Item List (16)

The 1920 Mayflower tercentenary is notable for its religious character, particularly its non-conformity. Many of the people who led the way in organising the tercentenary celebrations were members of the Free Church Council, made up of Quakers,…

Laurence Washington, who died in Maldon, Essex in 1652, was the great-great grandfather of George Washington. In 1924, Malden, Massachusetts was celebrating its 275th anniversary. Isaac Lothian Seymour, vicar of Maldon back in the ‘Old World’, was…

William Bradford, the second (and arguably most famous) governor of the Plymouth Colony, was born in Austerfield and baptised in this small Norman-origins church in 1589. By the final decade of the nineteenth century, when interest in the Pilgrim…

Edward Winslow, arguably one of the most important Pilgrim Fathers, was born in Droitwich in 1595 and baptised in St Peter’s. In October 1945, the 350th anniversary of his birth, a plaque to his memory was unveiled in the church. Commemorating…

St Mary’s Church in Redenhall, Norfolk, is a Grade I listed Anglican place of worship dating to the 14th century (with additions in the late 15th and early 16th century). Edward and Samuel Fuller, two brothers who were baptised in the church, were a…

St Bride’s Church on Fleet Street goes all the way back to a design of Christopher Wren in 1672, with churches on the site even dating many centuries previous. The history of the Church is intertwined with the USA: Virginia Dare, the first English…

John Tilley and Joan Hurst married in this church, and their daughter, Elizabeth, was also baptised there along with John’s nephew Henry Sampson; all journeyed on the Mayflower, but only Elizabeth and Henry survived the first harsh winter. In 1989,…

The World Evangelical Alliance’s Mayflower celebration in 1920 took place at London’s Queen’s Hall (no longer extant). The World Evangelical Alliance marked the sailing of the Mayflower as “a new epoch in the progress of religious liberty, which was…

The ‘Pageant of Hampton’ took place in the Rectory House of St Mary's Church (known as ‘the Deanery’) in the summer of 1929. Historical pageants, a sort of amateur re-enactment, were incredibly popular forms of engagement with the past in the early…

Plymouth - as the final port of departure for the Mayflower in 1620 - was one of the key sites for the 300th anniversary celebrations, with a full programme of events. Some events were very much aimed at the civic elite - there was a whole load of…