Chesapeake Royalist and Servant Migration

During and after the English Civil Wars, members of the southern English gentry and their dependants established or enlarged estates in Virginia. At the same time, many poorer migrants crossed the Atlantic as indentured servants to work in the tobacco economy.

Landholding, Anglican religion, patriarchal household organisation and a strong concern for honour developed within a society marked by high mortality, labour scarcity and widening inequality. The later expansion of racial slavery transformed but did not erase these early patterns.

Albion’s Seed identifies this movement as one of four major British migrations whose folkways remained influential in American regional culture.