poorer settlers in Virginia at this time comes principally from the Minutes of the Council and General Court of Colonial Virginia, 1622-32, or from the records of the county courts of Accomack-Northampton county and York and Norfolk counties, which begin respectively in 1632, 1633, and 1637." All these courts 5? Deposition of John Greenfield, Trinity College, Dublin, MS 824, fol. 30. 58 Deposition of Richard Pearl, ibid. fol. 111. 5 Deposition of John Rice, idid, fol. 150. © Deposition of Giles Dangar, ibid., fol. 163. °' H.R. Mellwaine (ed.), Minutes of the Council and General Court of Colonial Virginia, 162232 and 1670-76 (Richmond, Va, 1924). S. M. Ames (ed.), County Court Records of Accomack-Northampton, Virginia, 1640-45, (Charlottesville, Va, 1973); York County, Virginia, Deeds, Orders, Wills, etc., no. 1, 1633-57; ‘Norfolk County,70 Nicholas Canny were managed by the successful planters who, as we know from the writings of James Horn, were men of some substance and standing in England before they assumed leadership roles in this new settler society. The records show that these planters had recourse to the courts for assistance in maintaining authority over their subordinates and for arbitrations that would resolve differences between them- selves. There are regular references to punishments imposed upon inferiors for sexual misdemeanours, to extensions of servitude for servants who were lazy and recalcitrant, and to the disciplines ex- tended to those who, by word or deed, showed disrespect towards their superiors or the social order in general.°? This evidence of the harshness of the regime in Virginia far outweighs more humane incidents, as when masters granted freedom and compensation to servants or even black slaves as an expression of gratitude for their loyalty. In so far as evidence of humane values emerges from these court proceedings, it is in the solicitude shown by planters for the maintenance of the orphans of deceased planters. The concern here was to ensure that the terms of the wills of these planters were rigidly adhered to and that the orphans were not defrauded by their guardians. Such concern, as has been suggested by Edmund Morgan and Lois Carr, is only what one would expect in a society in which mortality rates were high and in which planters, who might themselves expect to leave young children as orphans, saw that it was in their own interest to set high standards in this matter.* However, while the planters were concerned to see that the wishes of their deceased peers were adhered to, one is struck by the modesty of the worldly gains that even the wealthiest of the planters had to Virginia, Deed Book A, 1637-46; Wills and Deeds B, 164651, consulted on micro- film at the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation. ® For examples of punishments imposed for illegitimate births see the cases of Mary Rouge and of Daniel and Eleanor Neale as reported in the court records of Norfolk County, Virginia, fols. 176-7; for an example of a work-related punishment see the sentence imposed on Michael Bryant of Accomack-Northampton found gui of shirking work for three weeks, in Ames (ed.), Records of Accomack-Northampton, 1632-40, 28-9; and for an example of a punishment imposed for disrespect see the case against Richard Duning in the court records of York County, Virginia, fol. 386. 3 For a rare example see the will of Thomas Gybson of York County, who released one ‘Humphrey from servitude in recompense for any former neglect: records of York County, Virginia, fols. 109-10. & E, S. Morgan, American Slavery: American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia (New York, 1975), esp. 158-79; L. G. Carr, ‘The Development of the Maryland Orphans’ Court, 1654~1715°, in Land et al. (eds.), Early Maryland, 41-62.English Migration n leave to their orphans. Captain Adam Thorowgood was head of the county court of Norfolk county from its institution in 1637 until his death in 1640. During these years occasional reference was made to his troubles in maintaining control over his servants, and we learn that he built a house in the county. On his death he left a widow, but it was his fellow planter Captain John Gookin who was given responsibility for the maintenance of the Thorowgood children Adam and Anne. Gookin was a conscientious executor, and he brought a case before the court in October 1642, in which he successfully defended the orphans’ title to the estate which had been willed to them by their father. Land alone was of little value in a society as fluid as seventeenth-century Virginia, and planters like Thorowgood were especially concerned to leave livestock with the property so that the natural increase from these would be available to the orphans when they came of age. The particular provision that Thorowgood made comes to our attention because Captain Gookin died in 1643, and the court required a statement on the condition of the orphans’ property. By then, the house had already fallen down, and the cow- keeper and the goat-keeper reported that the depredations of wolves had left them with just sixty-three cattle and eighty-seven goats for the maintenance of the orphans. The court required a further report in 1645; by then, when account was taken of sales and losses as well as natural increase, the herd stood at sixty-six cattle, fifty-seven goats, and five horses: hardly a fortune for orphans of somebody who had been the most prominent man in the county only five years previously. Several wills from Virginia convey an impression of the extent of these planters’ houses, because their inventories of goods were organized according to the rooms that they furnished. Typical of these is the will of Robert Glascock, also of Norfolk County, who had enjoyed a sufficiently high social position to serve on the jury that had adjudicated the contested Thorowgood will. When he in turn died in 1646, a detailed inventory of his possessions was made, which reveals that his house had five rooms on the ground floor with a loft over the kitchen. The hall, which was the principal room, was furnished with two feather beds and bedclothes, as well as tables, chairs, table-cloths and napkins, two suits, stockings, one Bible, and a book of sermons. °° For the relevant references to Thorowgood see records of Norfolk County, Virginia, 1637-46, fols. 204-5, 255~6, 258-9.72 Nicholas Canny Pewter serving dishes, two butter tubs, cups, and chamber-pots were kept in the buttery, while cooking utensils such as iron pots, pothooks, skillets, and dripping pans were kept in the kitchen. The loft over the kitchen must have been used as servants’ sleeping quarters, because it was furnished with flock-beds with bolsters, rugs, and coverlets; but it must also have served as a store because its contents included a powdering tub, pothooks, axes, hoes, saws, and shovels, The ‘maid’s chamber’ was apparently on the ground floor, and was sparsely furnished with one flock-bed, a bolster, one rug, and one ‘old bedstead’. Finally in ‘the little chamber’ there was one feather bed with bedclothes, as well as warming pans and minor items of furnishing. This listing suggests that Robert Glascock, his prominent social position notwithstanding, enjoyed but frugal comfort. The house, like that of Adam Thorowgood, would have been made of wood, and if left uninhabited for even a short period would, like the Thorowgood house, have fallen in. We can presume that Glascock had a wife and some children, although this was not stated in the will; and he is known to have had two menservants, two maidservants, a boy, and ‘a small boy’ in his employ. Thus living conditions in the Glascock household must have been cramped. The years which his servants had to serve accounted for one-sixth of Robert Glascock’s estimated wealth, and the remainder was accounted for by twenty hogsheads of tobacco, thirty-nine barrels of corn, ten cows, three bulls, and ten other cattle, as well as two sows, a boar, and their offspring, three old, and six young turkeys, and fifty other poultry. ‘The Glascock inventory indicates that somebody who would have been considered a success in the Virginia of 1646 had attained a level of affluence which no more than matched that of a yeoman or artisan settler in Ireland. There were others in Virginia at this time whose inventories show them to have been much poorer than Robert Glascock, and relatively few of those who left wills were more pros- perous than he. Moreover, we can assume that all property owners who made wills were infinitely more wealthy than the landless ser- vants who did not even own the time of their labour. These impres- sions of but modest gains made by those who were considered successful in Virginia coincide with the detailed information that is available to us on the social and material achievements of Robert Inventory of the goods and cattle of Robert Glascock, taken September 1646, in records of Norfolk County, Virginia, fols. 45~6.English Migration 2B Cole, a tobacco-planter in seventeenth-century Maryland. Indeed, the scholars who have analysed the inventory and other documents relating to his estate have arrived at the conclusion that it was freedom from the social and legal disabilities associated with being a Catholic, rather than any dramatic opportunity for economic gain, which was the principal benefit which Cole derived from his move to Maryland. ‘This evidence relating to both colonies in the Chesapeake, as well as to other places of English settlement in America, indicates that (ignoring the 1641 insurrection in Ireland) those would-be English settlers who opted for Ireland over all transatlantic destinations were making the correct economic and social choice. The fact that Ireland in the pre-1630 period attracted more skilled workers than perhaps all American destinations combined suggests that migrants were indeed making choices based on reliable economic information and matching their destinations to their abilities. This can never be more than an implication, however, because English migrants of the seven- teenth and eighteenth centuries seldom explained the reasons for their moves and seldom mentioned whether they entertained any options or alternatives when it came to deciding on an overseas destination. And while historians can point to trends and delineate migratory patterns, there are always many individual cases that run counter to these trends. Thus, while Ireland in the pre-1650 period, or even New England, might seem to have been a more logical destination than the Chesapeake for artisans and professionals, several such people come to our attention in the court records of colonial Virginia. Those coopers, carpenters, and joiners who make their appearance in the Virginia records could presumably have made a better living in Ireland than in the Chesapeake, and medical men such as Dr John Pott, who was elected governor of Virginia in 1629, must surely have been defying their own professional knowledge when they took up residence in that disease-ridden colony. Simi- °7 The modesty of the gains of planters in Virginia was recognized by some astute contemporary observers as, ¢.g., John Rosier, clerk, when he remarked that although William Hutchinson, a deceased planter, ‘was accounted a rich man’, he (Rosier) had never ‘supposed him to be a rich man’, even though his ‘credit was accounted to be very good’ (Shilton and Holworthy (eds.) High Court of Admiralty Examination. no. 263). On Cole see L. G. Carr, R. R. Menard, and L. S. Walsh (eds.), Robert Cole's World: Agriculture and Society in Early Maryland (Chapel Hill, NC, 1991), esp. 77-117. T wish to thank Peter Mancall for drawing my attention to the book on Cole. ‘8 A carpenter, one Thomas Cooper, is referred to in the court records of Norfolk County, 1637-46, fol. 18. There is reference in those same records (fol. 28) of a4 Nicholas Canny larly, the comings and goings of clergymen seem beyond explanation. One Lazarus Martin who disembarked in Virginia from the London Merchant in 1629 arrived unannounced, and had no parish waiting for him, while the Reverend George Keith, who had been present in Virginia in the early years, became discouraged and went back to England, only to return in 1629 when he sought to carve out a new parish in a recently settled area. And the actions of those who had originally established themselves in Ireland only to take up their roots again to resettle in Virginia are also difficult to explain. Some, such as Simon Tuchinge, who ‘was diligent in investigating the James River and other rivers in the bay’, may have had little choice, in that he had fallen foul of the authorities in Ireland because of his open attach- ment to Catholicism. Others, such as Captain Dowse, were fleeing from wives they had abandoned in Ireland; but still others such as Mr Daniel Gookin and his agent Lieutenant John Shipward, who developed a significant plantation at Newport News, were aban- doning already secure positions in Ireland.” Cases such as these suggest that no generalization can account for all migratory decisions or explain migratory trends. Clearly, economic conditions at home and knowledge of the range of prospects abroad were factors of prime importance, but so too were religious con- siderations and personal connections. Historians of recent vintage have tended to downgrade religion as a factor influencing English overseas migration during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. This tendency has developed partly in reaction to the generalizations advanced by an earlier generation of historians on the basis of a defective understanding of the seventeenth-century migration to New England, and partly out of a belief that religious persecution in England was never at a level that would justify a comparison with the experiences of Huguenots in seventeenth-century France or Jews in nineteenth-century Russia. However, religious considerations can be seen to have exerted at least some influence on English migratory trends, whether these are considered at the macro-level or at the micro-level. Those who fit the description of Puritan and who did decide to leave England during the early seventeenth century tended payment made to Mr Thomas Bullock for physic administered at several times to the Negro servants of Mr Robert Carne, which suggests that Bullock also was a medical man. © Mcllwaine (ed.), Minutes, 189. 7 Tid. 33-4, 113, 48.