Making Haste from Babylon

by Nick Bunker

  Hunter traced William Brewster’s father as a taxpayer at Scrooby during the reign of Elizabeth. By 1849, Hunter had become the deputy keeper of the Public Record Office in London, and there he also found the accounts of the Crown’s postmasters. These revealed the payments of the younger William Brewster’s salary. They ended in the autumn of 1607, immediately before he went into exile in the Netherlands. It also emerged, from the archbishop’s archives, that Brewster’s father was the archbishop’s bailiff. The Bradfords were easy to find, because the parish register of Austerfield survives. It lists the baptism of William.

  At that point the story seemed almost complete. A century ago, the loose ends were apparently tied up by two more clergymen, one an American and one a Briton. The American was a Congregational minister called Henry Martyn Dexter. A Yale man, he searched the archives again, and in York he examined the records of the prosecution of the Pilgrims. His book—The England and Holland of the Pilgrims, published in 1905—remains the best starting point for anybody studying their background.

  The British scholar was a Unitarian called Walter Burgess. In two books that appeared as long ago as 1911 and 1920, he unearthed new evidence about Robinson, and about another local Separatist called John Smyth. Burgess widened the field of inquiry, but not by much, since he took little interest in politics or in social history. After Burgess, British scholars added very little, for understandable reasons: no matter how much the Pilgrims may matter to Americans, by leaving England they made their exit from the historical stage of their homeland. And, since Hunter had a high reputation, and Dexter had written a very fat book, it was hard to imagine that they had overlooked anything significant. The exception, five decades ago, was a fourth clergyman, an Anglican called Canon Ronald Marchant, who wished to understand how the Church ran its affairs in the area.

  Marchant examined a rich but at that time a rarely visited archive, the papers left by the archdeacons of Nottingham. They presided over the Church courts that tried people accused of offenses such as adultery, blasphemy, or low-level witchcraft. The papers contain a host of anecdotes, about fornicating vicars, foulmouthed scolds, and men charged with playing football or spreading dung on a Sunday. Here we find scattered references to Puritans, shedding more light on the Pilgrims. Marchant reproduced them, but his research was limited, few have read his book, and he left the Scrooby myth intact.3

  Although Scrooby played its part, it was not the center of the movement. Nor were the Pilgrims a tiny, isolated congregation dwelling in a narrow little district about which nothing more can be said. Actually, the community of dissent extended across a much wider area. Its fulcrum lay in nearby towns that were far larger at the time. And when it came to leadership, the local Separatists looked to four men, rather than two. Brewster and Robinson worked with two partners and colleagues, John Smyth and Thomas Helwys. A clergyman, Smyth was a talented writer with a daring religious imagination. Helwys came from a local yeoman family that had risen to create within three generations a chain of estates across three counties and prospered in business in London.

  It was Thomas Helwys who led the flight of the Pilgrims to Holland in 1608. Because he did not reach America, because he fell out with Smyth, and because many records have been overlooked, history has almost forgotten him. Almost, but not entirely: in America, Baptist scholars rightly remember Helwys, and John Smyth, as pioneers of their form of worship. Often Americans think of the Mayflower as a northern event, something that took place above the Mason-Dixon Line and mattered mainly to people who later formed the blue side in the Civil War. In fact, southern and Chicago Baptists can trace their origins to the same tract of land by the Trent. This makes the region still more intriguing.

  Why did these things happen here, so far from London and in what looks like a backwater? Open and defiant separation from the Church of England was very rare indeed, and emigration was even less likely. Mostly, nonconformists found ways to stay within the Church by means of compromise or subterfuge. So why did Separatism take root around Scrooby, at a precise point in history, early in the reign of James I, at the moment when Shakespeare was writing Coriolanus?

  Of course, the Scrooby region was never really obscure at all, but these were very unusual events, and we have a great deal of explaining to do. The best place to start is with our feet placed firmly on the ground. For want of a better term, we might call the region the Pilgrim Quadrilateral.* It covers some ninety square miles. In 1603, it had a population of about fourteen thousand, divided among some thirty parishes.4 Its highest hill rises to three hundred feet, but most of the land is far lower than that, often only a few feet above sea level.

  The Quadrilateral has immense skies, thanks to the low horizon, and soft light, because of the reflection of the sun from lush grass and shallow water. It is a land of two rivers, the Trent and the Idle. In those days it was rich territory for cattlemen and hunters, coveted by rival noblemen and squires who vied for supremacy. Far from being a placid enclave, it bore a closer likeness to a troubled county in Faulkner’s Mississippi.

  Behind and beneath it all lay the necessities of the soil. As a great historian once put it, in early modern England agriculture was a vast mountain range, and in front of it other forms of activity were merely minor peaks. But rural productivity remained meager by the standards of a later age. Yielding far too little, each year the average acre gave rise to fewer than fourteen bushels of wheat, a fifth of the amount that farmers can grow on the best land in eastern England today. Fourteen bushels were only a bushel or two more than the yields medieval farmers had achieved, before the Black Death three hundred years earlier.

  By bringing more land into use, during the second half of the seventeenth century the English gradually made famine a thing of the past. But in Brewster’s day it remained a lingering threat as the kingdom’s population rose, from three million in 1560 to five million eight decades later. Poor harvests made the mid-1590s miserable years. Then another grain shortage sent prices soaring, at the very moment when the Pilgrims were on the verge of going into exile. This was not the reason they left, but it had implications that they could not evade: nobody could, in an England still so overwhelmingly agrarian.

  We can probably never entirely disentangle the mixed motives of the early settlers in New England. Their ambitions for betterment were religious, economic, and political at one and the same time. Separatists like the Pilgrims were men and women who wanted to improve themselves: that was the essence of what Robert Browne had said. It was their duty to create a more perfect form of society, disciplined and fraternal, like the early Christian world he saw in the New Testament. But what did this mean in practice, in the world as it actually was in a region such as the Quadrilateral? Religious ideals could never be pursued without thinking about material well-being as well.

  How could a human being be godly if he or she lived in a place that was so obviously not? In a sense, the problem was brutally simple, as it always is for emigrants: the risks of remaining at home began to outweigh the dangers of going somewhere else. The England in which they lived was starting to polarize between landowners and large tenant farmers, on the one hand, and a landless laboring class, on the other. As the gap widened, so the penalty for failure became more and more alarming.

  An enterprising yeoman might, by hard work and shrewd speculation, gradually assemble enough land to rank as a gentleman. Equally well, his family might sink down the scale, because of excessive debts, because a breadwinner died young, or because they simply had too many children. Because the land was still so unproductive, and because farm rents and the price of food rose far more rapidly than wages, the downward spiral might relegate them to degrading poverty. It has been estimated that between 1500 and 1620, the income of an English laborer fell by more than half in real terms. This created spiritual hazards, as well as the risk of destitution.5

  How could such a society fail to cause strife, conflict, and sin? And how could people be godly if they were poo
r, illiterate, and bullied by godless superiors? The social evils caused by poverty were all too obvious in the Quadrilateral, as we shall see. So too were the startling flaws of the men set above the population, in positions of authority.

  If we begin with things as they were, and not with the Scrooby myth, it will be easier to see why someone might wish to leave such a territory. The Mayflower story is the record of the extraordinary manner in which a group of people broke out of confining limits. Those boundaries were very specific, rooted in the landscape from which they came. The only way to grasp the meaning of the country is to walk across it patiently, from east to west, with an eye educated by what the archives contain.

  THE RIVER AND THE CLAY

  The river Trent defines the eastern edge of the Quadrilateral. Shakespeare called the Trent a “smug and silver” stream, and so it may sometimes appear, but it has a fluid drama of its own. From south to north, falling slowly in wide curves, from a Tudor ruin called Torksey Castle to the town of Gainsborough, the river drops only ten inches in each of the eight miles between the two. At this point, where it divides the counties of Nottingham and Lincoln, the current is slack, but the river is unstable.

  For millennia, its course has shifted back and forth over a plain two miles wide, creating bends a mile across and then chopping through them at the neck to form isolated lakes that dry out into boggy hollows. Although the Trent has thirty miles to go before it reaches its estuary, it is tidal as far as Torksey, with a foaming bore that charges up the river after a high tide in the North Sea. All this has made the river a very ambiguous resource. Being tidal, the Trent is rich with fish and fowl. In Brewster’s time, salmon swam in its waters alongside sixty breeding pairs of swans. But because it is tidal, and because the estuary into which it flows drains one-fifth of the surface area of England, the Trent has often flooded with disastrous effect.

  Elderly farmers recall how after the last great inundation, caused by melting snows after the harsh winter of 1947, the land became an elongated lake stretching fifteen miles north to the steel town of Scunthorpe. Even so, hazardous though the river can be, the same floods made the valley wealthy and sought after. They laid down deep beds of fertile alluvium, forming earth that clots after rain into heavy dark brown double cubes.6

  Before modern farming, the land was too dense and too wet to be plowed for corn. So in Brewster’s day the Trent valley was cow country. Here by the river they fattened livestock before the drive to Doncaster, the largest cattle market in the north, or the long journey on the hoof down to London.7 As early as 1560, a drover took sixty head from the Quadrilateral to the capital. Nine-tenths of the land by the river was given over to grass, either for grazing or as hay meadows, on land known then and now by a local dialect word, the “Ings.” Today a rim of dikes protects the Ings, but a painting from 1835 shows how they would have looked in the reign of Elizabeth. Trodden into mud at its edge, the Trent was a magnet for horses, red cows, fishermen, and guns, a coveted locale for watering cattle and for field sports.

  Thanks to the grass, the villages by the Trent were large and thriving.8 As towns grew, and their citizens ate more meat, the price of hay doubled in England in the twenty years before the Pilgrims went into exile. “Of all other grounds, none are as profitable as medow,” wrote the author of a surveyor’s manual, a book that Brewster took with him to Massachusetts. Rents along the riverbank were the highest in the region, but greed for meadow and pasture had its darker side. The archives show frequent disputes, sometimes fought in the courts and sometimes with fists and pitchforks. Villagers squabbled about their rights to graze cattle on the Ings, and members of the landed gentry argued about the terms of leases and bad debts.

  As we shall see, conflicts of this type, about land and status, played their part in the birth of the Pilgrim movement. Behind all this lay that same economic fact. A gap was widening between those who had land, either as owners or as large, secure tenant farmers, and those who were landless or lacked firm tenure. In the Quadrilateral, farm rents increased by perhaps a third in the ten years after 1594. This raised the stakes in all the conflicts of the region. Competition for land made the rich still wealthier, and made failure more devastating, giving each controversy about ideas an urgency it might otherwise have lacked.9

  If the Pilgrim movement had a center, it was not at Scrooby but here by the Trent. The largest incident of religious disobedience at the time occurred about ten miles from Scrooby, at Treswell, a Trent valley village. Here, in 1610, some twenty-seven residents refused to attend sermons given by a new vicar. They were fined a shilling each. The Treswell twenty-seven most likely drew their inspiration from preachers farther down the Trent, in two larger settlements on either side of the river, at Sturton and Gainsborough, at the northeastern corner of the Quadrilateral.

  The larger of the two was Gainsborough, where the early Baptist John Smyth organized his Separatist congregation. The area’s leading market town, with about seventeen hundred inhabitants, Gainsborough serves as a test tube where we can see Pilgrim origins come into crystalline form.

  Gainsborough stood on the right bank of the river, just across the county boundary in Lincolnshire. It owed its stature to its location. Although it lies inland, Gainsborough was a seaport too, at a time that saw a boom in coastal traffic. Gainsborough could handle vessels as large as eighty tons, dealing in coal, lead, and grain, and life in the town was dynamic. Because the parish register contains an unusually rich amount of detail, it can be seen in high relief. Starting at the moment when Separatism was at its height, in 1607, the parish clerk helpfully recorded the occupations of all three hundred men who died, married, or fathered newborn children during the next three years. Nearly a fifth of the men worked in trades reliant on cows: tanners, glovers, shoemakers, and no fewer than thirteen butchers. Twenty-three of the men listed were boatmen, fishermen, or shipwrights, and there were eleven tailors and six blacksmiths.

  Later, an opponent mocked John Smyth because he was “made minister by Tradesmen, and called himself the Pastour of the Church at Gainsborough,” and in this there was more than a grain of truth. Gainsborough was a commercial town of self-employed craftsmen and shopkeepers, based on the cattle trade but open to the outside world, by sea, by river, and up and down the Great North Road.10

  For this it paid a high price. In each of six epidemic years between 1587 and 1610, the grave diggers of Gainsborough consigned seventy people to the ground, compared with about twenty-five in a normal year. As a result, the average death rate was far worse than the norm for England at the time. Low-lying market towns in wetlands close to highways or to rivers suffered severely from infectious disease, imported from outside and fed by poor sanitation, or transmitted by mosquitoes: a form of malaria was common. William Brewster’s mother came from Doncaster, situated on the Great North Road and next to a marsh, and in 1583 a pestilence killed a quarter of its inhabitants. In Gainsborough, the other side of the coin was an even higher birthrate, far outstripping deaths. The town’s population grew by about fifteen surviving infants each year. Even this was a cause for concern, because so many of the births were illegitimate.

  From the number of entries marked “base” in the register, it seems that the people of Gainsborough copulated out of wedlock with twice the gusto of the average English town, leaving double the usual number of bastards. In August 1607, the local archdeacon summoned the church wardens to report offenders. Of the thirty-one people named, the seven accused of some form of religious dissent were outnumbered by the eight accused of premarital sex or adultery, the four drunkards, and the eleven men charged with plowing or hay making on Sunday. Most wicked of all was Janet Rogers, arraigned “for suspition of keeping a bawdie-house & herself being ye queane.” Behind this lay a national scandal. Rates of illegitimacy soared in England under Queen Elizabeth, to reach a peak in about 1600 before dropping away after about 1615. As a place of transit, Gainsborough offered more temptations than most.11

 
It was an ungodly community in which, paradoxically, a new religious movement was all the more likely to gain ground. Moral danger, the random but ever-present threat of sudden death, the entry of new ideas by way of contacts with the outside world, the hope of advancement, and the fear of squalor: these were all features of a town like Gainsborough. A man or woman was as likely to embrace an evangelical vocation here as he or she might have been in an urban ghetto in the twentieth century. The reasons might be the same: the yearning to carve out a space for respectability, and to gather allies against sin and the devil.

  The same was true of Sturton, across the river in Nottinghamshire. It was a smaller place, but even so it was the largest village in the Quadrilateral, with about 650 residents. John Robinson was born here, John Smyth taught at the village school in 1602, and Sturton gave birth to the Mayflower passenger Katherine Carver, who married the first governor of New Plymouth. As we shall see, it was a troubled, violent parish, where the vicar brawled in the main street and armed men ran off each other’s livestock, but by the standards of the time it was prosperous. Again this helps explain why it became another center for religious enthusiasm. Prosperity was insecure, and those who achieved it could not assume that it would continue indefinitely.*

  Visit Sturton today, and the signs of past affluence are unmistakable, in the shape of its medieval church. Unusually grand, it has a tower so tall that it can be seen from the castle battlements far away at Lincoln. In 1593, the village had fifteen men wealthy enough to pay the subsidy, the principal tax levied by the Crown and Parliament. Among them were John Robinson’s father, also called John, and his father-in-law, Alexander White. Robinson married Alexander’s daughter Bridget White, taking her with him into exile in Leiden, and Bridget’s sister Katherine became in due course the Mayflower’s Mrs. Carver. Sturton had more taxpayers than any other village in the Quadrilateral. It was and remains a large parish, of more than four thousand acres, with an excellent situation.12