The first social body to be birthed from Ipswich, Massachusetts, was Newbury to its north. Newbury was something of an outlier among New England towns, first of all because its ministers, Thomas Parker and his cousin James Noyes, had decidedly Presbyterian leanings and rejected the emerging Congregationalist model, perfected by Thomas Shepard, in which believers had to offer evidence that they were among the predestined “elect” in order to be admitted to full church membership and become communicants. In his 1646 Hypocrisie Unmasked, Plymouth's sometime governor Edward Winslow cited the toleration of Parker and Noyes as evidence that the New Englanders did not ruthlessly crush religious dissent. Newbury's land-use patterns also evolved atypically, because in 1642 the Newburyites, “well weighing the streights they were in for want of plough ground, remoteness of the Common, scarcity of fenceing stuffe & the like” decided to relocate their houselots to a “new Towne” about three miles north. This seems to have artificially accelerated the transition from open-field farming to enclosure in an anomalous way.

Accordingly, David Grayson Allen focused on Newbury's pronounced social hierarchy rather than its system of land use, pointing to inequalities in the allocation of common rights in Newbury. Allen argued that this stratification replicated conditions of inequality in the counties of Wiltshire and Hampshire, which provided most of the members of Parker's company. I would suggest that the thoroughgoing Protestant scholasticism and corporatism of Parker and Noyes had at least as much to do with it. In his biography of Parker, Cotton Mather labeled him “Scholasticus” (although he claimed that after devoting himself to “school divinity” early in his Newbury pastorate, Parker “afterwards laid it all aside, for the ‘knowledge of Jesus Christ crucified.’ “). Whether or not this is true, Parker received a thorough formation in Protestant scholasticism, first from his father, the famous Puritan Robert Parker, alumnus of Magdalen College, Oxford (author of the 1607 Scholasticall Discourse against symbolizing with Antichrist in Ceremonies), and later at Trinity College, Dublin— also John Winthrop Jr.'s alma mater— where Parker matriculated in 1610.

James Noyes attended Brasenose College, Oxford; his published works relentlessly deploy the corporatist image in defense of Presbyterian polity.