4 The richest families in New England were only middling prosperous by comparison with the great tidewater planters. Most towns in Massachusetts knew nothing like the dominion of great landed families that existed throughout the Chesapeake. The closest parallel in New England was the town of Springfield, where the Pynchon family was exceptionally rich and powerful. But even at the peak of their power, the Pynchons owned only about 20% of taxable wealth in that town. By most quantitative measures, the distribution of wealth even in Springfield was closer to the New England average than to Virginia’s. Stephen Innes, Labor in a New Land: Economy and Society in Seventeenth Century Springfield (Princeton, 1983), 44-47.