Stability and Change in Old and New England: Clayworth and Dedham

Stability and Change in Old and New England: Clayworth and Dedham Greven and Lockridge have mustered an impressive array of evidence to support their common conclusion that "the Massachusetts village became almost from the start more deeply rooted, more permanent, than its English counterpart." Together with most commentators on their work, both scholars seem to regard the apparent geographical immobility of the inhabitants of seventeenth-century Andover and Dedham (by comparison with the inhabitants of seventeenth-century English villages) as a major contribution to the relatively greater order, stability, and "traditionalism" of early colonial American society. Although Bissell's interesting study of Windsor, Connecticut, reveals geographical mobility rates in excess of those found at either Andover or Dedham, and explores the "apparent incongruities of a society that combined geographic mobility with social and religious stability," she nevertheless appears to endorse the view that population mobility in colonial New England was markedly less than in the English countryside.' This note questions that hypothesis and some of the inferences which have been drawn from it, in the course of discussing the problems raised by attempts to compare the spatial mobility of seventeenth-century English villagers and New England townsmen.