The local sources in England of the great migration, and the relations of that movement to local economic conditions, have not received adequate treatment as yet, and the subject is somewhat obscure; but apparently it was the eastern and southeastern counties that furnished the main supply of immigrants for the New World. It was in these counties that the artisans from Flanders had sought refuge, when driven abroad by Alva, as well as the Huguenots from France. In these counties, also, the enclosures, which were of such far-reaching economic influence, had taken place earlier than elsewhere, while wages there showed a lower ratio to subsistence than in the north.[270] The special area in which the inhabitants were most disposed to seek new homes was that around the low country draining into the Wash; and throughout the early seventeenth century economic and agrarian agitation was notably constant in that particular region,[271] the period of heaviest emigration—that between 1630 and 1640—marking, perhaps, its years of greatest economic readjustment and strain. The rise in rents and land-values had, indeed, been enormous during the preceding half-century.[272] But this agricultural prosperity had been so closely bound up with the great expansion of the cloth industry, that in this section it may be said to have been wholly dependent upon it.[273] From 1625 to 1630, however, the business of the clothiers suffered a very severe decline, which continued for some years, and the effects of which were very marked in the agricultural industries as well.[274] In Norwich, for example, the Mayor and Aldermen complained that, owing to the dearth of food, and to the great increase of unemployment due to bad trade conditions, the amount necessary for poor relief had to be doubled.[275] Moreover, as is always the case in periods of great economic alteration, the change had not affected all classes in the community alike. The yeomanry, who were less influenced by the rapidly rising scale of living, and so could save a much larger proportion of their increased gains from the high agricultural prices, were improving their position at the expense of the gentry.[276] Enterprising traders, in the cloth and other industries, who had acquired fortunes, but who naturally were not of the old families, were pushing in and buying country estates, and, like all _nouveaux riches_, were asserting their new and unaccustomed position by raising the scale of living.[277] Many of the gentry, on the other hand, unable to adjust themselves to the new economic conditions or to take advantage of them, and yet unwilling to give up their comparative position in the county, found themselves “overtaken,” as a contemporary writer says, “with too well meaning and good nature,” and so were “inforced sometimes to suffer a revolution” in their domestic affairs.[278] About the years of the emigration, however, there seem to have been financial difficulties and economic unrest among