LITMIR.BIZ

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commissioners for the suppression of monasteries (which were plentiful in Lincolnshire) went down to hold a visitation at Louth. But the excursion was not to their pleasure. As one of them rode into the town he heard the alarm bell pealing from the tower, and then he saw people swarming into the streets carrying bills and staves, "the stir and noise arising hideous." He fled into the church for sanctuary, but they hauled him out, and with a sword at his breast bade him swear to be true to the Commonwealth. He swore. That was the Examiner. When the Registrar came on the scene he was with scant ceremony dragged to the market cross, where his commission was read in derision and then torn up, and he barely escaped with his life. For the same cause there were risings at Caistor and Horncastle – two of the demurest of modern towns. The Bishop's Chancellor was murdered in the streets of Horncastle and the body stripped and the garments torn to rags; and at Lincoln the episcopal palace was plundered and partially demolished.

      But Lincolnshire need rest no fame upon such merits as these. Greater honour belongs to the county, for it was Lincolnshire that made the most important of all contributions to the building of America when it sent forth the Pilgrim Fathers, and afterwards the Puritan leaders, who met for conference in the eventful days of the movement in Boston town, in Sempringham manor house, or in Tattershall Castle, to lay the foundations of the Massachusetts settlements. And, as Doyle in his "English in America," truly says, "In romance of circumstance and the charm of personal heroism the story of the Pilgrim Fathers is pre-eminent. They were the pioneers who made it easy for the rest of the host to follow." Their colony was the germ of the New England States.

      Amid the quiet pastures threaded by the Ryton stream, where the counties of York and Lincoln and Nottingham meet, are two small villages, the homes of the only Pilgrim Fathers satisfactorily traced to English birthplaces. A simple, pathetic interest clings to these secluded spots. At Scrooby is the manor house wherein William Brewster, the great heart of the pilgrimage and foremost planter of New Plymouth, was born. Archbishops of York had found a home here for centuries; Wolsey, at the close of his strangely checkered career, lodged there and planted a mulberry tree in the garden; Bishop Bonner dated a letter thence to Thomas Cromwell. And when William Brewster became Elder Brewster, pensive Puritans often gathered there to worship, "and with great love he entertained them when they came, making provision for them to his great charge." His condition was prosperous and he could well afford to do it. A Cambridge man, Brewster early took his degree at Peterhouse; he next saw service at Court, and accompanied Secretary Davison to the Netherlands; afterwards succeeding his father and grandfather as post on the great North Road at Scrooby, a responsible and well-paid office, which he filled for nearly twenty years.

      The parish church, "not big, but very well builded," as Leland said; the quaint old vicarage; the parish pound, and all that remains of the parish stocks: these stand witness to the antiquity of Scrooby. A little railway station and rushing Northern expresses are almost the only signs of twentieth century activity.

      The Scrooby community was an off-shoot from that at Gainsborough, the first Separatist church formed in the North of England, of which the pastor was John Smyth, a graduate of Cambridge, an "eminent man in his time" and "well beloved of most men." Smyth preached at Gainsborough from 1602 to 1606, when he was driven into exile. The members of his church gathered from miles around to its services, crossing into Gainsborough by the ferry-boat on the Trent. This continued for two or three years, until at length "these people became two distinct bodies or churches, and in regard of distance did congregate severally; for they were of sundry towns and villages."

      Richard Clyfton, once rector of Babworth near Retford – "a grave and reverend preacher" – was the first pastor at Scrooby; and with him as teacher was "that famous and worthy man Mr. John Robinson," another seceder from the English Church, who afterwards was pastor for many years "till the Lord took him away by death."

      Next to Brewster, William Bradford was the most prominent of the lay preachers among the Scrooby fraternity. He became Governor Bradford of the Plymouth Colony – "the first American citizen of the English race who bore rule by the free choice of his brethren" – and the historian of the Plymouth Plantation. Bradford, a yeoman's son with comfortable home surroundings, lived at Austerfield, an ancient agricultural village about three miles from Scrooby on the Yorkshire side. The pretty cottage of his birth is still shown by the roadside near the Norman church, and the parish register bears the record of his baptism, on March 19, 1589. A youth of seventeen years, he walked across the fields to join the Scrooby brethren in their meetings. He and Brewster, the two men who were to impress their individuality so powerfully upon the religious life of the American people, became firm friends, and, says their later historian,1 that friendship, "formed amid the tranquil surroundings of the North Midlands of their native land, was to be deepened by common labours and aspirations, and by common hardships and sufferings endured side by side both in the Old World and the New."

      But it was Robinson to whom they jointly owed much guidance. When, in Bradford's own words, "They could not long continue in any peaceable condition, but were hunted and persecuted on every side;" when "some were taken and clapt up in prison, and others had their houses beset and watched night and day, and hardly escaped their hands;" and when "the most were fain to fly and leave their homes and habitations and the means of their livelihood," it was John Robinson, the devout and learned pastor, who led them out of Nottinghamshire into Holland, and there inspired within them the vision of complete earthly freedom in the new country across the Atlantic.

      Robinson was a Lincolnshire man. Gainsborough claims him, and on Gainsborough his first solid memorial has been raised. Many are familiar with Gainsborough who have never seen the town. Up the Trent sailed Sweyn, the sanguinary Dane, to conquest; and his son Canute – he that ordered back the rising tide, and got a wetting for his pains – was at Gainsborough when he succeeded him as King of England.

      Gainsborough is the St. Ogg's of "The Mill on the Floss," and the Trent is the Floss, along which Tom and Maggie Tulliver "wandered with a sense of travel, to see the rushing spring-tide, the awful Ægir, come up like a hungry monster" – the inrush of the first wave of the tide, a phenomenon peculiar at that time to both the Trent and the Witham.

      What George Eliot wrote of St. Ogg's describes old Gainsborough to-day – "A town which carries the trace of its long growth and history like a millennial tree, and has sprung up and developed in the same spot between the river and the low hill from the time when the Roman legion turned their backs on it from the camp on the hillside, and the long-haired sea-kings came up the river and looked with fierce eyes at the fatness of the land."

      And in sketching the history of St. Ogg's the novelist remembered that time of ecclesiastical ferment now written about, when "Many honest citizens lost all their possessions for conscience' sake, and went forth beggared from their native town. Doubtless there are many houses standing now," she said, "on which those honest citizens turned their backs in sorrow, quaint gabled houses looking on the river, jammed between newer warehouses, and penetrated by surprising passages, which turn at sharp angles till they lead you out on a muddy strand over-flowed continually by the rushing tide." Did not Maggie Tulliver, in white muslin and simple, noble beauty, attend an "idiotic beggar" in the still existing Old Hall, where the Fathers worshipped and John Smyth taught – "a very quaint place, with broad, jaded stripes painted on the walls, and here and there a show of heraldic animals of a bristly, long-snouted character, the cherished emblems of a noble family once the seigniors of this now civic hall"?

      In this Old Hall the Separatist church was founded in 1602, and here it had the friendly protection of the Hickman family, Protestants whose religious sympathies had brought them persecution and exile in the past.

      But the "foreign-looking town" which George Eliot endowed with romance had, like the neighbouring estuary town of Boston, which her language might have served almost as well to paint, been the abode of hard, historic fact. We can imagine the Scrooby brethren crossing the ancient ferry to bid their friends at Gainsborough farewell. For in 1607 we read, this "groupe of earnest professors of religion and bold assertors of the principle of freedom and personal conviction in respect to the Christian faith and practice" had formed the resolution to seek in another country the liberty they found not at home.2 But it was as unlawful to flee from their native land as to remain in it without

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