The Scrooby Congregation were English Protestant separatists who lived near Scrooby, on the outskirts of Bawtry, a small market town at the border of South Yorkshire, Lincolnshire and Nottinghamshire. In 1607/8 the Congregation emigrated to the Netherlands in search of the freedom to worship as they chose. They founded the "English separatist church at Leiden", one of several English separatist groups in the Netherlands at the time.
Richard Clyfton was rector of Babworth, from 1605 under suspicion of nonconformity. Suspended, he continued to preach at Bawtry, near Scrooby though just over the county boundary in Yorkshire. From 1606 the congregation around Clyfton met in the house of William Brewster. This manor house has been identified as on the site of the old Scrooby Palace of the archbishops of York, though much of the older building had been demolished by then. [1] In 1607 Clyfton was excommunicated; at this time he had already met William Bradford. [2] [3]
John Robinson from Sturton le Steeple, also in northern Nottinghamshire, had lost his pulpit for his views and returned home by about the end of 1604; he made contact with separatist groups in Gainsborough, just over the eastern county boundary in Lincolnshire, as well as Scrooby. The minister at Gainsborough was John Smyth. In this way the two separatist churches were drawn together, with Robinson assuming authority in the Scrooby congregation alongside Clyfton after a process of ordination. [4]
From the end of 1607 and into 1608 the Gainsborough-Scrooby separatist group emigrated to Holland, in waves. An important organizer of the move was Thomas Helwys of Smyth's congregation, who had moved away to Basford, Nottinghamshire before coming to attention for not taking communion. [5] The emigrants went to Amsterdam and Leiden. [6]
After arriving at Holland they realized that as foreigners, they could only take unskilled jobs and were exempt from working organizations. The congregation also noticed that their children were growing up more Dutch than English. The Congregation decided to emigrate to the Americas, where their children could be English, and they could worship freely.
The exact significance of Scrooby for the Pilgrim group is still debated. The first research on the congregation was published by the antiquarian Joseph Hunter in 1849. It was followed in 1853 by a popular book from William Henry Bartlett, a topographical artist. Henry Martyn Dexter (Henry Morton Dexter) wrote the authoritative account The England and Holland of the Pilgrims (1905). Further documentary evidence was found by Walter Herbert Burgess (1867–1943) and Ronald Marchant. [7] See also Sandra Goodall, "Beyond Bradford's Journal: The Scrooby Puritans in Context," Ph.D. Dissertation, August, 2015, Arizona State University. Sandra Goodall provides zero evidence from writings of the time. In fact, Ms. Goodall forgets the nickname of Queen Mary "Bloody Mary" for her trying to force Catholicism on the inhabitants of Great Britain.
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Bawtry is a market town and civil parish in the City of Doncaster in South Yorkshire, England. It lies 8 miles (13 km) south-east of Doncaster, 10 miles (16 km) west of Gainsborough and 8 miles (13 km) north-west of Retford, on the border with Nottinghamshire and close to Lincolnshire. The town was historically divided between the West Riding of Yorkshire and Nottinghamshire. Its population of 3,204 in the 2001 UK census increased to 3,573 in 2011, and was put at 3,519 in 2019. Nearby settlements include Austerfield, Everton, Scrooby, Blyth, Bircotes and Tickhill.
Scrooby is a small village on the River Ryton in north Nottinghamshire, England, near Bawtry in South Yorkshire. At the time of the 2001 census it had a population of 329. Until 1766, it was on the Great North Road so became a stopping-off point for numerous important figures including Queen Elizabeth I and Cardinal Wolsey on their journeys. The latter stayed at the Manor House briefly, after his fall from favour.
Thomas Helwys, an English minister, was one of the joint founders, with John Smyth, of the General Baptist denomination. In the early seventeenth century, Helwys was the principal formulator of a demand that the church and the state be kept separate in matters of law, so that individuals might have a freedom of religious conscience. He was an advocate of religious liberty at a time when to hold to such views could be dangerous. He died in prison as a consequence of the religious persecution of Protestant Dissenters under King James I.
John Robinson (1576–1625) was the pastor of the "Pilgrim Fathers" before they left on the Mayflower. He became one of the early leaders of the English Separatists called Brownists, and is regarded as one of the founders of the Congregational Church.
Richard Clyfton (Clifton) was an English Separatist minister, at Scrooby, Nottinghamshire, and then in Amsterdam.
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I offer unto you my noble countriemen, as the most proper persons to whom it can be presented wherein you will see very much of your worthy ancestors, to whose memory I have erected it as a monumentall pillar and to shew in what honour they lived in those flourishing ages past. In this kind, or not much different, have divers persons in forrein parts very learnedly written; some whereof I have noted in my preface: and I could wish that there were more that would adventure in the like manner for the rest of the counties of this nation, considering how acceptable those are, which others have already performed
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