At first, there were a few such churches of
Puritan Separatists formed in London, almost
none in the country. The founders of New
Plymouth, the pilgrim fathers, began as one
of the very few such churches maintained in
a rural district, far away from London. They
belonged to the Nottinghamshire village or
mean townlet in the hundred of Basset Lawe;
they were, in fact, the Church of Scrooby.

In the country surrounding Scrooby there
were many recently extinct religious
establishments belonging to the Roman Catholics;
and it may possibly be, in some measure,
on account of an antagonism so created that
the pulpits of these parts were held by a
great number of men with strong Puritan
tendencies. These, often cleaving to their
livings, clove, by so doing, to the right of speaking
boldly, and could knead much of the strict
Puritan spirit into the minds of the common
people. One among this people, who lived
afterwards to supply the business head to
an emigrant church, expresses the growth
of feeling, and the manner of its growth, in
these characteristic words: "When by the
travail and diligence of some godly and
zealous preachers, and God's blessing on
their labours, as in other places of the land,
so in the north part, many became enlightened
by the Word of God, and had their ignorance
and sins discovered by the Word of God's
grace, and began, by His grace, to reform
their lives, and make conscience of their
ways, the work of God was no sooner
manifest in them, but presently they were both
scoffed and scorned by the profane multitude,
and the ministers urged with the yoke of
subscription, or else must be silenced; and
the poor people were so urged with apparitors,
and pursuivants, and the commission of
courts, as truly their affliction was not small,
which notwithstanding, they bare sundry
years with manly patience, until they were
occasioned, by the continuance and increase
of these troubles, and other means which the
Lord raised up in those days, to see further
into these things by the light of the Word of
God, how that not only those base, beggarly
ceremonies were unlawful, but also that the
lordly tyrannous power of the prelates ought
not to be submitted to, which those, contrary
to the freedom of the Gospel, would load and
burden men's consciences with, and, by their
compulsive power, make a profane mixture of
persons and things in the worship of God;
and that their offices and callings, courts, and
canons, &c., were unlawful and anti-Christian,
being such as have no warrant in the Word
of God, but the same that were used in
Popery, and still retained . . . . .  So many,
therefore, of those professors who saw the
evil of these things, in these parts, and whose
hearts the Lord had touched with heavenly
zeal for his truth, they shook off this yoke of
anti-Christian bondage, and, as the Lord's
free people, joined themselves by a covenant
of the Lord into a church estate, in the fellowship
of the Gospel, to walk in all his ways
made known, or to be made known, unto
them, according to their best endeavours,
whatsoever it should cost them." The whole
spirit of this is in striking correspondence
with the spirit shown in France at about the
time, by those who seceded to form
Huguenot churches in provincial towns.
Every word here quoted might have been
written by Bernard Palissy concerning the
reformed church in his town of Saintes.

Now there was at Scrooby an episcopal
manor-house, given by Sandys, Archbishop of
York, to his eldest son, and leased to a
gentleman named William Brewster, who
had spent some little time at Cambridge, and
subsequently served under Davison when he
was Secretary of State. After the fall of
Davison, Mr. William Brewster received the
appointment of Postmaster at Scrooby, which
place, it has been said, was one of the twenty-
six English post-stations on the great North
Road. The master of a post-station was, in
those times, generally a man of good condition,
who was tolerably well paid for
important services. It was requisite that he
should maintain a stud of post-horses for the
onward despatch of mails, the distribution of
letters in his district, the supply of government
couriers and persons riding post. It
was requisite also, that he should have
premises capable of providing the accommodation
of an inn to travellers by post, these
being a source of further income to him.
Thus a traveller from York to London is
found to have recorded that, in Brewster's
time, he paid the post at Scrooby for a
conveyance and guide to Tuxford, ten shillings,
and for a candle, supper and breakfast, seven
shillings and tenpence. On his return, he
paid eight shillings for conveyance to
Doncaster, then reckoned seven miles; and two
shillings for burnt sack, bread, beer, and
sugar to wine, with threepence to the ostler.
The government salary of the Scrooby post-
master was two shillings a-day; so that,
considering the value of money in and about the
year sixteen hundred, even if he had no
private means, William Brewster was to be
regarded as a man of substance. The need of
spacious premises by the postmaster accounts
for his occupation of the Scrooby Manor, a
great house standing within a moat, built in
two courts, whereof the first was "very ample,
and all builded of timber, saving the front of
the house that is of brick." The ascent to the
front was by a stone flight of steps. In this
house a king and a king's daughter had
slept, and many an archbishop had taken his
pleasure. In this house the great republic of
America had its beginning; for it was here
that the Church of Scrooby first began to
meet. William Brewster was himself a
Separatist, and adopted as its elder by the
little Church, to which he gave under his
own roof a local habitation. He provided
liberally also, at his own charge, for the