This chapter will take readers on a journey through the Valley of the River Stour in the English region of East Anglia to meet clerical members of the Ward/Rogers family: Nathaniel Ward, his brothers Samuel and John, his stepfather Richard Rogers and his stepbrothers Daniel and Ezekiel Rogers, and their kinsman John Rogers of Dedham and his son Nathaniel. Along the way the reader will encounter issues of great concern to ordinary people and their ministers in the early seventeenth century: land use patterns and the spread of enclosure, moral economy and the right of resistance, the problem of vagrancy, economic depression, and attempts by Puritans and other local leaders to address these issues through a combination of moral regulation and poor relief. Any disorientation the reader may feel is intentional, mirroring the sense of rapid demographic, economic, and agricultural change observed by people of the time, and replicating the lived experience of Puritan mobility in early Stuart England. This included “gadding about” to sermons by the godly faithful, and the even more striking peregrinations of their clerical leaders, leaving home to attend university or to pursue legal studies at the Inns of Court, perhaps relocating for a time to learn from a Puritan spiritual teacher like John Cotton, to whom the Protestant scholastic John Preston sent his pupils (as Cotton Mather put it) for “seasoning,” then moving from one ministerial post to another, possibly even leaving the country to escape persecution or pursue Calvinist connections on the continent. Such strategic religious removals set the stage, not only for the Great Migration, but also for the emergence of a full-blown politics of place within New England, as leaders like Thomas Dudley and Thomas Hooker relocated in order to make political statements.

For the past century and a half, discussion of Puritans’ motives for migration to New England has centered on whether they emigrated primarily for religious or economic reasons, and historians’ responses have predictably followed their own ideological proclivities. In recent decades scholars have valiantly attempted to construct datasets of migrants that would provide a more objective foundation for addressing this question. Results have been inconclusive, to say the least.