tlement was in West Jersey, where in 1675 they founded Salem (a name
adapted from the Hebrew shalom). Then in 1682 some 2,000 sailed across
the Atlantic with William Penn to found Pennsylvania.
The Moravians (Brüdergemeine) had a different background and dif-
ferent reasons for going to the New World. Their church grew out of a
fifteenth-century central European offshoot of the Catholic church; after a
long period of persecution and eclipse, this offshoot spread to Germany. In
1732, Moravian missionaries reached the West Indies, where they worked
among the black slaves; eight years later, a group of Moravians established
their first settlements, Nazareth and Bethlehem, in Pennsylvania. Thus,
although the Moravians began their movements from central Europe as a
consequence of persecution, they went to the New World to spread their
interpretation of the Gospel.
Socially, as well as religiously, seventeenth- and eighteenth-century
England and France were deeply divided. The division was not so evident
as the division by color in present-day American society; but culturally,
economically, and politically it was nonetheless sharp and painful. I will
focus on England, but much of what I say is also applicable to France.
The English middle and upper classes, who have bequeathed to us ele-
gant furniture, exquisite silver, serene paintings, and graceful architecture,
floated above a swamp of misery. “Swamp” is not just a metaphor: the nar-
row, nearly airless streets of English cities, particularly London, were also
open sewers. The refuse of butchers, tanners, and pliers of other noxious
trades lay rotting in the streets, along with the bodies of animals and peo-
ple. The bulk of London’s inhabitants endured poverty, filth, disease, and
ignorance that today could probably be matched only in the worst slums of
Calcutta. Hordes of rats, fighting with the living for food and gnawing their
way through the dead and dying, give an English actuality to the German
legend of the Pied Piper. Crowded into that slough, the poor lived precari-
ously on the brink of starvation. We see the English “poore folkes” today
mainly through the eyes of novelists such as Charles Dickens, Daniel
Defoe, and Henry Fielding; the playwright John Gay; and the artist
William Hogarth.
The London poor lived segregated in slums where unemployment
reached monumental proportions, and hunger was a constant companion.
Society and Wars in the Old Countries 69