Puritan colony was not made up of leaders. In firm intelligence,
in clearly realized conceptions of Church and State, in moral fervor and
spiritual exaltation, men like Winthrop and Davenport were far removed
from the rank and file. The great majority of those who first came to
Massachusetts were small "merchants, husbandmen, and artificers"; men
with little property or none at all; uneducated and home-keeping men
whose outlook was bounded by the parish; Puritans by temperament and
habit rather than by reasoned conviction: followers in a very real and
literal sense. Few of them would have come as individuals; but they came
as families and groups of families from the same community, yielding to
the call of a favorite minister or trusted neighbor. And few would have
come for religion's sake alone. Persecution was the efficient cause, but
straitened circumstances frequently gave point to the pricks of
conscience. Even Winthrop himself, a man of substantial possessions,
tells us that a consideration for his undertaking the New World venture
was that "his meanes heer are soe shortened as he shall not be able to
continue in that place and employment where he now is." How far more
persuasive an appeal was this to common folk! "This lande grows weary of
her inhabitants, soe as man is heer of less price amongst us than a
horse or sheep. All towns complain of the burthen of their poore though
we have taken up many unnecessary, yea unlawfull trades to maintaine
them. Children, servants, and neighbors (especially if they be poore)
are considered the greatest burthen. We stand heer striving for places
of habitation (many men spending as much labour and cost to recover or
keep sometimes an acre or two of land as would procure them many hundred
as good or better in another country) and in ye mean tyme suffer a
whole continent as fruitful and convenient for the use of man to lie
waste without any improvement."

Both in a spiritual and a material sense, it was to preserve and not to
dissolve the ties of community life that the Puritans, leaders and
followers alike, came to Massachusetts. Coming as townsmen seeking land,
they settled in towns, to which they often gave the names of the places
from which they came--for example, Boston, Plymouth, Dorchester. The
town was not originally an industrial center, but a group of
agricultural proprietors who procured from the company title to the land
which they held individually or in common accor