The Beginners of a Nation: A History of the Source and Rise of the Earliest English Settlements in America, with Special Reference to the Life and Character of the PeopleEggleston, Edward
History
The Beginners of a Nation: A History of the Source and Rise of the Earliest English Settlements in America, with Special Reference to the Life and Character of the People
Eggleston, Edward
United States -- History -- Colonial period, ca. 1600-1775
On the southern margin of Yorkshire the traveler alights to-day at the
station of Bawtry. It is an uninteresting village, with a rustic inn.
More than a mile to the southward, in Nottinghamshire, lies the
pleasant but commonplace village of Scrooby. About a mile to the north
of Bawtry is Austerfield, a hamlet of brick cottages crowded together
along the road. It has a picturesque little church built in the middle
ages, the walls of which are three feet thick. This church will seat
something more than a hundred people nowadays by the aid of a rather
modern extension. In the seventeenth century it was smaller, and there
was no ceiling. Then one could see the rafters of the roof while
shuddering with cold in the grottolike interior. The country around is
level and unpicturesque.
[Sidenote: Hunter's Founders of New Plymouth, 24, 25.]
But one is here in the cradle of great religious movements. In Scrooby
and in Austerfield were born the Pilgrims who made the first
successful settlement in New England. A little to the east lies
Gainsborough, from which migrated to Holland in 1606 the saintly
Separatist John Smyth, who gave form to a great Baptist movement of
modern times. A few miles to the northeast of Bawtry, in Lincolnshire,
lies Epworth, the nest from which the Wesleys issued more than a
hundred years later to spread Methodism over the world. Religious zeal
seems to have characterized the people of this region even before the
Reformation, for the country round about Scrooby was occupied at that
time by an unusual number of religious houses.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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