14 Kenneth Lockridge, Literacy in Colonial New England (New York, 1974); David Cressy, Literacy and the Social Order: Reading and Writing in Tudor and Stuart England (Cambridge, 1980). These two works are not precisely comparable. Lockridge’s estimates should be treated as an upper-bound estimate of illiteracy in Massachusetts; Cressy’s as a lower-bound of illiteracy in England. The difference was probably even greater; see below, “Massachusetts Learning Ways.”
15 Five tabulations of occupations among emigrants to New England yield the following result:
Occupations |
Anderson (n = 139) |
Tyack (n = 147) |
Salerno (n= 124) |
Breen-Foster (n = 42) |
Cressy (n = 242) |
Professional |
3.6% |
27.2% |
2.4% |
4.8% |
2.1% |
Agriculture |
33.8% |
16.3% |
28.2% |
26.2% |
22.3% |
Cloth trades |
25.2% |
23.1% |
24.2% |
23.8% |
20.7% |
Other crafts and trades |
35.3% |
29.9% |
45.2% |
40.5% |
28.9% |
Maritime |
2.2% |
3.4% |
0.0% |
4.8% |
1.2% |
Laborers |
n.a. |
n.a. |
n.a. |
n.a. |
4.1% |
Servants |
n.a. |
n.a. |
n.a. |
n.a. |
20.7% |
Total |
100.1% |
99.9% |
100.0% |
100.1% |
100.0% |
16 Anderson, “Migrants and Motives,” 358. Of 590 immigrants, more than 200 came from the city of London and the six large towns of Canterbury, Dover, Maidstone, Great Yarmouth, Norwich and Salisbury. This pattern is partly the result of bias in the ship lists available to Anderson, as she herself points out. But other inquiries yield much the same result.