by Nick Bunker
As always, the villagers had to pay by way of tithes a tenth of the produce of the land. At Sturton, the Church gave the Thornhaghs a lease of the revenue in return for a yearly rent. This angered the Lassells family beyond endurance. During the harvest of 1600, George Lassells told his men to gather the peas and beans that grew amid the corn, and he refused to give the compulsory tenth to his rivals. Then, one autumn day, two men from the Thornhagh household rode down to the Trent to hunt with a hawk.
By the river they met George Lassells, leading a gang armed with swords and pikes. In the fight that followed, Lassells and his men killed the hawk, and then to add another insult, they stole a spaniel belonging to the Thornhaghs. The Thornhaghs went to court, filing with the Star Chamber a diatribe that filled a parchment thirty inches square. In the Church courts, they began another lawsuit, demanding their fair share of Sturton’s green vegetables.30
These tales of vendetta in the countryside might be trivial if they were isolated affairs, but in fact they were typical of the landscape from which the Pilgrims came. Worst of all was the rivalry between the Earl of Shrewsbury and his enemies, a family called Stanhope. It reached its climax in 1593 in a pitched battle by the Trent. Among those who fought for the earl were Richard Torre of Scrooby and the Lassells family: no mêlée was complete without them. In the reign of Elizabeth, the county of Nottingham acquired a reputation as one of the most turbulent in the realm. Under King James its infamy continued.31
In those days, a happy and peaceful shire needed a dominant aristocrat to mediate between the squabbling gentry and to plead the county’s case before the king. If the poor were lucky, the nobleman in question would organize food supplies in hungry years and hear their complaints against exploitation. He would also try to make sure that the JPs who undertook most local government did their job as they should, rather than making it a pretext to serve their own greed and ambition. Nottinghamshire had no such man to lead it. Instead, the local aristocracy were divided, each rival magnate seeking his own self-interest and each hoping to emerge as the king’s favored grandee in the region.
In due course, the Pilgrims fell victim to the toxic conditions created by this local battle for power. By far the most dangerous of the rival magnates was Gilbert Talbot, the seventh Earl of Shrewsbury. As we shall see, the earl stood to gain the most from a purge against religious dissent, and he hated Puritans with venom. But before we come to that, and to the events that forced the Pilgrims out of England, we have to look more closely at their early lives. In America the leading layman among the exiles was William Bradford’s mentor, William Brewster. To him we must now turn, and to his misbehaving father, William Brewster the bailiff of Scrooby.
* Most of the area in question fell within an administrative unit called the Hundred of Bassetlaw, part of Nottinghamshire. However, the Pilgrim movement spilled over the county lines, into Lincolnshire and the West Riding of Yorkshire. It also included people from other districts in Nottinghamshire a long way from Scrooby. To call the people involved the Bassetlaw Pilgrims would be incorrect: Pilgrim Quadrilateral makes more sense, which is why the phrase has been coined for use in this book.
* At some time in the eighteenth or early nineteenth century, the village came to be known as Sturton le Steeple, the name it bears today.
* Thornhagh was pronounced either “Thorney” or “Thorn-hay.”
Chapter Six
THE MAKING OF A PILGRIM
Late in the afternoon, we rode through Brewster … Who has not heard of Brewster? Who knows who he was?
—HENRY DAVID THOREAU, VISITING THE CAPE COD TOWN OF BREWSTER IN 18491
To the west of Scrooby, the largest of its open fields stretched away over a ridge toward the town of Blyth. It was called the Bishop’s Field. Somewhere hereabouts a scandalous incident took place one day in the 1580s. Somebody saw a young woman take off her shoes and tights and place them in a bush. Barefoot and bare-legged, she crossed the field toward a balk, a strip of soil left unplowed between the corn to allow people and cattle to pass to and fro. Among the wildflowers she found an older man waiting. He was William Brewster, gentleman of Scrooby, the father of the Pilgrim, and the young woman was “Mr. Willm Brewster’s whore.”
Or so she was said to be. In about 1587, old William Brewster sued a local woman for libel, for repeating the gossip about his alleged fornication between the furrows. Among the undated court papers are four witness statements from women in Blyth who heard the tale. The girl was a maidservant who worked for a lady in Blyth called Jane Marshall. It seems that Mrs. Marshall spread the story around the neighborhood, saying that if her maid was pregnant, then Brewster must be the father.2
At the time, his son was about twenty-one. The future Pilgrim was living in London and serving on the staff of a member of the Privy Council, William Davison, the queen’s new secretary of state. If he heard about his father’s disgrace—if that is what it was—we will never know his reaction. The episode certainly never appeared in later histories of the Plymouth Colony. Whether the story was true or not, the incident casts a harsh light on the environment in which the Pilgrims came to maturity.
We cannot write a conventional biography of William Brewster. He left no private letters. No physical likeness survives, and we know very little about his inner life. But we can sift through the elements that went to make him what he was, including the circumstances of his father. In fact, such an undertaking is essential, because Brewster was indispensable, as a member of the core group of Separatists who supplied leadership in America. Without an understanding of the man, and the forces that created him, the reasons why the colony succeeded will remain elusive.*
His protégé William Bradford had no doubt that this was so. When Brewster died in New Plymouth in 1644, at the age of about seventy-seven, Bradford composed a eulogy that awarded him much of the credit for the settlement’s survival. Brewster, he says, was a man “seasoned with the seeds of Grace and vertue.” Tough and resilient, in mind and body, brave but also canny and resourceful, he was an inspiring teacher, modest and sociable, and discreet as well as devout. He also had an education: he possessed, said Bradford, “knowlidge of the lattine tongue and some Insight in the Greeke.” Once again, there is no reason to doubt the truth of what Bradford writes. The colony could not have maintained its morale, essential for survival, if it had lacked leadership of high caliber.3
How did William Brewster become the man he was? Or, to put it another way, what was he trying to achieve, first as a Separatist and then as an American, and why did he want to achieve it? The answer may run something like this: when the Pilgrims settled in the New World, they were looking for more than Christian liberty, however they might define it. They carried with them a blended ideology, an amalgam between religious beliefs and secular concepts of virtue, gentility, and heroism. These ideas were borrowed from ancient Greece and Rome and then refashioned to suit the needs of the Elizabethan era.
Brewster, as we shall see, became exposed in his teens and twenties to new thinking about what it meant to be civilized and courageous. Welded together with Calvinism, it gave him a powerful creed, a Puritan compound of Saint Paul and the stoic austerity of Roman heroes. Life in Nottinghamshire was unheroic, and unholy. For a man of William Brewster’s social rank it also contained barriers to advancement. Puritanism offered, perhaps, an alternative, the opportunity and the means to escape from what he thought of as moral squalor. It might also provide a new way to define “gentility” and “virtue,” words that resonated widely in the discourse of the period. To see what Brewster was trying to escape from, we return briefly to his father’s lechery.
GENTLEMEN AND LECHERS
This peccadillo in the long grass was not an isolated case. If old Brewster seduced a serving girl, he was only one of many gentlemen who did so. At Sturton, George Lassells had at least attempted the same thing, and others certainly accomplished it. In 1592, the archdeacon prosecuted Thomas Sturton, a member of the family that
claimed the troublesome pew. He admitted fathering a child with a servant, “Dorothy Style, fornicatrix,” taking her into his bed night after night while Mrs. Sturton was away caring for a sick neighbor.4 In the Quadrilateral, the sexual exploitation of young women was casual and commonplace. The authorities recognized it as something that required firm action.
At the end of the century, in the face of conditions close to famine, the queen and Parliament enacted the first of a series of poor laws. They obliged each parish to look after paupers and to collect a parish tax for the purpose. As a result, in the Trent valley in the late 1590s we begin to find churchwardens taking a few pence a week from each taxpayer to be doled out to the needy. As the cost of welfare rose, it became all the more essential to find the fathers of illegitimate children. So the JPs started to name the culprits. A sordid company of local gentlefolk began to file through the courtroom. In the summer of 1607, just before the Pilgrims made their first attempt to leave the country, churchgoers at Blyth could enjoy the spectacle of a gentleman called Valentine Revell sitting in the stocks. The justices sentenced Revell to a stocking for fathering a bastard, and ordered him to pay the mother twenty pounds.5
When the pioneer Baptist John Smyth wrote about his reasons for becoming a Separatist, social evils such as this featured high among them. According to Smyth, the parishes along the valley of the Trent were filled with “infinite sorts of sinners … adulterers, Theeves, Murtherers, Witches, Conjurers, Usurers, Atheists, Swaggerers, Drunkards, Blasphemers.”6 He exaggerated a little (outright homicide seems to have been rare), but in a village such as Sturton he clearly had ample evidence of sin.
When John Smyth drew up his list of sinners of different kinds to support his condemnation of the Church of England, he did so as a way to support his argument that by permitting the wicked to worship alongside the godly, the Church betrayed the sanctity of the congregation. Actually, the authorities in the Quadrilateral tried hard to punish moral offenders, and with renewed vigor after the accession of King James. But the archives that they left behind serve only to show that Smyth was describing things he saw with his own eyes.
In the last three months of 1607, as the Separatists reached the peak of their activity in the area, the archdeacon’s court at Retford prosecuted forty-one people. Among them more than half were charged with fornication. When the Retford JPs met for their quarterly session on October 9, with Sir John Thornhagh in the chair, they dealt with another twenty-three offenses, with drink-related matters to the fore. Included among the defendants were seven people accused of brewing without a license. Five were charged with assault or fighting. As for conjurers and witches, a laborer’s wife came up before the justices, prosecuted for using charms.
Low-level sorcery often appears in the local records, with references to fortune-telling or the use of magic to cure sick cattle. Occasionally, women found themselves accused of malevolent witchcraft. Austerfield had a village witch, reported to the archdeacon in 1589 by William Bradford’s uncle; she was a widow who tried to inflict dysentery on her victims by burning pieces of their excrement. But while this sort of case was very rare, harmless white magic was an everyday occurrence. John Smyth took special offense at people who tried to put a stop to rabies by writing the Lord’s Prayer on a piece of cheese, and feeding it to mad dogs.7
So if old Brewster was a sinner, there were many like him, and Smyth drew his portrait from life. If immorality in Gainsborough helps explain why pious tradesmen turned to Smyth to lead them in worship and prayer, the same was doubtless true on the west bank of the Trent as well. However, many other people besides Puritans objected to sexual misconduct, drunkenness, and witchery without reaching his conclusions about the need for a new form of Christian community. Sin aroused just as much anger among the Anglican bishops. This was especially true of Browne’s old enemy Richard Bancroft, who embarked on determined campaigns against malefactors in London. So there must have been more to the motivation of Separatists such as Brewster and Smyth than simple moral outrage at the sin they saw around them, essential though such outrage was.
If we turn old William Brewster’s libel case on its side, so to speak, and think about what it meant to sue for defamation, then it will become easier to understand why Puritanism appealed to men and women in such places as the Quadrilateral. When Brewster the bailiff filed suit, he joined a long procession of people who used litigation as a way to defend their good names.
The Church courts dealt with cases of sexual defamation, and after 1560 the number of new lawsuits began to soar in the archdiocese of York. People called each other whoremongers or adulterers or accused each other of carrying venereal disease, and those whom they insulted fought back with a writ alleging slander. By the 1590s, plaintiffs in the region were filing at least two hundred lawsuits of this kind each year.8
Slandered men and women asked the court for help because they set enormous store by honor, status, and reputation. Families rose and fell, with their fortunes determined by access to land, by patronage, or by luck. They were exposed to random crises of a moral, an economic, or a pestilential kind. For this reason, it became all the more urgent to achieve rank, to cling to it, and to defeat those who tried to take it away.
Litigation became a way of defending status, but if that was too expensive, or the prospects were uncertain, ritualized violence offered another avenue of redress. Dueling was a craze as feverish as the resort to law, forcing James I to pass the first anti-dueling statute in 1609.9 Perhaps we might view Puritanism in the same light, as a strategy for protecting reputation. If a family chose to be godly, they gave themselves a discipline that reinforced respectability. Piety and a moral code might keep a household untainted by sin and dishonor; and Christian evangelism created its own form of prestige, an alternative hierarchy of esteem.
Issues such as these possessed a special urgency for people like the Brewsters. They inhabited the grayest of gray areas within the social hierarchy, the foggy mezzanine between the lower reaches of the gentry and the upper ranks of the yeomanry. One form of status mattered more than any other, and that was the right to call oneself a gentleman.
Everybody wanted to be a gentleman, or a gentleman’s wife or daughter. Local leadership belonged only to those who ranked among the gentry, or within the even more exclusive social tier made up of aristocrats: earls, marquesses, and dukes. In Elizabeth’s reign, there were only about sixty peers of the realm. Aristocrats and the gentry combined amounted at the most to less than one in twenty of the population. While the tiny size of the elite made membership all the more intrinsic to self-worth, it also caused all the more argument about the eligibility of those who aspired to it.
Although the gentry remained a tiny minority, it was a minority in motion. Some families climbed the social staircase, while others slid backward into the unwashed multitude. In Yorkshire, during the reign of Elizabeth one hundred new families claimed to have entered the gentry, but many of those who called themselves gentlemen had doubtful grounds to do so. A case in point to the south at Sturton was Charles White, brother of the Mayflower’s Katherine Carver. In 1614, heralds from the College of Arms carried out one of their occasional investigations of the Nottinghamshire elite. In the marketplace at Retford, they publicly reprimanded Charles White for falsely claiming to be a gentleman.10
If everybody had agreed on an economic test, based on the number of acres owned, then White might have escaped humiliation, but such a test did not exist. People disagreed profoundly about the definition of gentility. Was it a matter of blood, of education, or of wealth? If it was the third, how much land did a gentleman need? Should entry to the elite be a reward for meritorious service of some kind? Once a man was a gentleman, was his status guaranteed forever? Or could he forfeit his rank, thanks to debt or disgrace? Was there such a thing as a Christian gentleman? If so, how did he behave, and what did he believe? Did a lady simply take on her father’s or husband’s rank, whatever it might be? Or could she aspire t
o gentility of her own, a composite of beauty, charm, accomplishments, and cash?
At Scrooby, these questions had no easy answer. In the eulogy that Bradford wrote for Brewster, we find a typically intriguing sentence describing the dead Pilgrim’s life in the Quadrilateral. Brewster, he said, “lived in the Country in Good esteeme among his frinds and the Good Gentlmen of those parts especially the Godly and Religious.” What exactly did Bradford have in mind, when he used this string of loaded words: “esteem,” “good,” “gentle,” and “religious”? Who were the “good gentlemen” of whom he spoke, but whom he does not name? What did it mean to be a “gentleman” in a place where gentlemen went about fighting, whoring, smashing pews, stealing spaniels, and rustling cattle?
As for the Brewsters, people might very well question their right to be regarded as genteel at all. They never served as JPs. Their only real estate was apparently some property in Doncaster, belonging to the Pilgrim’s mother, but they had to go to court to prove their title even to that. Fifteen miles from Scrooby lived a lawyer called Sir John Ferne, legal counsel for the borough of Doncaster, and in 1586 he published a book, The Blazon of Gentrie, which summed up the most snobbish of attitudes toward families such as the Brewsters. According to Ferne, the gentry consisted of no fewer than twenty-three grades, ranked according to their lineage, occupation, and record of military service. Highest among them were those of perfect blood ancestry, with five generations of forebears each entitled to bear a coat of arms. At the very bottom, Ferne placed a suspect order of gentry, “gentlemen of paper and wax,” men who scarcely deserved the title at all. This was the place where we would find the Brewsters, clinging to the ladder’s lowliest rung.11
By way of occupation, old William Brewster had two jobs. Neither automatically qualified him for the status of a gentleman, and his grip on at least one of them was frail. As bailiff of the archbishop’s manor at Scrooby, he collected the rents and ran the manorial court, where his principal task would be to arbitrate in disputes between tenant farmers. This sort of thing carried little prestige, and William Brewster quarreled with his employer. In 1588, the archbishop of York died, his widow began to sort out his affairs, and she raised queries about Brewster’s expenses. He reacted by filing suit against her, and she responded by accusing him of “evill words” and false accounting. If he lost his post as bailiff, he still had another position—before his son, he served as the Crown’s postmaster—but this was not especially well paying. Nor did the post confer social rank on the man who held it. His daily stipend added up to little more than thirty pounds a year, about the same as a country vicar. If he supplemented his earnings by hiring out horses and guides, or by keeping an inn at the manor, then his genteel status would become even more questionable.*