(Funny History)
When my family left the west midlands of england for New England in 1630, the population of say, Birmingham was only around 10,000 people. It was naturally anarchic because there were no cathedrals no bishopric and no visible nobility. It was a small market town. Focused on metalworking if anything.
You can tell a family’s morals by their morals four hundred years ago. Because it’s transferred involuntarily and unintentionally as logical premises by each generation. In the broader literature you’ll find that morals are correlated by crop.
I can read one of my progenitor’s (many) volumes (books) on puritanism and it’s as if I wrote it myself. It’s … weird. I mean, I do the natural law thing and he does the christian thing, but realistically it’s the same cognitive bias expressed in different terms because of different times.
(I find all this intergenerational durability fascinating).

BACKGROUND

The West Midlands carried a particular “nonconformist, anti-authoritarian streak” by the time of the 1630s. Let me lay out the causes and their relation to the Civil War.

1. Regional Character Before the Civil War

– The West Midlands (Worcestershire, Warwickshire, Staffordshire, Shropshire, Herefordshire) sat between two poles:

— — Royalist strongholds (the aristocratic, landholding gentry who backed Charles I — especially in Worcestershire, which leaned Royalist).
— — Radical towns (Birmingham, Coventry, Kidderminster, and others) that had traditions of free crafts, dissent, and weak aristocratic oversight.

Unlike London, Oxford, or York, the region had few bishops’ sees and little aristocratic patronage, so towns grew relatively independent.

The region had a history of Puritanism, Lollardy (late medieval dissent), and radical preaching, which set the stage for Civil War divisions.

2. Bias in the Civil War

Worcestershire and much of the countryside: Largely Royalist, tied to landholding gentry and the king’s authority. Charles I set up court in Oxford, not far away.

Strongly Parliamentarian:
Birmingham, Coventry, Kidderminster, Dudley, and other towns.
– Birmingham especially gained a reputation as a “treasonous town” for supplying Parliament with armaments and opposing the king.
– Kidderminster was a Puritan preaching hub, producing ministers like Richard Baxter (a leading Puritan theologian who settled there in the 1640s).
– Coventry became a famous “Puritan city”, fortified and staunchly Parliamentarian.

So the West Midlands was a borderland of conflict, with local feuds breaking out between Royalist landowners and dissenting, artisan towns.

3. Why Think of them as “Anarchists”?

Many Midlands dissenters looked anarchic to contemporaries because:

Weak Guild/Aristocratic Control
– Birmingham had never been chartered as a city with guild monopolies.
– Craftsmen operated independently, resisting both London’s control and aristocratic taxation.

This independence translated into political radicalism: if they could govern their own trades, why not their own religion and politics?

Religious Radicalism
Lollard traditions had survived in the region.
By the 1620s–30s, the area was crawling with Puritan preachers, “lecturers,” and separatists.
To Anglican authorities, these men looked like anarchists: breaking ecclesiastical order, refusing conformity, creating “churches within the church.”

Economic Independence
Towns like Birmingham and Kidderminster were full of small producers (nails, cloth, etc.).
They had little dependence on royal charters or aristocratic estates. This made them fertile ground for resistance to centralized authority.

English Civil War Consequence
– Birmingham in 1643 armed itself against Prince Rupert (the Royalist general).
– After defeating Royalist forces at Edgehill, Parliament relied on the Midlands towns for supplies and manpower.
– Royalists retaliated viciously, burning parts of Birmingham in 1643.

This cemented the region’s reputation as “rebellious”.

4. Broader Cultural Frame

If you call them “anarchists,” I’d refine it as:

– Religious anarchists — resisting ecclesiastical hierarchy, pushing toward congregational independence.
– Economic anarchists — rejecting monopolies, guilds, and feudal dues.
– Political proto-liberals — advancing the idea that towns and congregations could self-govern.

This is exactly the soil out of which New England Puritanism grew. The Doolittle family’s move in the 1630s fits the broader pattern: dissenting families from the West Midlands, East Anglia, and London leaving to avoid the repression of Laud’s Anglican regime.