by Nick Bunker
To the east, a wide bend of the river created an expanse of grassland more than a mile across, known as the Upper Ings and the Out Ings. Drained by a lattice of ditches, the Ings were divided into long rectangles of meadow and pasture, with their short side along the water, and here the cattle fed. This was valuable land, but the secret of Sturton’s success lay in a combination of assets, and soil of many different kinds. To the west, the ground begins to rise gently, up a long shallow gradient, toward the top of an escarpment that runs north and south, parallel with the Trent. High, dry, and easily worked for grain, with copses of oak on its summit, the escarpment has been known as the North Clay since the early Middle Ages. Its color and its characteristics added a second defining feature of the Pilgrim country, and another source of wealth.
After harvest, the empty fields of the North Clay resemble vast rashers of raw bacon hung out to smoke on the hillside. Beneath the earth is a soft sedimentary rock, and it frays at the surface into a red soil, which crumbles easily and does not impede the plow. The land drains freely into streams that fall down to the Trent and give the villages fresh water. So distinctive is the land that medieval writers simply called its inhabitants “Men of the Clay.” Likewise, the soil, its pigment, and the crops upon it determined the name of the nearest market town to the west, Retford, and the names of villages nearby: North and South Wheatley, Clayworth, and Clarborough.13
Sturton lay astride the clay ridge and the river meadows, encompassing cornfields, orchards, woods, and grass, with ample manure from its livestock. If a farmer could assemble a mixed portfolio, combining each type of land, he could do very well: and so it was with the Whites. When Katherine Carver’s father died, in about 1595, he owned nearly 160 acres of land in and around the village. He owned two houses, six cottages, two gardens, and two orchards, and he rented more land across the river. On the slopes of the escarpment, Alexander White had arable land, while out on the Ings he owned pastures and meadows. The hay alone would have brought in roughly twenty-two pounds a year, about three times the earnings of a field laborer. If he sold all his land on the open market, it would fetch close to six hundred pounds, enough to place him within the top 1 or 2 percent of England’s population.
And yet even the Whites were insecure. Holdings as large as theirs could provide a good standard of living, but they could not guarantee its maintenance from father to children. At his death, Alexander White made over the bulk of his estate to his widow and eldest son, Charles, but there remained three younger sons and four unmarried daughters. To the daughters, including the future Bridget Robinson and Katherine Carver, he gave sixty-seven pounds each, and at least two of them found solid husbands. But the younger sons each received a meager yearly income of two pounds, intended to be paid from the profits of the White properties. The problem was typical. As the birthrate ran ahead of a family’s means to support its offspring, the younger sons and the unmarried daughters had to seek alternative routes to security and status.
One of the younger sons, Roger White, became a Separatist and went to Leiden, exchanging letters with William Bradford in America. Meanwhile, those Whites who stayed at home became industrial pioneers in coal mining. Forty miles away across the county they rented another estate, at Beauvale Priory near Nottingham. By the 1590s, this was already an active coalfield, and so the Whites went into the trade. Leases survive, showing that Katherine Carver’s nephew Charles White Jr. rented the rights to sink mines at Beauvale, using horse-driven engines to pump water from the shafts.
This was the social stratum from which the leaders of the Plymouth Colony came. They were the nouveaux riches of rural England. If they had luck and aptitude, they might prosper in villages where rising profits flowed from the land, but there were limits to advancement. The cruel statistics of fecundity and early death stacked the odds against them. At the same time, these conditions planted seeds of incentive to work and better themselves, by way of coal or by way of exile. If William Bradford had stayed in England, it is hard to believe that he would have floundered in passive idleness. Like his teacher John Robinson, he might well have married a White, and ended his days as another coal-mining entrepreneur.14
THE IDLE WETLANDS
At its northern extremity, the North Clay ends in a conical hill, called Gringley Beacon. From its top, a shepherd gazing down would see to the west another floodplain. Through it flowed the Idle, the second river of the Quadrilateral. From the steep side of the escarpment, the clay fields overlook the Idle valley, a low-lying basin that extends like a concave green dinner plate as far as Scrooby, three miles away. This was William Brewster’s immediate neighborhood. Like the land by the Trent, it was pasture and meadow, but damper still. And again this had its implications for the Pilgrims in the coastal wetlands of New England.
In winter, heavy rain often floods the valley. Almost overnight, the river can turn from a stream fifteen yards across to a chain of ponds ten times that width, with wild swans feeding among the drowned crops. In Brewster’s day, before modern drainage, this happened all the more often. The paths across the valley were merely narrow filaments of gravel lined by scrubby trees, where men and women gathered willow wands for basket weaving. Many traces survive in the archives of the constant struggle to maintain the fields and tracks, and to keep them dry. In 1648, after winning the Civil War, Parliament sent commissioners to survey Scrooby Manor, confiscated because it was Church property. The manor house had mostly been demolished. What was left was “built of Bricke & Timber & much ruinated,” and nearby they found “parcells of meadow … wasted by the overflowing of waters.”
In William Brewster’s day, the leading resident of Scrooby was a man called Richard Torre. He acted as business manager for the area’s richest magnate, Gilbert, seventh Earl of Shrewsbury, arranging shipments of lead from the earl’s mines to Europe. When Torre died in 1602, he left twenty shillings to his neighbors, “towardes the mendinge of the hye waye into the Inges,” enough to pay six laborers for a week’s work on the path that led out of Scrooby to the east. Two years before that another man, from Mattersey, the next village, fell afoul of the archdeacon’s court for cleaning out a ditch on the Sabbath. In 1606, a woman from Clayworth was charged with failing to attend her parish church. Her excuse, accepted by the judge, was that in winter the way was “so dangerous that without dainger to her health she cannot resort.”15
Even now, the green wetness of the plain has sounds, shades, and textures that, at times and fleetingly, invite us back into the world Brewster inhabited. Come on foot to Scrooby from the east, or wander to the south, and you will see on the horizon a chain of seven medieval church towers. They encircle the lowest part of the valley. Each tower pokes up like the small gray horn of a cow, and they mark dry spots on the rim of the wetland where islands of the same gravel supplied sites for building.
One of these church towers is at Scrooby, and another is at Austerfield. Between them the river Idle bends in a wide U, curving around to the northeast toward its junction with the Trent, through what are known as “Carrs,” another dialect word. Created by the last glaciation, twenty thousand years ago, the Carrlands mark the northern frontier of the Quadrilateral, but this is a damp, blurred frontier without a rigid frame. The eye is always drawn away into the far distance, over alternating bands of dark and light green as far as a man or woman can see.
At their farthest extremity, the glaciers ended about fifteen miles south of the city of York. They left only a ridge of moraine to make a low barrier across the country from west to east. In front of the glacier, meltwaters collected in a huge lake. When it emptied, and formed the estuary of the river Humber, the lake bed filled with peat from rotting vegetation, forming wetlands known as the Humberhead Levels. Rivers flowing out of the glacier, off the hills, and across the lake bed created a braided pattern of peat and sand, leaving the low humps and levees where the churches and causeways can now be found.
How did the wet, flat geography and the vast skies
affect the minds of those who lived there? It is impossible to say for sure, especially now that drains and pumps have tamed the Levels, but some elements of their mental life can be reliably imagined. Because to the east the Levels melted into an estuary, the sea and what lay beyond it were far closer than they appear on a modern map. Between Scrooby and Austerfield, there were wharves on the Idle at Bawtry, another river port where packhorse routes converged, carrying wool and minerals for shipment down the rivers to the ocean. Because of the direction in which the valleys bend and the waters flow, those who lived nearby looked eastward toward the North Sea, and the region’s chief seaport, at Hull. The Idle basin was a place with a wide perspective, facing outward. It was not an enclosed, landlocked zone of introversion.
For centuries, in fact, the Levels had a reputation for nonconformity, as a place where hunting and gathering vied in importance with stationary farming as a way of life. Austerfield lay on the edge of Hatfield Chase, a royal hunting forest, often submerged, where in the reign of King James red deer in their hundreds swam in flight from men pursuing them in flat-bottomed boats. Where islands rose above the water, the people herded cattle or foraged in the wetlands for shellfish and eels. On account of their independence, and their occasional lawlessness, they came to be known as borderers, stilt walkers, or free dwellers. By 1830, engineers had already drained most of the Chase and the Carrs, but at the time of the American Civil War a newspaper in Doncaster carried a series of articles that recorded the details of this older way of life. The writer interviewed men and women whose memories stretched back into an environment that the Pilgrims would have recognized.
Their England was not yet a domesticated place, but a landscape with wild features, and these he recorded. Otters four feet long lived on the Idle, close to Scrooby, where men hunted them with spears. They stalked the otters along the riverbed, using a long pole to vault across deep streams. Stag hunting continued on the Carrlands until as late as 1762. Beds of rushes sheltered pike and twenty species of wild duck, and the Carrlands supplied a rich habitat for tens of thousands of wildfowl taking refuge from stormy weather out on the North Sea. Trout swam in a brook that flowed past Brewster’s back gate. In the summer, he would hear the high-pitched whistle of the osprey, a migrant from Africa, swooping down with black-and-white wings six feet wide to take fish from the waterways. The last osprey in the valley was shot near Austerfield in 1856. Even within living memory, after World War II, the clumps of sedge at Scrooby between the trout stream and the railway were thick with the nests of snipe.
Historians often write about the early English settlers of America in a cerebral way, or with a sentimentality that the Pilgrims would have found very odd. In fact, they came from the old, feral England, as it was before the railways, and as it still exists in vestiges today. The Mayflower carried two dogs to America, not as pets, but as hunting dogs: a spaniel for retrieving game birds and a mastiff for running down deer. When Bradford spoke of “the innumerable store of fowl, and excellent good” that the Pilgrims found at New Plymouth, he knew what he meant. Scrooby had a village poacher, prosecuted three times in 1605 and 1607 for shooting hares and geese and killing swans without a license.16
When the Pilgrims explored Cape Cod and the forest behind New Plymouth, they were excited young men, wandering freely in a game-filled land that echoed on a vastly larger scale the semi-wilderness they knew in the land of their birth. In America, herons rise blue and serene from the marshes at Wellfleet, and they have their transatlantic cousins in the herons that alight on the Idle.
Southern New England was also formed by glaciers, and their aftermath created a similar pattern of wetlands, low hills of sand, and wide shallow estuaries, ideal for migrating birds like the wetlands between Scrooby and the sea. When settlers crossed the Atlantic, they followed paths taken long before by vagrant sandpipers. Sometimes the birds fly back and forth from America and feed in England, probing for mussels on the mudflats along the Humber.17
THE FOREST AND THE OPEN FIELDS
Not all the land was wet. Three miles west of Austerfield, there grew until 1820 an ancient oak called “the jutting tree,” and by tradition it marked the northern end of the royal hunting forest of Sherwood. The legal boundary of the forest lay farther south, but the tree made perfect sense as a marker. Sherwood was a forest, used for hunting, because the rock beneath it is acidic sandstone, fit only for woodlands of oak and birch. The rock began close to the jutting tree, extending past Scrooby and south in a long strip as far as the city of Nottingham, where the castle sits on its most conspicuous yellow outcrop. Because the sandstone was hard and dry, the Great North Road ran along its eastern margin, above the marshes, but it also created heaths and wastelands close to Austerfield. They formed a no-man’s-land between north and south, long viewed with official distrust.
If the legends of Robin Hood have any basis, it derives from outlaws in this part of medieval England. Today the name Raker’s Field on the map marks a spot, behind Harworth Colliery, that was licensed by Richard the Lionheart as a tournament ground. Bands of men from Yorkshire met their rivals from the south in legalized fights that had to be banned when they became deadly brawls. In Bradford’s day, highwaymen plied their trade on the Great North Road, pillaging travelers until King James ordered a purge of innkeepers who harbored them. For six weeks in 1605, judges sat at Doncaster and Sheffield to put on trial and hang the felons whom they found.18
So, long before he reached New England, the young Pilgrim had already lived on a frontier of a sort, in a village where life was arduous and rewards were small. Austerfield bore little resemblance to the fat cattle country along the Trent. Again, the village has left behind it a footprint of early documents, while the terrain preserves memories of its own that open a window into the world he knew.
Near the church where William Bradford was baptized, a narrow track called Low Common Lane veers away from the road. Follow the lane until it dwindles into a path, and three things catch the eye. The first is the hedge that lies along its eastern side. It contains a host of species—hawthorn, holly, wild blackberries, and more—and then a stand of oak and beech. Hedgerows like this take centuries to establish, and so in Low Common Lane we encounter remnants of the Jacobean landscape. The second signature of the land is bracken, spilling across the path’s western side. The third is a dead rabbit, slung over a fence by its throat.
A rabbit killed with a shotgun can sum up a page of a history book. With about 130 residents, divided among some twenty-five households, Austerfield was one of the tiniest townships in the Quadrilateral. It had so few people, so much bracken, and so many rabbits because so much of its soil was sand. Ten minutes’ walk from the church, in an arc around the village, quarrymen have dug huge pits, and they reveal that the topsoil is thin. Exposed beneath it lies sand the color of burnished copper, pockmarked by rabbit holes. Not all the land was quite as difficult as this—to the east and south, the soil is darker, near the Idle—but most of the parish offered little to the farmer.
The northern half of Austerfield consisted of thickets and rough pasture known as High Common. Here the villagers cut hay and gathered firewood, while their pigs rooted for acorns. To the south, between High Common and the church, lay the Ridding Field, the site of the sand pits, where William Bradford’s uncle Robert rented seven acres. Again, “ridding” was a dialect word meaning a clearing hacked from a forest, and again the soil was sparse. It was unsuitable for wheat. So they grew rye and peas to make the best of the sandy conditions, but next to the Great North Road the ground was fit only for trees. A strip of woodland lay along the highway.
On a modern map it still bears the name the King’s Wood, because Austerfield was a royal manor, and the Bradfords were tenants of the sovereign. The Crown occasionally surveyed its estates, and sometimes the results survive, as they do at Austerfield. Because of this, and because before they died the Bradfords made detailed wills, the family’s changing fortunes can be plotted over time.
They did well during the sixteenth century, but Austerfield did not offer much by way of opportunity. Under King James, the Bradfords faced the likelihood that life would become harder still. Against this background, the young William left and went into religious exile.
William Bradford had a great-great-grandfather called Peter. During the reign of Henry VIII, he lived in the wet lowlands to the north of Doncaster. There he grew barley and raised sheep. A good Catholic, at his death he bequeathed his soul to “god Almightie and to owre ladie saint Marie and all tholie company of heaven.” His family multiplied and fanned out across the countryside. They accumulated horses and more sheep and a broken line of land to the south of Doncaster, as outright owners or as holders of a lease. In doing so, they were typical of large tenant farmers in the first half of the reign of Queen Elizabeth. Because leases were long, with rents set many years before, a tenant selling his produce for rising prices could prosper and acquire freehold property himself. At his death in 1578 the Pilgrim’s great-uncle Robert Bradford gave his daughter forty pounds and an income of six pounds per annum, after leaving the bulk of his assets to his widow.
At some time before 1560, the Pilgrim’s grandfather, also called William, moved to Austerfield, where he joined a small, intermarried elite of yeoman farmers, ranking above the landless field hands. Grandfather William had two sons, another William and another Robert. In 1584, William married Alice Hanson, also of Austerfield. Their first child was William Bradford the Mayflower passenger, baptized on March 19, 1590. When the boy was less than a year old, his father died, and two years later his mother, Alice Bradford, wedded an Austerfield man called Robert Briggs.
