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Vexed and Troubled Englishmen, 1590-1642

出版	Oxford University Press, 1967
ISBN	78003491609787800349164
URL	http://books.google.com.hk/books?id=adR1NAEACAAJ&hl=&source=gbs_api

註釋"The astounding vitality that Englishmen of all ranks and degrees displayed in every area of human activity during the half-century between 1590 and 1642 is depicted in these pages. This era was not an attenuation of the Elizabethan age; it had a style and direction all its own. Change and challenge were its hallmarks. From the generations born in England during these years came the first great wave of America's settlement, and from them the new country took its temper. Among the people, who were too close to the hardships of life to comprehend what was occurring, everything seemed to be going wrong both for themselves and their country. In rural and urban economic matters, in domestic policy and in foreign affairs, and above all else, in the practice of their Protestant faith, nothing was as it should be. After 1620, the woes of the average man in this apparently ill-faring land mounted every year and reached a climax in the years between 1629 and 1642, when both state and church were threatened with unsought and misunderstood changes. Ordinary Englishmen and women found much that was happening disrupting and disturbing, and a large minority of them came to think of themselves as supernumeraries of whom the land was weary. They were truly vexed and troubled Englishmen. One of America's leading historians tells their story—the fruit of ten years of research and writing-with grace and wit as well as authority. Mr. Bridenbaugh had two purposes in view when he wrote this revealing book: to portray, for the first time, the much-neglected and interesting "chaps" of the middle and inferior orders in England; and to explain what it was that impelled some 80,000-two percent of the entire population of England-to forsake their homes and homeland and seek new lives elsewhere. Most of these emigrants went to the new world called America and, without being aware of it, performed the most daring and portentous act of modern history by founding a nation "where none before had stood." Never before studied just as human beings, these English men, women, and children are vividly brought to life by Mr. Bridenbaugh. His pages offer a social, economic, and cultural history of England in the fifty years before 1642, when the "Great Migration" ended. At the same time they provide the introduction essential to any understanding of American origins. This is the first of several volumes projected by the author on "The Beginnings of the American People."-Publisher.