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The noblest of the Pilgrims of Plymouth was sprung from the people. For generations the little farming village of Austerfield, a royal manor of the West Riding of Yorkshire close to the Nottingham line, had known the family of Bradfurth or Bradford as a race of tenant-yeomen who, besides tilling the lands of the Mortons, possessed also a freehold of their own.
The moss and lichens, with which its roughly cut back and edges are overgrown, have been removed from its face, and the quaint inscription is distinctly legible, whereby the curious idler is informed that "Here lies, in y'e Hope of a Joyfull Resurrecion, y'e Body of Maj'r Iohn Bugbee, an Assistant of y'e Colony & A Iustice of y'e Peace. Born at Austerfield, in y'e County of Lincoln, England.
In 703 a synod was held at Austerfield, the King and Berhtwald, Archbishop of Canterbury, being present, when Wilfrid was actually asked to promise that he would cease to act as bishop, that he would accept the partition of Theodore, and that he would retire to Ripon and not leave the monastery without the king's permission.
At sixteen he fell, in some unknown way, under the influence of one of the much-maligned Puritan preachers of Scrooby, a Nottinghamshire village but a few miles from Austerfield.
As a result he gave up his farming-life, left his Austerfield home, and in the face of bitter opposition, distrust, censure, and persecution, joined the Puritan church and settlement at Scrooby, established there by William Brewster, the postmaster of Scrooby and a prominent leader in the new sect of dissenters from the English church, known first as separatists and, later, because of their frequent changes and wanderings, as Pilgrims.
Here he apprenticed himself to a silk-weaver, and became an efficient member of the association of English exiles in Holland. Upon his coming of age in 1610, he sold off the Austerfield lands that had descended to him upon the death of his father, and entered upon an unsuccessful business investment in Amsterdam.
The third character was William Bradford, born at Austerfield, a village neighboring to Scrooby, and at the time of the flight from England seventeen years of age, afterwards noted for his ability and loftiness of character. In 1607 the Scrooby congregation made their first attempt to escape into Holland.
Bradford was born in 1590 at Austerfield, in Yorkshire, England, and at the age of sixteen, joined a company of Puritans or Separatists, which met for a time at the little town of Scrooby, but, being threatened with persecution, resolved to remove to Holland. Most of the congregation got away without interference, but Bradford and a few others were arrested and spent several months in prison.
The palace itself has now entirely disappeared; "but," said my host, "dig anywhere around here and you will find the ruins of the old palace." Dickinson said that he himself was reared in Austerfield, a few miles off in Yorkshire; and that a branch of the Bradford family still lived there.
Whatever the facts, the environments, undoubtedly, were not such as would suggest the making of a leader or the development of a religious nature. But we are assured that, before the age of twelve, the boy William Bradford, brought up in that Austerfield farm-house "in the innocent trade of husbandry," displayed alike a thoughtful temperament and "a pious mind."
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