3 Eight studies have obtained similar results. The largest and most detailed is still Charles E. Banks, The Planters of the Commonwealth; A Study of the Emigrants and Emigration in Colonial Times … (Boston, 1930), and Topographical Dictionary. His tabulations show that 51.3% of 2,885 emigrants came from the nine eastern counties. Banks was a careful historian, but the Topographical Dictionary was a posthumous work, and other scholars have found many inaccuracies. Its statistical results also understate the East Anglian connection with Massachusetts Bay, for they include emigrants to Plymouth (a different group), to New Haven (which drew heavily from London), and to New Hampshire and Maine (which attracted disproportionate numbers from the West Country).
Moriarity independently reached the same results in his “Social and Geographical Origins of the Founders of Massachusetts,” 49-65. Anderson found a similar concentration in her study of seven ship lists in the period 1635-38. Of 592 passengers whose origins she could identify, 188 (32%) came from Norfolk and Suffolk; 182 (31%) were from Kent; and another third were scattered widely through the other counties of England. This pattern was partly produced by her sample, but is broadly consistent with other results (“Migrants and Motives,” 339-83). Anders Orbeck, in a study for his thesis on New England speech, concluded that “67.73 percent of New England immigrants came from the coast counties from (and including) London to the Wash.” That area comprises Essex, Suffolk, Norfolk and Lincoln; see Orbeck, Pronunciation in Early New England (Ann Arbor, 1927).
Similar conclusions were reached by Tyack, and also by Breen and Foster. David Grayson Allen does not directly address this question in In English Ways: The Movement of Societies and the Transferal of English Local Law and Custom to Massachusetts Bay in the Seventeenth Century (Chapel Hill, 1981), but in his unpublished dissertation he included a survey of geographical origins to all New England towns before 1650. The results, once again, appear to be broadly similar. Cf. “In English Ways” (thesis, Univ. of Wisconsin, 1974), appendix I, 415-26.
Breen and Foster have raised the important question of bias in ship lists, but precisely the same patterns also appear in independent evidence of elite origins and New England place names, reported below.