During the seventeenth century, the social and economic pressures within England that generated the Chesapeake colonies also spawned the colonization of a region to the north named New England.

Known as Puritans, they meant to purify the protestant faith, in England if possible, in a New England if necessary.

In crowded England, labor was plentiful and cheap, but land was scarce and expensive.

During the 1530s, Queen Elizabeth’s father, King Henry VIII, had rejected the Catholic pope to become the head of an independent Church of England.

Begun as an epithet, “Puritan” persists in scholarship to name the broad movement of diverse people who shared a conviction that the Protestant Reformation remained incomplete in England.

Puritan magistrates strictly enforced the long-neglected laws against gambling, blasphemy, adultery, public drunkenness, and Sabbath-breaking.