Item List (150)

William Henry Bartlett provides some beautiful illustrations of Boston’s church, town hall, and the medieval buildings that adorn the town. He compliments this with an emotional narrative of the Pilgrim’s ill-fated attempt to flee to Holland from…

Unlike its neighbours to the east and west, Southampton and Plymouth, Bournemouth could claim no special relationship to the Mayflower story. Nevertheless, the wide reach of the Free Church Council meant that Bournemouth too had an opportunity to…

The small market town of Brigg in north Lincolnshire did its tercentenary bit in 1920 by holding a “Mayflower bazaar” at the Congregational Church in December 1920. The organisers hoped to raise £100 in aid of the church, though it is not recorded…

William Butten, servant to Samuel Fuller, died during the Mayflower’s voyage across the Atlantic. There is no strong evidence to tie him to Austerfield (William Bradford’s parish), but he is memorialised nonetheless in this striking Delft-tiled mural…

This celebration in the Primitive Methodist Church at Ellesmere is another example of the innumerable small-scale local celebrations organised across towns and villages in Britain under the auspices of the Free Church Council. The Council was hugely…

Like others organised by the Free Church Council, Bradford’s celebration for the Mayflower anniversary in 1920 was to be fairly modest with much emphasis on preaching and lecturing. But early reports were good for Bradford. By May, months before the…

After the Palace of Westminster was destroyed by fire in 1834, a Royal Commission was set up in 1841 to deal with the question of how to decorate the new palace (by then already under construction). A series of competitions and exhibitions of…

Marcus Huish visits, in 1907, St Laurence's Church, Chorley, the burial place of the Standish family. The Standish pew was described by Pevsner as "the best example of its type in North Lancashire" and had become another point of interest on the…

Harwich has a claim to fame in the story of the Pilgrim Fathers; the captain of the ship, Christopher Jones, at one time lived and married in the town, and the ship itself – according to the best guesses of some historians - was possibly even built…