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"The poetry of history lies in the quasi-miraculous fact that once, on this earth, once, on this familiar spot of ground, walked other men and women, as actual as we are today, thinking their own thoughts, swayed by their own passions, but now all gone, one generation vanishing after another, gone as utterly as we ourselves shall shortly be gone...This is the most familiar and certain fact about life, but it is also the most poetical, and the knowledge of it has never ceased to entrance me, and to throw a halo of poetry around the dustiest record." --George Macauley Trevalyan quoted by Ballen
"Merchants like Smythe and dreamers of empire like Gorges were relatively new types, made possible only because England had been transformed by an economic revolution that started about the middle of the 14th century and was finally terminating as the 17th century began" (19 Pomfret).

Some kind of relationship between people and their environment was at the heart of everyone's future.  Whether juxtapositional or of mutual benefit, men in relationship to each other and to the objects of the earthly world, constituted society.  Even high seas adventurers had some sort of relationship to governance.

"The transformation was initiated when English landowners, recognizing a rising demand for woolen clothing throughout Europe, decided to raise more sheep.  To make this possible, they turned considerable land formerly cultivated by serfs into enclosed pastures.  This change reduced the need for agricultural workers, but those who remained were able to escape from serfdom to become independent yeoman, tenant farmers, or hired laborers.  Those serfs who were evicted moved into towns to try to learn new ways of supporting themselves, and the large number who could not make that transition successfully ended up as homeless vagrants" (Pomfret 19-20).

Enterprising Englishmen began organizing trading companies.  Merchants began to emerge as a new class.

A couple books that Pomfret recommends reading and we're trying to get a hold of...

John U. Nef, INDUSTRY AND GOVERNMENT IN FRANCE AND ENGLAND, 1540-1640 (Philadelphia, 1940).

Wallace Notestein, THE ENGLISH PEOPLE ON THE EVE OF COLONIZATION, 1603-1630 (NY, 1954).

R.H. Tawney's THE AGRICULTURAL PROBLEM OF THE 16th CENTURY (NY, 1912).


Likewise, it was indentured servants and settlers who had migrated at their own expense who became tenants on land leased from the Company in the colony of Virginia who became North America's first transplanted farmers.  Pomfret tells us that the most gifted, as in durable, "survived to become the founders of Virginia's colonial middle class" (40 FOUNDING).