need a cheap work force to make their crops financially feasible. When King Henry the VIII wanted to annul his marriage Catherine of Aragon and was denied by the pope, he created the Anglican Church and placed himself as the head of it. In the years following the creation of the Anglican Church, Protestants began to rise in power within the church hierarchy. By the year 1658 most English people considered themselves to be protestant, but the question was how protestant? Puritans believed that merely leading an outwardly moral life was not enough. These Puritans were Protestants that had a more radical view on the worship of God. Puritans believed that it was important for the individual to have a spiritual rebirth or conversion and were opposed to some of the more Catholic styled ceremonies that the Anglican Church performed.
The years from 1629 to 1640 are known as the "Eleven Years Tyranny" in Great Britain by the Whig historians.
Those were the years that King Charles the 1st ruled without a parliament and Archbishop William Laud purged the Anglican Church of its Protestant members. The Protestants had long been trying to eliminate the office of bishop, these bishops composed one quarter of Parliament's upper house and the removal of this office could greatly jeopardize the Anglican Church's power. This was also a time of great economic depression and epidemics. The cities were overcrowded and poverty was everywhere. These factors, and many others, helped contribute to the migration of a great number of Puritans to the new world. The protestants held a strong belief that suffering was caused by a displeased God and that they would suffer themselves as long as they were surrounded by people who did not worship God the way they believed that he should be. The people who settled the area of Massachusetts had left Europe in the hope to create a "City on the Hill". They wanted to create an ideal religious community where there was no separation of church and state, were they could live in harmony with their beliefs. They were also searching for a place where their worship of God could go on unrepressed by the Anglican church of king Charles the
1st. When Puritans came to the new world, they often times did so as a family. More than any other migration in the history of America, Puritans came to the new world mostly as whole nuclear families or with some relatives. The Puritans considered the family the "little commonwealth". Typically the husband tended to the livestock and the farm, while the wife raised the children and took care of the house. The family was generally economically independent, anything that they couldn't grow and make themselves they bartered for from other colonists. Adult colonists were required by law to attend church regularly and to support it monetarily