Puritans produced their ideology of mobility by applying certain key principles available to the English godly in the early seventeenth century, especially corporatism and covenant, so that they could live out their beliefs in the political, religious, and social context of the time. It was a very unlikely development, not only because long-distance migrants in England were feared and stigmatized as vagrants, but also because a covenanted, corporate body, once created, was seen as a living organism that people should not depart from with impunity. Prior to the Great Migration, the most common rationales offered for mobility by the godly were to obtain religious teaching, to partake in fellowship with other believers, and to enjoy a ministry that was sound by Puritan standards. After removal to New England, justification for mobility centered on the health of the social bodies created by the settlers. A corporate body could become diseased or distempered if the elements that composed it fell out of balance. This might happen if a town's location did not afford enough of the resources required, including arable land, forest, meadow, and pasture, to sustain the “mixed farming” regime for all inhabitants. Political and religious disagreements also threatened the health of a social body. In all these cases it might become necessary for some of the members of the body to withdraw to another place, creating a new social body in order to save the collective life of the original body.

In order to create this ideology, Puritans first had to redefine mobility, chipping away at its negative connotations in seventeenth-century England. But they also had to develop an institutional framework to make mobility possible, based on the already existing ideological concept of corporatism. Before turning to the ideology of mobility proper, I would like to discuss its organizational underpinnings.

Patrick Collinson made his appeal, referenced in the last chapter, for a “social history with the politics put back in” as part of his discussion of the 1596 Swallowfield Articles. Leaders of the parish of Swallowfield, straddling the border of Wiltshire and Berkshire, drew up this document to address social problems and regulate communal life. In reprinting this document, Steve Hindle called it “a milestone on the road from manor to vestry.”