The Road to Thanksgiving Started Here

“Few people understand where they are when they get here,” Mr. Swinscoe says as he greets us with a broad smile and a map. “Here” is one of England’s pervasive medieval churches, which arguably marks the spot where America’s experiment with democracy began.

On these grounds four centuries ago, a flinty priest named

Richard Clyfton

inspired separatist

William Brewster

and a young

William Bradford,

who, for a time, walked 15 miles to Babworth and back to hear the pastor’s sermons. Both men eventually helped lead a growing band of Church of England dissenters into exile in the Netherlands and aboard the Mayflower to Massachusetts in 1620. Bradford became governor of Plymouth Colony and helped to draft the Mayflower Compact.

For most of us the Pilgrim journey begins with the Mayflower’s voyage and ends at the late-autumn feast with the Wampanoag warriors in 1621. The national holiday we celebrate as Thanksgiving, 401 years later, is an endangered species—overtaken by a retail-driven Christmas frenzy, threatened by cancel culture and diminished by ideologically motivated historians intent on turning the Pilgrims into economic migrants. Overstuffed with lore, Thanksgiving has lost the true grit of Native Americans and these English newcomers who endured years of reckoning before quitting their homeland.

The task of patching together the story of those years when the seeds of American democracy were planted now falls to a few historians and to locals like Mr. Swinscoe and Mrs. Davis.

Mr. Swinscoe, 93, is a lifelong All Saints Church member, and Mrs. Davis, 85, arrived in 1980 with her family. Both are widowed, their spouses buried in the church cemetery alongside the earliest separatists. Both tell breathless stories of the Pilgrim Fathers as though they happened last week.

How Clyfton and fellow pastor

John Robinson

resisted Church of England rituals and corrupt leadership in favor of plain New Testament teaching. How followers flocked to their messages, risking heavy fines and imprisonment for failing to attend their parish churches. How by 1605, when church officers defrocked Clyfton, the congregants were meeting secretly at Brewster’s home 7 miles away in Scrooby. Mr. Swinscoe points east across distant barley fields as he describes how they decided to leave altogether, eventually making it to Amsterdam, where they found the religious freedom they craved but also years of impoverished living.

The Church of England resisted the Reformation, which swept Europe despite King Henry VIII’s break with Rome in the 1530s. The separatists opposed worship that resembled Catholic practice and the state apparatus controlling it. Some faced hanging. In Babworth, Clyfton refused to wear official vestments or use the sign of the cross. Robinson urged fellow separatists to reject corrupt archbishops in favor of ordinary leaders who “diligently promote the common good.” The decision to leave the established church was years in the making, but Robinson described it “as a burning fire shut up in my bones.”

The yearning to breathe and believe free runs deep in the American DNA, but interest in the Pilgrim stories wanes. A secularizing West sees their journey as more catch than release. Mrs. Davis said a Pilgrim Trail organization met regularly until Covid, re-enacting the early walkabouts. Now there are only a few signposts marking the landmarks, including a pub in Scrooby named Pilgrim Fathers across a highway from what remains of Brewster’s manor house and parish church. “What we know, it’s all been handed down generation to generation,” Mrs. Davis says.

Will they pass it on? “We hope so,” she says with a shrug.

Clyfton and Robinson died in the Netherlands, but when the Mayflower sailed it carried the lessons of Nottinghamshire. The separatists—only 37 of 102 passengers—drew up the Mayflower Compact as the ship veered off course and neared mutiny. In simple wording they covenanted to form a community of mutual obligation despite their diverse leanings, setting a pattern for local elections, self-government and rule of law that would be followed in Plymouth Colony for decades.

The 17th century marked a time of dispersion and upheaval not unlike our own, with shiploads of colonists escaping tyranny for the New World. The Mayflower Compact was the separatists’ unique contribution. Their stubborn struggle shows that Americans also have the will to pursue a pluralist society and respect individual human rights.

The struggle to preserve such ideals is helped by protecting the sites that enshrine them. Mr. Swinscoe and Mrs. Davis make it their duty to care for All Saints, and they say they will continue to show up to meet stray Americans who wander a Nottinghamshire lane in search of their roots.

Ms. Belz is a former senior editor at World Magazine and author of “They Say We Are Infidels.”