Conquest, the Old-English nobility or _thegnhood_ was pushed down into
"a secondary place in the political and social scale." Of the
far-reaching effects of this change upon the whole subsequent history of
the English race I shall hereafter have occasion to speak. The proximate
effect was that "the ancient lords of the soil, thus thrust down into
the second rank, formed that great body of freeholders, the stout gentry
and yeomanry of England, who were for so many ages the strength of the
land." [2] It was from this ancient thegnhood that the Puritan settlers
of New England were mainly descended. It is no unusual thing for a
Massachusetts family to trace its pedigree to a lord of the manor in the
thirteenth or fourteenth century. The leaders of the New England
emigration were country gentlemen of good fortune, similar in position
to such men as Hampden and Cromwell; a large proportion of them had
taken degrees at Cambridge. The rank and file were mostly intelligent
and prosperous yeomen. The lowest ranks of society were not represented
in the emigration; and all idle, shiftless, or disorderly people were
rigorously refused admission into the new communities, the early history
of which was therefore singularly free from anything like riot or
mutiny. To an extent unparalleled, therefore, in the annals of
colonization, the settlers of New England were a body of _picked men_.
Their Puritanism was the natural outcome of their free-thinking,
combined with an earnestness of character which could constrain them to
any sacrifices needful for realizing their high ideal of life. They gave
up pleasant homes in England, and they left them with no feeling of
rancour towards their native land, in order that, by dint of whatever
hardship, they might establish in the American wilderness what should
approve itself to their judgment as a god-fearing community. It matters
little that their conceptions were in some respects narrow. In the
unflinching adherence to duty which prompted their enterprise, and in
the sober intelligence with which it was carried out, we have, as I said