In the first of a regular series of columns from the other side of the Atlantic discussing the people, places and events that led to the Mayflower voyage from an English perspective. The author’s novel Voices of the Mayflower; the saints, strangers and sly knaves who changed the world is out in February.
You might be disappointed. The village of Austerfield is far from ye olde English picture postcard image of timber and thatch one would like it to be.
Without wishing to offend, it is a hum drum now as it was when a young William Bradford sat in the pews of the village church of St Helena’s, clutching his Book of Common Prayer and murmuring his prayers.
On one side of the church a bungalow, on the other ruined farm buildings. Opposite, a maker of gravestones (You know what real estate agents say about location) and almost hidden by a tall hedge, a factory making carbon-based products. The traffic is heavy.
No, this little settlement in the north of England does not send the pulses racing despite the welcome in the Mayflower Inn with its four bedrooms and a menu offering fish and chips and a chef’s special.
But the church is a joy, a little oasis of calm with its graveyard of conifers and lopsided gravestones. It dates back to 1080 when it was built by a descendant of one of William the Conqueror’s invading army and boasts a little bell tower and a font in which the boy could have been baptized in the spring of 1590. It was reunited with its the lead liner in the 19th century after years of use watering animals. Bizarrely, graphic carvings of naked women known as sheela na gigs which were used to used to ward off death, evil and demons hover over the portals.
Stand in the churchyard and imagine the lad, yet to be gripped by the religious fervour which was drive him eventually to become the governor of the Plymouth Plantation, as he gazes out over flat, treeless fields, which still stretch uninterrupted to the Lincolnshire Wolds, low and blue on the horizon. In the fields men and children, some as young as seven, would be tending oxen, sheep and cattle on its common grazing lands; these days the fields are given over to wheat, sugar beet, potatoes and cabbages.
He would have heard nightingales chirruping, the boom of a bittern and the miaow of buzzards. Barn owls would have swooped out of the night sky - all rare sounds today.
Among today’s houses is the remains of the manor owned by his grandfather. Built in the early 1500s and the largest farm in the village, it was saved from demolition over the centuries by history-minded volunteers and is now a private home.
In Bradford’s day villagers, about 120 of them, lived in mean, smoke-filled houses with a hearth and chimney and perhaps a ladder into an attic. Crowded too, with women giving birth to eight to ten children of which five or six survived.
There was little opportunity to escape their lot. Everyone in Austerfield would have been subject to the immutable class system which dominated 17th century England with the aristocracy at the top and at the bottom the 25 percent who scratched a living in the fields.
The husbandmen, or farmers, working on the land owned by the likes of Bradford’s grandfather would be lucky to earn £15 a year and laborers might pick up one shilling a day.
If this was not grueling enough the population was at constant threat from the plague which helped keep the average life expectancy to about 39 years old.
To get a sense of the Bradford’s small world, walk, drive or meander in his steps to the manor in nearby Scrooby where he studied the scriptures at the feet of William Brewster, one of the Separatist movements most inspiring leaders.This is where the idea to flee persecution - ‘an adventure almost desperate’ - began for him and his fellow believers.
He would have trudged across the fields or followed the banks of the sluggish River Idle to its juncture with the River Ryton, crossed by the mill - still there, if a little decrepit looking - and knocked at the door of Brewster’s mediaeval manor tucked away at the end of a lane. It was demolished in 1636-7 though one wing was renovated as a farmhouse in 1750.
The church of St Wilfrid’s is still standing but, as the vicar’s husband, busy varnishing the pews, confessed, it is in need of a lick of paint today. True, but the crowded churchyard, the ancient pen where stray animals were rounded up and the well-worn pews on which Brewster may have prayed again, help tell a little of the Mayflower saga.
Next stop; All Saints' Church in Babworth, seven miles away where the Separatists crowded into the sturdy 15th century nave to listen to the iconoclastic preacher Richard Clyfton railing against the church’s ‘vile ceremonies and vain canons and decrees’.
The building fell into ruin but was restored in 1830 and again in 1864 and has a tower steeple with three bells and a clock, a nave, chancel and a handsome porch. The inmates of a nearby prison presented the church with a matchstick model of the Mayflower and a painting shows our seekers after truth walking across the fields to prayer. Older members of the congregation reckon they were modelled on the prison staff of the day while others will be intrigued by a damaged figure in the nave which looks just like the Jedi master Yoda in Star Wars. Proof that the force is with them, perhaps.
The graveyard is shaded by gloomy conifers but last week it was lit up by a carpet of snowdrops. Did Bradford pick his way carefully between them, recalling how Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these?
Perhaps he was not given to such fancies but the visitor should try to conjure up the sound of prayers and the passion of their beliefs.
You won’t be disappointed.
Next; on the trail of the great escape
Seventeenth century insult of the month. Slubberdegullion druggles. Slabberdegullion from the Dutch overslubberen, to wade through mud or the English slabber, to drool. Druggle, task made infinitely more difficult by a state of intoxication. A combination of the words drunk and struggle. Definitely an insult.
