But Leland's description of the village suggests the influence that caused Scrooby and the wheat fields thereabout to send forth, in the beginning of the seventeenth century and of a new reign, men capable of courage and fortitude sufficient to make them memorable, and to make these three townlets places of pilgrimage in following centuries. [Sidenote: Itinerary, i, 36, in Hunter's Founders, p. 20.] [Sidenote: Bradford, 410.] [Sidenote: _Supra_, Book I, chap. ii, iii.] [Sidenote: Plimoth Plantations, 411.] "In the meane townlet of Scrooby, I marked two things"--it is Leland who writes--"the parish church not big but very well builded; the second was a great manor-place, standing within a moat, and longing to the Archbishop of York." This large old manor-place he describes with its outer and inner court. In this manor-place, about half a century after Leland saw it, there lived William Brewster. He was a man of education, who had been for a short time in residence at Cambridge; he had served as one of the under secretaries of state for years; had been trusted beyond all others by Secretary Davison, his patron; and, when Elizabeth disgraced Davison, in order to avoid responsibility for the death of Mary of Scotland, Brewster had been the one friend who clung to the fallen secretary as long as there was opportunity to do him service. Making no further effort to establish himself at court, Brewster went after a while "to live in the country in good esteeme amongst his freinds and the good gentle-men of those parts, espetially the godly and religious." His abode after his retirement was the old manor-place now destroyed, but then the most conspicuous building at Scrooby. It belonged in his time to Sir Samuel Sandys, the elder brother of Sir Edwin Sandys, whose work as the master spirit in the later history of the Virginia Company has already been recounted. At Scrooby Brewster succeeded his father in the office of "Post," an office that obliged him to receive and deliver letters for a wide district of country, to keep relays of horses for travelers by post on the great route to the north, and to furnish inn accommodations. In the master of the post at Scrooby we have the first of those influences that lifted a group of people from this rustic region into historic importance. He had been acquainted with the great world, and had borne a responsible if not a conspicuous part in delicate diplomatic affairs in the Netherlands. At court, as at Scrooby, he was a Puritan, and now in his retirement his energies were devoted to the promotion of religion. He secured earnest ministers for many of the neighboring parishes. But that which he builded the authorities tore down. Whitgift was archbishop, and the High Commission Courts were proceeding against Puritans with the energy of the Spanish Inquisition. "The godly preachers" about him were silenced. The people who followed them were proscribed, and all the pains and