The author would like to thank members of the University of Virginia's Faculty-Student Seminar, Professor Martin J. Havran and Dr. A.L. Beier, for their useful comments on an earlier version of this essay.

¹ Taylor, R.C., “Migration and Motivation: A Study of Determinants and Types,” in Jackson, J.A. (ed.), Migration, Ch. 5 (Cambridge, 1969)Google Scholar. In this study, the term “migration” signifies internal (within England) movement of persons (“migrants”); “emigration” denotes movement of individuals (“emigrants”) across national boundaries, outbound.

² In studies of motivation in the 1630s emigration to New England there has been too much concern with a debate over the primacy of economic factors versus religious discontent. A succinct account of the controversy can be found in Morgan, Edmund S., “The Historians of Early New England,” The Reinterpretation of Early American History: Essays in Honor of John Edwin Pomfret, ed., Billington, R.A. (San Marino, 1966), pp. 45–52Google Scholar. An attempted corrective to the traditional debate is Breen, T.H. and Foster, S., “Moving to the New World: The Character of Early Massachusetts Immigration,” Wm.&M.Q., third series, XXX (April 1973), 189–222Google Scholar.

³ Ibid. 193-95.

⁴ Campbell, Mildred, “Social Origins of Some Early Americans,” in Seventeenth-Century America: Essays in Colonial History, ed., Smith, J.M. (Chapel Hill, 1959), pp. 63–89Google Scholar; Souden, David, “‘Rogues, whores and vagabonds’? Indentured servant emigrants to North America, and the case of mid-seventeenth-century Bristol,” Social History, III (Jan. 1978), 23–38CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Galenson, David, “‘Middling People’ or ‘Common Sort’?: The Social Origins of Some Early Americans Reexamined,” Wm.&M.Q., third series, XXXV (July 1978), 499–524Google Scholar; Campbell, “Response,” Ibid., 525-40.

⁵ Eighty-one Wiltshire emigrants were recorded on the following passenger lists (all published): (1) from Southamton, April 1635, New England Genealogical and Historical Register (hereafter, N.E.G.H.R.), XIV (1860), 332–36Google Scholar; (2) from Southampton, April 1638, Ibid., 332-36; (3) from Southampton, May 1638, Hotten, John C. (ed.) The Original Lists of Persons of Quality … and Others Who Went from Great Britain to the American Plantations, 1600-1700 (London, 1874), pp. 296–300Google Scholar. Twent nine additional Wiltshire emigrants, who left between 1635 and 1640, were found in various volumes of N.E.G.H.R., and Banks, Charles E. (comp.), Topographical Dictionary of 2885 Emigrants to New England, 1620-1650 (3rd ed.; Baltimore, 1963)Google Scholar.

⁶ The Wiltshire group was composed of fifty-two single males, four single females, twenty-eight husbands and wives, and twenty-six children (under sixteen years).

⁷ 52 percent of Wiltshire's adult, male emigrants were artisans or tradesmen; 30 percent were “servants;” 18 percent were either yeomen, husbandmen, or agricultural laborers.

⁸ Salerno, Anthony, “The Character of Emigration from Wiltshire to the American Colonies, 1630-1660” (hereafter, “Emigration from Wilts.”); (Ph.D. thesis, University of Virginia, 1977), p. 18, Appendix AGoogle Scholar.

⁹ Information regarding the Wiltshire emigrants was obtained from a volume in the Bristol (England) Record Office: “Servants to foreign plantations, 1654-1662,” BAO 04220(1).10

¹⁰ The sex ratio of the 1650s Wiltshire emigrants was fairly typical of seventeenth-century emigration to the Chesapeake and West Indies: Dunn, Richard S., Sugar and Slaves: The Rise of the Planter Class in the English West Indies, 1624-1713 (New York, 1972), pp. 52-56, 326–27Google Scholar; Morgan, Edmund S., American Slavery—American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia (New York, 1975), p. 407Google Scholar. However, the sex imbalance exhibited by the 1630s Wiltshire emigrants may not have been typical of seventeenth-century emigration to New England. The male-female ratios exhibited by New England-bound groups from other southern and western counties is only 1.8 to 1. Others have found an even more balanced sex ratio: Breen, and Foster, , “Moving to the New World,” Wm.&M.Q., XXX, 194Google Scholar.

¹¹ Eighty-six of the 204 were from rural regions. The remaining twelve were from places not readily identifiable through the use of modern gazeteers and place-name studies.

¹² The Wiltshire return was compiled with great care by Simpson, Cecil in “A Census of Wiltshire in 1676,” Wiltshire Notes and Queries, III (1895), 533–39Google Scholar. The statistics given there are confirmed by the 1669 ecclesiastical return found in Turner, G. Lyon (ed.), Original Records of Early Nonconformity, I (London, 1911), 127–35Google Scholar. The latter was also used to fill in some gaps in the 1676 census, which omitted 15 percent of the county's parishes. The procedure for estimating total population from these returns is in Hoskins, W.G., Local History in England (2nd ed.; London, 1972), p. 173Google Scholar.

¹³ Souden reached a similar conclusion regarding the geographic origins of Bristol emigrants (1654-60) from all counties. Souden, , “Rogues,” Social History, III, 29–30Google Scholar.

¹⁴ See, for example, Breen, and Foster, , “Moving to the New World,” Wm.&M.Q., XXX, 197Google Scholar.

¹⁵ Of those who gave occupations, 52 percent were yeomen, 2 percent were husbandmen, 32 percent were artisans and tradesmen, and 12 percent were laborers.

¹⁶ See p. 32, n. 4.

¹⁷ A., J. and Tawney, R.H., “An Occupational Census of the Seventeenth Century,” Econ. Hist. Rev., first series, V (Oct. 1934), 59Google Scholar.

¹⁸ Ibid. 36; Clark, P., “The Migrant in Kentish Towns, 1580-1640,” in Crisis and Order in English Towns, 1500-1700, eds., Clark, P. and Slack, P. (London, 1972), p. 121Google Scholar. The Wiltshire wills included inhabitants of Chippenham, Devizes, and Warminster. Indexes of the probate material at the Wiltshire County Record Office, Trowbridge (hereafter WRO), were used.

¹⁹ WRO 894.4/15-17. It is significant that the surnames do not appear on the list at all, precluding the possibility that the two emigrants were given their father's designations.

²⁰ Souden, , “Rogues,” Social History, III, 27Google Scholar.

²¹ See p.33, n.7.

²² Beier, A.L., “Vagrants and the Social Order in Elizabethan England,” Past and Present, No. 64 (Aug. 1974), 3–29Google Scholar; Slack, P., “Vagrants and Vagrancy in England, 1598-1664,” Econ. Hist. Rev., second series, XXVII (May 1974), 360–79Google Scholar; Patten, J., Rural-Urban Migration in Pre-Industrial England, Research Papers, No. 6, School of Geography, University of Oxford (Oxford, 1973)Google Scholar.

²³ See, for example, Bridenbaugh, C., Vexed and Troubled Englishmen, 1590-1642 (New York, 1968)Google Scholar; Campbell, , “Social Origins,” in Seventeenth-Century America, pp. 82–85Google Scholar; Tyack, Norman C.P., “Migration from East Anglia to New England before 1660”; (Ph.D. thesis, University of London, 1951), pp. 169-70, 220–30Google Scholar.

²⁴ Campbell, , “Social Origins,” in Seventeenth-Century America, pp. 84–85Google Scholar.

²⁵ PRO, S.P. 14/115/58; PRO, Assi 24/21/56; WRO, Quarter Sessions, Great Rolls, Easter 1622, 1653; H.M.C. Various MSS, I, 84, 115; Ramsay, G.D., The Wiltshire Woollen Industry in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (London, 1965), pp. 77–78Google Scholar.

²⁶ Only one emigrant was from this region.

²⁷ In lieu of any comprehensive lists of inhabitants and their occupations, I have used the best available sources for this type of analysis: (a) ecclesiastical court depositions, which always give deponents' occupations; and (b) indexes of wills and inventories at the WRO and PRO. The depositions have been proven to yield a fairly representative sample of rural society, if the sample is large enough. Mine probably is not, considering the relatively short period analyzed. To supplement the sample, I used the probate indexes, which have their own deficiencies: for example, the poorest segment of the population is grossly underepresented. Yet, my findings are confirmed by the Tawneys' occupational analysis (based on the more reliable 1608 muster returns) of nearby Gloucestershire hundreds. For instance, Pucklechurch (Glos.) hundred, a lower Cotswold district near Box and Corsham, exhibited a remarkably similar economic structure: 50.4 percent of the adult male population was engaged in agriculture; only 10 percent in textiles. See Tawneys, , “An Occupational Census,” Econ. Hist. Rev., V (1934), 64Google Scholar.

A possible defect in the analysis should be mentioned. The terms “yeomen” and “husbandmen” suggest a majorpreoccupation with agriculture, but may disguise minor cloth-making activity. There is really no way of determining how many self-styled yeomen and husbandmen wove or spun cloth as a byemployment. My analysis of yeomen wills and inventories turned up little evidence of such activity, but this is far from conclusive. One can only state the problem and assume that those who were primarily farmers would have suffered less from depressions in the textile industry than those who were not.

²⁸ Although no occupational analysis of Rowde and Kingswood was attempted, indirect evidence suggests that textile production was a major source of employment at both parishes during the seventeenth centurv. See PRO, A.P.C., XXVII, 221; VCH, Wilts., VII, 218Google Scholar.

²⁹ For additional evidence, see Salerno, , “Emigration from Wilts.,” pp. 65-95, 151-59, 166–82Google Scholar.

³⁰ Kerridge, E., “The Agrarian Development of Wiltshire, 1540-1640” (hereafter, “Agrarian Development”) (Ph.D. thesis, University of London, 1951), pp. 36-42, 294-95, 449Google Scholar; Everitt, A., Change in the Provinces: The Seventeenth Century (Leicester, 1972), pp. 22–23Google Scholar. An interesting late nineteenth-century parallel can be found in Barton, Josef J., Peasants and Strangers: Italians, Rumanians, and Slovaks in an American City, 1890-1950 (Cambridge, Mass., 1975), Chap. 2CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The author found that areas in which commercial agriculture prevailed and that exhibited a hierarchical social structure (as in Wiltshire's Chalk region) were far less fertile sources of emigrants to Cleveland.

³¹ Population estimates were made by way of aggregative analysis of parish registers, various ecclesiastical returns, and the Protestation Returns of 1641-42. For a more complete discussion of sources and methodology, see Salerno, “Emigration from Wilts.,” App. C., E.

³² For instance, the Warminster parish register shows that baptisms exceeded burials by an average of twenty per annum between 1611 and 1640.

³³ Guidelines for using depositions in migration analyses are in Clark, , “The Migrant in Kentish Towns,” in Crisis and Order, eds., Clark, and Slack, , pp, 118–25Google Scholar. The major drawback of the Wiltshire records is that the sample is considerably restricted by the absence of archdeaconry depositions. In my analysis, I included urban deponents from Salisbury, Marlborough, Devizes, Trowbridge, Warminster, Bradford-on-Avon, Chippenham, and Amesbury; and rural deponents from Box, Corsham, Lacock, Chippenham (rural tithings), Whiteparish, Plaitford, and Landford.

³⁴ WRO 845, Manorial Bndls. 2-3.

³⁵ The resemblance with nineteenth-century emigration from various regions of Europe is again striking. See Barton, , Peasants and Strangers, pp. 40–45Google Scholar.

³⁶ For instance, burials at St. Martin's and St. Edmund's, Salisbury, between 1621 and 1640 averaged 108.95 p.a.; between 1641 and 1660 they averaged only 95.35. At Trowbridge, Durials averaged 40.8 annually from 1621 to 1640, and 39.5 from 1641 to 1660. Burials at Lacock from 1621 to 1640 averaged 25.8 p.a., and only 24.75 from 1641 to 1660.

³⁷ Insufficient data precludes verification of this thesis. Demographers usually determine birth rates by calculating births per 1,000 population. Change in the birth rate can be shown by comparing rate per 1,000 population at an earlier and later date. Unfortunately, there are not two population estimates for any of the forest-pasture parishes under study. In most of the population estimates in Figure 1 it is assumed that the birth rate remained constant.

³⁸ Gaps in the parish register prevent an accurate count of deaths. Thirty-three is a good estimate based on average annual burials of adult males in noncrisis years.

³⁹ Based on an admittedly narrow sample of fifteen. Interestingly, John Lucas and William Marchant, emigrants to America, appear on the 1642 and 1649 lists of “young men.”

⁴⁰ Smith, S.R., “The Social and Geographical Origins of London Apprentices, 1630-1660,” The Guildhall Miscellany, IV (April 1973), 198Google Scholar.

⁴¹ Age-selective mobility of this magnitude was not uncommon in seventeenth-century England. See Spufford, P., “Population Movement in Seventeenth-Century England,” Local Population Studies, IV (1970), 41–50Google Scholar.

⁴² Eversley, D.E.C., “Population History and Local History,” in Introduction to English Historical Demography, ed., Wrigley, E.A., (New York, 1966), p. 19Google Scholar.

⁴³ The church wardens complained in 1659 that there had recently been a “great Increase of poor old Blinde and Impotent persons.” WRO, Quarter Sessions, Great Rolls, Trin., 1659.

⁴⁴ Burials at Trowbridge averaged between 45 and 46 p.a. during the 1660s. The norm for the period 1641-70 was 35. Baptisms averaged 38 p.a. during the 1660s; the norm for the period 1641-70 was 44. The possibility that disease inflated the burial figures has been discounted since there is no evidence of a true mortality crisis, normally defined as twice the average number of burials in any given year, during the 1660s.

⁴⁵ WRO, Quarter Sessions, Order Book 1 (1642-54), Hil. 1649; Order Book 2 (1654-68), Mich. 1659. PRO, Assi 24/21/12.

⁴⁶ BAO, Apprenticeship Enrollments, 1600-58. The indentures were no longer systematically recorded after 1658.

⁴⁷ A similar trend took place at Southampton during the seventeenth century. See Willis, A.J. (comp.), A Calendar of Southampton Apprenticeship Registers, 1609-1740 [Southampton Record Society, XII] (Southampton, 1968), pp. xxx–xxxiGoogle Scholar.

⁴⁸ Ramsay, , Wilts. Woollen Industry, pp. 20–22.Google Scholar; Salisbury Municipal Archives, List of Freemen, 1612,I/252.

⁴⁹ Slack, P., “Poverty and Politics in Salisbury, 1597-1666,” in Crisis and Order, eds., Clark, and Slack, , p. 171Google Scholar.

⁵⁰ Those involved in food and drink trades formed the largest occupational group (21 percent of total), followed by textile workers (20 percent). Occupational information for a sample of seventy-four Salisbury tradesmen and artisans was gathered from consistory court depositions, 1630-41, 1662, 1665.

⁵¹ Kerridge, , “Agrarian Development,” pp. 408-28, 435-40, 562–88Google Scholar.

⁵² VCH, Wilts., IV, 57–60Google Scholar.

⁵³ The petitions often cited a scarcity of housing as a reason for the requests. Hence, the vicar of Lacock petitioned early in the century for permission to erect fifteen cottages, since without them sixty persons would “like[ly] … lye in the streete for want of houses.” H.M.C., Various MSS, I, 82.

⁵⁴ For further evidence of unusually numerous cottagers in the southeastern parishes, see WRO, Quarter Sessions, Great Rolls, Hil. 1633, 1635, 1638, 1646, 1651. At Whiteparish, much of the seventeenth-century population growth was absorbed by the creation of tenements and the erection of cottages on common lands to the south of the village. Taylor, C.C., “Whiteparish: A Study of the Development of Forest-Edge Parish,” Wiltshire Archaeological and Natural History Magazine, LXII (1967), 97Google Scholar.

⁵⁵ Wilts. Arch. and Nat. Hist. Mag., L (1942–1944), 128Google Scholar. The period covered was 1627 to 1647.

⁵⁶ Rents on “new takings” as opposed to rents on lands having sitting tenants. Young adults, seeking to acquire land for the first time, were more concerned with the former.

⁵⁷ Kerridge, , “Agrarian Development,” pp. 488, 497Google Scholar. See also Kerridge, , “The Movement of Rent, 1540-1640,” Econ. Hist. Rev., second series, VI (1953–1954), 16–34Google Scholar.

⁵⁸ WRO, Quarter Sessions, Great Rolls, Hil. 1635.

⁵⁹ A possible explanation is that most of the testators occupied lands that were copyholds for life or lives, that were held upon the will of the manorial lord (tenancies-at-will), or were short-term leaseholders—none of which was heritable.

⁶⁰ Kerridge found that entry fines increased from four-fold to nine-fold between 1570 and 1660, the greatest increment occurring between 1630 and 1660. Kerridge, , “The Movement of Rent,” Econ. Hist. Rev., second series, VI, 16–34Google Scholar; Kerridge, , “Agrarian Development,” pp. 487–88Google Scholar.

⁶¹ The sample is admittedly small. But if the findings concerning regional variations in age at marriage are borne out by further research, some heretofore puzzling regional differences between seventeenth-century migrant groups might be explained. For instance, it might explain why, given a basic similarity in age structure, there were more married couples and more children among the East Anglian/Kentish emigrants studied by Breen and Foster than there were among the 1630s emigrants from the south and west of England. It might also explain why, given a basic age similarity, vagrant groups from southeastern England included more married couples and children than groups from other regions. See Slack, , “Vagrants and Vagrancy,” Econ. Hist. Rev., second series, XXVII, 366Google Scholar.

⁶² Salerno, , “Emigration from Wilts.,” pp. 67–77Google Scholar.

⁶³ As indicated by both the Warminster lists of householders and Trowbridge settlement certificates (WRO, Trowbridge Settlement Certificates, 206/50). The latter reveal quite substantial migration of textile workers from western Wiltshire, eastern Somerset, and Gloucestershire to Trowbridge as that town, along with Bradford-on-Avon, became a key center of western medley cloth production during the late seventeenth century.

⁶⁴ Stone, L., “Social Mobility in England, 1500-1700,” Past and Present, No. 33 (April 1966), 31–32Google Scholar; Smith, , “London Apprentices,” Guildhall Misc., IV, 199Google Scholar; Beier, , “Social Problems in Elizabethan London,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History, IX:2 (Autumn, 1978), pp. 203–21CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Slack, , “Vagrants and Vagrancy,” Econ. Hist. Rev., second series, XXVII, 374–75Google Scholar.

⁶⁵ Stone, “Social Mobility,” Past and Present, No. 33, 29-32Google Scholar.

⁶⁶ Stouffer, S.A., “Intervening Opportunities: A Theory Relating Mobility and Distance,” American Sociological Review, V (1940), 845–67CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁶⁷ Breen, T.H., “Persistent Localism: English Social Change and the Shaping of New England Institutions,” Wm.&M.Q., XXXII (1975), 3–28Google Scholar. On typologies of migration, see Kosinski, Leszek A. and Prothero, R. Mansell (eds.), People on the Move: Studies on Internal Migration (London, 1975), pp. 7–9Google Scholar.

⁶⁸ See, for example, Hawkins, M., “The Government: Its Role and Its Aims,” in The Origins of the English Civil War, ed., Russell, C. (London, 1973), pp. 35–65CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Fletcher, A., A County Community in Peace and War: Sussex, 1600-1660 (New York, 1975), pp. 184-200, 205-16, 224–26Google Scholar.

⁶⁹ For a detailed discussion, see Salerno, , “Emigration from Wilts.,” pp. 113-24, 191–200Google Scholar.