The lives of the Pilgrim Fathers are little recognized or recalled in the towns and villages of England from which they fled to find freedom.

he great cathedral at Lincoln is a glorious artifact of medieval Christendom that once projected authority over the farmlands, manors, and small villages of the English Midlands. Today the majesty, if not the might, of the cathedral endures. But in the shadow of this monument another, greater work of faith commenced that would prove more influential across the centuries than the artistry of sculptors and stonemasons.
        In a region known locally as the "Holy Triangle," in the villages of Babworth, Gainsborough, and Austerfield-Scrooby, a quest for freedom was germinated that was to advance the ideal of religious liberty as the foremost principle of civil government. For Americans, the voyage of the Pilgrims on the Mayflower and the founding of Plymouth in the harsh New England winter is a birth narrative of biblical solemnity. But the story begins here, along forgotten pathways, in ancient churches, and in anonymous public buildings that survive to the present day.
        No casual traveler would give a second look down a tree-lined dirt road that bends out of sight among the low hills and neatly tilled farms outside of Retford in Nottinghamshire. Perhaps a quarter mile down the road, hidden among stands of well-aged trees, is the Babworth All Saints' Parish Church. Outside, indifferently tended gravestones encircle the church. Within the sanctuary, a replica of the Mayflower encased in glass and a second, elaborately detailed three-dimensional carving of the ship remind parishioners of the church's singular role in a religious drama that would become legendary.
         Dating from 1290, the church toiled dutifully through the centuries. In 1382, the English churchman John Wycliffe translated the Bible from Latin into the English vernacular, an effort for which he was posthumously rewarded by being exhumed and having his bones burned. The English Bible nevertheless was widely dispersed, and vigorous new theological disputes arose that laid the groundwork for reformist and Puritan challenges.
        In the sixteenth century, Henry VIII broke from the Roman Catholic Church and established himself as head of the Protestant Church of England.

A replica of the Mayflower reminds parishioners of the historic role of the Babworth Church.

For Henry VIII, rooting out "papist" sympathies and medieval monastic orders (and taking lands for the further glory of the crown) proved to be a dirty business. But so too was the punitive reign of Henry's Catholic daughter, Mary, who embroiled England in bloody reprisals against Protestants who resisted a renewed subordination to the pope. With the ascension of the Protestant Elizabeth, who followed her half-sister Mary to the throne, relative moderation, guided more by prudence and a desire for civil order, enabled a relative peace.
        At the Babworth church, the Reverend Richard Clyfton was appointed rector in 1586, to no one's particular notice. Becoming restive with the enforced conformity of Anglican Protestantism, Clyfton began to wade deeper into the troubling waters of Puritanism, a movement that sought to "purify" the Church of England from such errors as the Book of Common Prayer, judged by some clerics as "an imperfect book, culled and picked out of the popish dunghill."
        As critical as Puritans were toward the established church, other devout Christians fundamentally objected to any state interference in any matters of religious faith or church constitution. These "separatists" existed on the margins, under constant threat of charges of treason and the gruesome consequences reserved for disturbers of the civil order. Thus it was that Clyfton, stirred by the usurpations of civil authority over points of faith and conscience, gradually drifted from Puritanism to separatism.

The Pilgrim way

rom the corner of the Babworth churchyard a trail disappears into the woods, running maybe a quarter mile before opening onto a pasture where cattle graze indolently. Along this mute and unmarked trail--known as the Pilgrim Way--a former diplomat and leading citizen of nearby Scrooby, William Brewster, made his way to Babworth on Sunday mornings. Brewster, cited for "irregular church attendance" at his home church of St. Wilfred's, within a few years would lead a band of persecuted separatists first to Holland and then on a perilous journey across the ocean in search of religious freedom.
        Perhaps Brewster met the adolescent William Bradford on the path as the boy walked from his home in Austerfield some nine miles away to hear the "grave and fatherly" Clyfton. Neither "the Wrath of his Uncles, not the Scoff of his Neighbors," wrote the colonial Puritan divine Cotton Mather of Bradford, "divert[ed] him from his Pious Inclinations." Orphaned and with little formal education, Bradford would be remembered as the greatest of the Pilgrim Fathers, governor of Plymouth Colony for nearly forty years, author of the historical chronicle Of Plimoth Plantation (the most important primary source we have of the Pilgrims in America), and arguably the leading figure in seventeenth-century colonial American history.
 

The Parish Chuch of St. Helena in Austerfield is among the finest Norman churches in England and the home church of William Bradford.

        The Bradford family church in Austerfield, the parish church of St. Helena, is set back from the road behind the graveyard and easy to miss. Among the finest examples of early Norman architecture in Britain, the church is reminiscent of the charming, unpretentious wooden churches English Puritans would later build in New England. Striking in its austerity, in its dignified twin bell tower, massive stone walls, and disproportionately small windows, the church offers solace not in glittering iconography but in the rudimentary, God-given elements of life--earth, stone, and discrete allocations of light.
        On a typical day the church is apt to be locked and empty, in some ways a remarkable fact for me, an American and New Englander who has recrossed the ocean to explore the beginnings of this nation's freedom heritage. Indeed, my sojourn would prove to be a solitary one. The harassment of the separatists who would later become the revered fathers of the American liberties is not a proud event in England to be memorialized.
        No roadside makers, promotional literature, or other telltale signs of tourism were apparent at any of these sites (apart from church guest books with the signatures of Americans, like me, following the Pilgrim trail). So rather than waiting in a queue, paying an admission, and attending an interpretative historical presentation, a determined visitor must knock at a neighbor's house, get the phone number of the church warden, and wander about the churchyard, taking in the simple geometry of the church from various flattering angles until the official arrives with a key.
        Built just after the Norman conquest, in 1080, St. Helena Church has undergone restoration since the recent discovery of original Norman pillars that had been filled in centuries earlier when the north nave of the structure had collapsed. The pillars and nave have now been reinstated; more

This historic Norman baptismal font, used for the baptisim of William Bradford, was recovered from a neighboring cow pasture.

interestingly, above the south doorway is a carving that is thought to predate the Norman conquest by some three centuries. A crude image of a dragon, it is suggestive of the Anglo-Saxon epic Beowulf, a historically tantalizing work of a culture in the transition from pagan Celtic to Christian beliefs.
        But certainly the most important "proto-American" artifact at St. Helena is also the most unlikely to have found its way home. Discovered in a nearby cow pasture, where the cattle were drinking from it, was the original Norman baptismal font of William Bradford. The basin where this courageous Christian leader was consecrated to God is now properly restored within the church, freely accessible to touch and ponder over in the quiet solitude of this lonely seedbed of American history.

The separatist challenge

n London, the forty-three-year reign of Queen Elizabeth drew to a close in 1603, and the English throne passed to her designated successor, James I of Scotland. William Shakespeare was now at the height of his powers, authoring the great tragedies that would entertain the king and his ministers at court. Less entertaining was the fractious religious division of the realm he inherited, and he determined to take a harder line than Elizabeth had. Meeting with representatives of the clergy at the Hampton Court Conference in 1604, James set the tone by declaring to the assembly that he had lived among Puritans in his youth and detested their ways. Warming to the subject he added, "I shall make them conform, or I will harry them out of the land, or else do worse."
        The "harrying" began forthwith. In 1604, Clyfton was among some three hundred ministers who were abruptly removed from their churches. Clyfton fled with his family to live with Brewster at the Scrooby manor house, an important stop along the Great North Road to Scotland whose history reach back at least to 1212, when records indicated that King John had stayed there. Although Henry VIII spent a night at the manor house in 1541, by 1605 the then-ancient house was a refuge for persecuted religious separatists, not English royalty.
        Some eight miles to the southeast, the unincorporated (and thus largely unmonitored) town of Gainsborough in neighboring Lincolnshire was also attracting religious dissenters. The magnificent Old Hall in Gainsborough, one of the largest and best-preserved manor houses in Britain, received Richard III in 1483. Henry VIII held court and banqueted for four days in the massive great hall of the manor on his journey north to York in 1541, and John Wesley preached there to a "rude, wild multitude" in 1759. Today, the Gainsborough manor house is one of the few Pilgrim-related sites that is open to the public--more as a splendidly preserved medieval artifact than a testament to the Pilgrim Fathers (although the Pilgrim story is told in a condensed exhibition).
        The lord of the manor house in the first decade of the seventeenth century, William Hickman, was an ardent Protestant whose family had survived the religious persecutions of Henry VIII. Sympathetic to the separatists, Hickman offered his protection and hosted meetings at the manor that included Brewster, Bradford, and John Smith, the presiding pastor who would later lead some of the first separatists to Amsterdam.
      

Gainsborough Old Hall is one of the largest and best-preserved manor houses in Britain. The way station of kings, it also provided refuge to the Pilgrim separatists.

  
      By 1606 it was becoming dangerous to travel from Scrooby to Gainsborough and so the Scrooby Separatists, as the early Pilgrim movement is sometimes known, met secretly at Brewster's manor house. Led by the exiled Clyfton and the prominent separatist John Robinson, a parish minister from nearby Norfolk who assumed the role of teaching pastor, the separatists drew up a covenant, as Bradford recorded in his Plimouth Plantation account, "and as the Lord's free people . . . joined themselves into a church estate, in the fellowship of the gospel, to walk in all His ways made known . . . whatever it should cost them." The manor house where this historic compact was drawn up still stands.
        Scrooby itself is a clean and compact bedroom community of tile-roofed homes and pleasant gardens. St. Wilfrid's Church, Brewster's family church, also survives; its lofty stone spire is a focal point around which the small village seems organized. The house that once welcomed kings and sheltered homeless Pilgrims is now much reduced in size and, evidently, hospitality. No Trespassing signs greet pedestrians at the entrance of the property, and for those who stubbornly persist, trained attack dogs are on patrol to "harry" any stray visitor off the land. The only possible view of the manor house is from a parallel country lane, where a curious observer can scramble off the road and through some underbrush to see the home of William Brewster and way station of kings across the length of a cow pasture.
        Soon enough the danger came to their very doorstep. "They could not long continue in any peaceable condition," related Bradford in his history, "but were hunted and persecuted on every side, so as their former afflictions were but as flea-bitings in comparison of these which now came upon them. For some were taken and clapped up in prison, others had their houses beset and watched night and day, and hardly escaped their hands; and the most were fain to flee and leave their houses and habitations, and the means of their livelihood."
        In 1607 Brewster was ordered to appear in court to answer charges that he was "disobedient in matters of religion." Surmising the outcome, he went into hiding. The Scrooby Separatists thus began to think of ways to escape to Holland, where the Gainsborough assembly had just managed to flee.
        Emigration without a license was illegal. However, licenses were generally denied to Catholics and separatists, and the Pilgrims in any case were already wanted by the authorities. So they quietly began to dispose of their homes and property in preparation for flight from their native country.
        By September 1607 the group had secretly contracted with a ship captain to transport them from the coastal town of Boston to the port of Amsterdam. Carrying what few belongings they required, they traveled in small, inconspicuous groups toward the lofty lantern tower of the St. Botolph Church in Boston. Then, as now, the magnificent church tower, called the Stump, was visible from miles around the flat coastal region. Completed in 1450, St. Botolph is the largest parish church in England, named after the Anglo-Saxon missionary who is thought to have founded a monastery nearby in 654. Over the years, "Botolph's town" was shortened to "Boston." In 1630--ten years after the voyage of the Mayflower--Puritans from Boston would found a village on the Massachusetts coast that would come to overshadow its parent and namesake in both size and importance.
        Boston's market, an attraction in Lincolnshire for 450 years, is held twice weekly in the public square beneath the Stump. Across the canal that runs through town, a grand seventeenth-century windmill continues its timeless orbit, and a network of crooked old streets with irresistible names like Wormgate proffer a selection of old pubs, restaurants, and curiosity shops.

Flight and betrayal

eeting as arranged at Scotia Creek a mile south of Boston in the dead of night, the Pilgrims watched anxiously as the ship approached. "When he had them and their goods aboard," Bradford narrates, the captain "betrayed them, having beforehand complotted with the searchers and other officers so to do; who took them, and put them into open boats, and there rifled and ransacked them, searching them to their shirts for money, yea even the women further than became modesty; and then carried them back into the town, and made them a spectacle and wonder to the multitude, which came flocking on all sides to behold them."
        This unflattering episode has been preserved in Boston's fifteenth-century Guildhall. Constructed in 1390, the handsome brick building originally accommodated Boston's guild and later housed the town hall, court, and prison. The Guildhall is closed to the public until 2005, when a new virtual-reality simulation in the guildhall museum will open, re-creating life in Boston in the year 1536. Surviving undisturbed in the basement are the medieval kitchen and the very prison cells that confined the hounded Pilgrim leadership. What were the thoughts of the devout men held in these cramped cells for the infraction of worshiping according to their conscience? Just outside the jail a circular wooden stairway ascends through a trapdoor into the middle of a small courtroom where the humiliated fugitives were arraigned. This is not history improved and corrected by scholars using the best available evidence but history largely undisturbed--and all the more vivid and compelling.
        (Interestingly, the inhospitable treatment of those revered forefathers of the United States has been ameliorated for visiting Americans in the nearby Fydell House, an eighteenth-century private residence. When the house fell into disrepair, town fathers approached the Massachusetts-born U.S. ambassador, Joseph Kennedy, to appeal to a Boston, Massachusetts, relief society for funding for improvements. The funds were approved, on condition that a room be set aside to receive and welcome visiting Americans. And so for any American pilgrims who arrive in old Boston, make your way to the American Room at the Fydell House to take your rest.)

The cells that held the Pilgrim leadership still survive in the basement of Boston's fourteenth-century Guildhall.

        The Pilgrims were eventually released, in part from pressure by sympathizers in strongly Puritan Boston, and survived the winter of 1607 as refugees in their own homeland. In the spring of 1608 they again secretly arranged for the crossing to Holland, this time from an obscure shoreline called Immingham some fifty miles to the north. To escape detection, the men went overland while the women and children traveled by barge with all the belongings. When the ship arrived at the appointed meeting place, the men on shore quickly ferried to the ship and began boarding. But the sudden appearance of armed English soldiers on foot and horseback caused the captain to weigh anchor and sail out of reach of the pursuing authorities.
        With husbands, wives, sons, and daughters now separated, the ship began a frightful fourteen-day nightmare upon the storm-tossed ocean. John Robinson, Brewster, and Clyfton were left behind on the barge with the women and children, while the teenaged Bradford found safe harbor at last in Amsterdam.
        "Being thus constrained to leave their native soil and country, their lands and livings, and all their friends and familiar acquaintances, it was much, and thought marvelous by man," Bradford reflects. He further relates a poignant description of the hardships he and those left behind faced.
        But to go into a country they knew not (but by hearsay), where they must learn a new language, and get their livings they knew not how, it being a dear place, and subject to the miseries of war, it was by many thought an adventure almost desperate, a case intolerable, and a misery worse than death. Especially seeing they were not acquainted with trades nor traffic, (by which that country doth subsist,) but had only been used to a plain country life, and the innocent trade of husbandry. But these things did not dismay them (though they did sometimes trouble them) for their desires were set on the ways of God, and to enjoy his ordinances; but they rested on his providence, and knew whom they had believed.
        After endless courts of inquiry, with women and children caught in tedious litigation and a portion of the separatists safely in Holland, the magistrates finally abandoned the prosecutions and, according to Bradford, "were glad to be rid of them in the end upon any terms, for all were weary and tired of them."
        By August 1608, the Scooby Separatists "met together again according to their desires, with no small rejoicing." And so concluded the promise of James I to harass such dissenters from the land. For the Pilgrims--the fathers, mothers, and children--this was but the beginning of tribulations that would bring them ultimately to a distant coast, a fragile seed blown across a perilous ocean to a threatening wilderness. The seed would survive and germinate, nourished by the rich earth of the American continent and by faith in the providence and protection of God. From this bitter beginning would grow ultimately a great and stately nation that would enshrine justice in its Constitution and open its shores to the poor and persecuted of the world.

Additional Reading