Making Haste from Babylon

by Nick Bunker

  In 1599, Austerfield had only four villagers affluent enough to pay the taxes voted by Parliament, and three of these were William Bradford’s grandfather, uncle, and stepfather: John Hanson, Robert Bradford, and Robert Briggs. When more deaths struck the family, the boy was passed from one man to another. Alice died in 1597, and so young William entered the care of John Hanson, Austerfield’s wealthiest tenant. When in turn Hanson died in 1602, the twelve-year-old Pilgrim went to live with his uncle Robert.19

  What effect did the chain of bereavements have on the boy? We have no idea what emotional damage might have occurred, if any, but we do know that he stood to inherit his father’s property, such as it was, making him independent at twenty-one. We can also locate the Bradfords precisely in the social scale of their time.

  Like most of the Crown’s land, Austerfield had been neglected, its rents packaged up and sold off on derisory terms on a long lease to a remote absentee. In 1608, in a vain effort to restore the solvency of James I, the lord treasurer commissioned a new survey of royal manors, to see what income they would yield if they were managed commercially. Along with the will of William’s uncle Robert—he died in 1609—the document tells us what kind of people the Bradfords were. Their upward mobility had apparently ceased.

  On the royal manor, Robert Bradford owned a house and a little under eleven acres of plow land and meadow, and he rented another twenty-three acres. A holding of this size made him no more than a minor yeoman: independent, making perhaps fifteen pounds a year, twice as much as a laborer, but without a safety cushion against disaster in the event of a string of poor harvests or a bout of cattle plague. At his death, Robert Bradford had two maidservants—to one he left a cow called Daisy, and to the other a horse—and he owned a team of oxen. Besides that, and his tenancies, he had very little.

  At Austerfield, he enjoyed the status of a village elder, but only because this was such a small place, and because he was lucky enough to find a careless landlord in the shape of the Crown. The survey showed that Bradford paid less than nine shillings in rent, while he should have been paying forty. His kinfolk, the Hansons, had the same good fortune. For their seventeen acres they paid less than six shillings, about a seventh of the rent the surveyor thought was a fair amount. This situation clearly held risks of its own, if the Crown tried to push the rents up as high as they would go when the tenancies fell due for renewal.

  Small yeoman farmers like the Bradfords had little status, and far less security than the Whites of Sturton. Uncle Robert left behind him an eighteen-year-old son and three teenage daughters, cousins of the future Pilgrim. An estate of his size would not support a dowry. All three Bradford daughters died unmarried, and in the conditions of the time they would have had to work as domestic servants. Robert Bradford’s will said that his children should receive “tuition” from neighbors, but “tutor” could mean a guardian or an employer, rather than implying any element of education.

  Perhaps all this explains why, when the young William Bradford became an ardent Puritan, he found his family less than sympathetic. Nearly a century later, the Massachusetts historian Cotton Mather wrote a short biography of the Pilgrim, and despite its brevity it contains details that carry us back into the harsh realities of rural life. Mather says that Bradford encountered the “wrath of his uncles … [and] the scoff of his neighbours.” According to Mather, after an illness at about the age of twelve William Bradford began to read the Scriptures, and then he came under the influence of a local Puritan clergyman, Richard Clifton. It is easy to see why this upset his family. As an only child, with what Mather calls a “comfortable inheritance,” the young William should have been helping his kin, perhaps by marrying a cousin. This was all the more necessary if the rents they paid were about to shoot up.20

  That was the way things were in the Jacobean countryside, just as they would have been in County Clare in 1870, or Calabria in 1900, or as they are on the plains of northern India today. And yet in another sense Austerfield was very distinctively English, in a way that shaped the attitudes of the people who lived there. It was what historians call an “open field” village, like Scrooby and Sturton. For perhaps five centuries or more, men and women had farmed in the same way, according to the medieval field system of the English Midlands. This too had its implications for William Bradford.

  In an open-field village, the farmers divided the land for grain into many hundreds or even thousands of strips. Each strip occupied about an acre. They were arrayed asymmetrically across the land so that the furrows followed the natural slope. That way, rainwater drained by itself across the contours, emptying into ditches at the field edge. In each village the strips were grouped into three or four great open fields, sometimes a mile wide, with no fences or hedges within them, spaces entirely different from the uniform rectangles that long ago replaced them.

  At Scrooby, the open fields covered the dry and rising ground to the west of the Great North Road, with woad for blue dye grown nearer to the village. Austerfield had three open fields—the Ridding Field, the West Field, and the Low Field—arranged in a ring around the parish church. Robert Bradford rented six or seven acres in each one, so that his strip holdings lay as much as a mile apart. They were scattered among those of his neighbors, as the system decreed, so that each man had a share of good or bad ground.

  Open field farming was not some kind of communism. All the villagers were tenants of a landlord. At Austerfield and Scrooby the farmers were commercial, buying and selling cattle, hiring extra grazing land for cash when they needed it, and sometimes subletting cottages to one another. Pragmatically, the open field system survived not as a form of socialism but because it saved time on fencing and ditching, the bane of an English farmer’s life, in a rain-soaked country that relied on livestock for fertilizer and protein.21

  Certainly, they managed the land in a communal way, but again this was simply pragmatic. Out of experience, they planned the farming year jointly, with everyone plowing, planting, weeding, and harvesting at the same time. They moved their cattle only when necessary, at fixed dates. By doing so, the village made the most of its labor, keeping fences to a minimum, ensuring that everybody had a stake in the yearly outcome. All the tenants had rights to scavenge and to feed their beasts on the meager soil that formed the commons of Austerfield, but this too was subject to rules. No one could keep more than an allotted number of sheep or swine. To enforce the regulations, they had a manorial court. With a jury of tenants, it levied fines on those who tried to dodge the system by putting a few more animals on the common or by cutting more than a fair quantity of wood.22

  How this system affected the way people thought and felt we cannot know for sure, but the mental world of William Bradford had characteristics that we can realistically guess. The first was the pervasive anxiety of a system under threat. During his teenage years, a few landlords and large tenant farmers were just starting to enclose the open fields in villages within twenty miles of Austerfield. They cast greedy eyes on such spaces as High Common, with a view to a new, more risky kind of system, where enterprising men did as they pleased with their land. Fair or unfair, this was likely to bring unsettling change.

  Austerfield was small but not isolated, since London already exerted a magnetic force, as men from the region went there and back to do business. Aside from the Crown, the largest landowners were the Frobishers, including the Arctic explorer Martin Frobisher. With his plunder from raiding the Spanish in the West Indies, he bought the manor next to Austerfield, and in Bradford’s boyhood the Frobishers owned half the houses in the village.23 Even so, places such as this were inherently conservative, because of disciplines of an economic kind. The open field system imposed rules, and it required team spirit. As it came under threat, relationships were bound to become more fraught.

  Families would almost inevitably persecute those of their members who showed signs of being different. If a landowning youth like William Bradford displayed too much independence, bu
cking the constraints of kinfolk and community, and especially if he spoke the language of piety, the conflict was likely to be all the more unpleasant. At Austerfield the surviving records suggest that people lived on rye bread, pea soup, weak beer, and in wintertime a little pork and bacon. Being told by a Puritan that they were ungodly was doubtless more than they could tolerate.

  William Bradford grew to manhood in circumstances such as these, but economics and rural envy were not the only forces that formed his mind. From Austerfield he would have learned other things too. Life among the open fields gave rise to a precise awareness of nature, the habit that the Pilgrim took with him to Cape Cod.

  Men and women of his period knew the trees, flowers, animals, and wild birds of the countryside in intricate detail. They had a huge, largely forgotten vocabulary of words for each and every species. Prescientific, it survives best of all in Shakespeare, in the scenes portraying the madness of King Lear and in the names of the wildflowers gathered for a garland by the drowned Ophelia: “crow-flowers, nettles, daisies and long purples.” This was not imaginary: because plows drawn by oxen required a large turning circle, and because the wetter parts of the soil were left untilled, the open fields were fringed and hemmed by ribbons of color, thickest where the livestock left their droppings. And beneath the corn, the clay required its own ample lexicon.

  Within the open fields each patch of soil possessed a label according to its dampness, its dryness, its use, or the landmarks that gave it an identity. A little of this lingers on in early surveyors’ plans of Sturton, from the eighteenth century, and in the list of Alexander White’s real estate. Within the Low Field and the West Field at Sturton were “House Furlong,” “Robinet Furlong,” “Four Sandhills Furlong,” and “Nether Bolgate.” In open fields with no fences between the strips, men and women needed such a plethora of terms to define the spaces they occupied. The sought-after grazing land was parceled out precisely too, in small lots, each with its own designation.24 All of this went with Bradford to America, and again it helps explain the care with which he described the New World.

  There was also something Shakespearean about the narratives that unfolded in the Pilgrim Quadrilateral. The years that saw the local birth of Separatism were a period of abrasive conflict. This was especially true of Sturton, the home of John Robinson and Katherine Carver. People fought for grazing land, for the tithe revenues of the Church, or for the rights to levy tolls on river traffic or goods sold on market day. They competed for precedence, quarreling over symbols of rank within a local hierarchy. In the stories the village left behind, again we can begin to see why people might wish to emigrate, and how little Christianity in the neighborhood resembled a Puritan ideal.

  The parish church at Sturton le Steeple, Nottinghamshire, seen from Freeman’s Lane to the northwest. According to local tradition, the Robinsons lived close by, near the left-hand edge of the picture. In the foreground is land known in 1600 as Wybern Dale, where Alexander White, father of the Mayflower passenger Katherine Carver, owned a close, a fenced area probably used for livestock. The picture has been edited to remove electric power lines. (Photography: Nick Bunker)

  THE BREAKING OF THE PEWS

  Two muddy roads met in Sturton by the parish church. One was the old Roman highway from Lincoln, which crossed the Trent by way of a ferry before heading over the North Clay to Bawtry. The second road ran north to south, parallel with the river. On May 16, 1594, the vicar of Sturton, John Quippe, was leaving the church when he saw by the crossroads a gentleman called George Lassells. Aged thirty-three, Lassells was lord of the manor of Sturton. Lassells carried a pistol, while Quippe had only his walking stick.

  There are two versions of what happened next. The first, and the more likely, says that George Lassells flew into a rage. He felled the vicar and rained blows down on him. Struggling to escape, Quippe, a man in his mid-fifties, asked what might have provoked the attack. Lassells told Quippe that he was “a vyle priest” and accused him of reporting the Lassells household to the authorities for failing to come to church. The story Lassells told was different—he accused the vicar of assaulting him—but a fracas there clearly was, and it was neither the first nor the last. George Lassells was the eldest of at least eight brothers. They fought their neighbors, and they fought each other, leaving behind them a long chronicle of violence.25

  A word must be said about the sources. The details of the brawl come from the records of the Court of Star Chamber, where Lassells sued Quippe. On at least thirteen occasions George Lassells, his father, or his siblings were parties to litigation in that court, which heard case after case filled with stories of mayhem. Historians must be skeptical about some of these anecdotes of bloodshed, because lawsuits in the Star Chamber were apparently used as a form of intimidation. Complaints filed with the court were not given under oath, and so false accusations were often made as a way to smear an enemy. However, at Sturton we have other sources, and they corroborate the picture of a troubled village. George Lassells was a bully, and a predatory lecher. Such were the local rulers of the Pilgrim country.26

  A stream of incidents in 1605 convey a picture of life as they lived it. On January 12, a laborer from Sturton called Henry Arnold appeared before the local JPs, charged with a felony. He confessed, so they sentenced him to be whipped by the parish constable “till his body be bloody.” The constable failed to carry out the punishment, and so in April the justices put the constable in the stocks, and they ordered a flogging for two Sturton men accused of theft. Meanwhile, an unholy scene had occurred in Sturton Churchyard involving George Lassells—or rather, Sir George, as we must call him, because King James had given him a knighthood.

  One Sunday in Lent, after evening prayer, the villagers found Sir George arguing with a manservant called Biggs. “Young man, I will teach you to behave,” said Lassells. “I am too olde to be taught by you,” Biggs replied. “I never offered 40 shillings and a gowns cloth to one of my maids to occupie her as you did.” Among those present was John Robinson, the preacher’s father. Three lawsuits for libel followed, and produced a stream of testimony on oath, from Robinson and others. It appears that Sir George had approached a serving girl one morning, as she made the beds. In exchange for sex, he offered her money, a bodice made of taffeta, and enough material to make a pair of sleeves to go with it. The story was all the more credible because Sir George had a history of mistreating his employees. In 1604, the JPs at Retford had summoned Sir George to appear before them for failing to pay his servants their wages. Lassells was a JP himself, which makes it virtually certain that these allegations were true.27

  At Sturton, even the parish church became a site of combat. The state of the building was a disgrace. It was a common problem in the period, when the Reformation had made men and women more reluctant to mend leaking roofs and broken windows. In November 1597, the people of Sturton gathered to discuss repairs, and they decided to erect new pews. A churchwarden, called Dickens, installed a private pew and sat in it every Sunday until Christmas. As the vicar celebrated the Nativity, his prayers were interrupted by uproar in the aisles. One Isabell Sturton clambered into the pew, claiming that “tyme out of mynde” her ancestors had occupied the spot. Dickens told her to move and threatened to punch her in the face if she did it again. She and her menfolk waited, and then did what they had to do. One night in February, someone crept into the church and smashed the pew to pieces.28

  Behind all this lay a story of dispossession, a chain of injustice that destroyed whatever harmony this village may once have enjoyed. In the time of Henry VIII, the lord of the manor at Sturton was Thomas, Baron Darcy. A valiant soldier, Darcy held firm Catholic beliefs. He opposed Henry’s divorce from Catherine of Aragon and he objected to the dissolution of the monasteries. When the king’s greed caused an insurrection in the north in 1536, Darcy sided with the rebels, but he also tried to bring about reconciliation with the king. He was courageous, but he was naive.

  Darcy failed to allow
for the ambitions of the Lassells family. Minor landowners near Worksop, at the opposite corner of the Quadrilateral, they hitched their cart to the horse of Protestant reform. George Lassells, grandfather of Sir George, acted as an informer, alleging that Darcy had conspired with the rebels. Darcy was beheaded, and his estates were taken by the Crown. As a reward, the Crown gave George Lassells the whole of Darcy’s land in the North Clay.29

  Men who had behaved in such a way were bound to be unpopular, but for other reasons too the village became unstable. The parish contained more than one manor, and the Lassells family had made enemies. Their rivals were a dynasty called Thornhagh, who lived as lords of the manor at Fenton, half a mile from Sturton crossroads.*

  By 1600 the Thornhaghs had amassed an ample estate in the neighborhood, and they bought more land whenever they could. Wealthier than the Lassells clan, the Thornhaghs also outranked them in status and in education. They sent their sons to Cambridge, and their mortal remains still lie in the place of honor at the eastern end of Sturton Church. The two families waged a long war for domination of their little world. Over the space of thirty years, Lassells and Thornhagh sued each other time and again, exchanging accusations of fraud, barn burning, and abduction of each other’s cattle. By the early seventeenth century, the feud had come to center on the church tithes, but the conflict was entirely irreligious.