In 1607 most of England’s population was rural, living in manorial villages and on the farmsteads of large estates, spread out across the countryside. There were few towns as large as 1,000 people. Apart from the capital, Bristol and Norwich were the only “big” towns. Wealth lay in the land; living lay in farming it. The agrarian economy, way of life and quality of life in the early 17th century remained largely unchanged from what it had been two centuries earlier. It would be 200 years more before the introduction of elementary machines like the seed drill would begin to transform the way the land was farmed.

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The one element of life that had changed dramatically over the last two generations was religion.

Through the reigns of Henry VIII and his children, the country’s formal ecclesiastical allegiance had switched four times. Religious passions were still strong, and nearly everyone from the court to the croft believed their personal convictions held eternal consequences. In the Suffolk town of Bury St. Edmunds, where Captain Gosnold went to church with his family, the churchyard contained the remains of men who had died in flames at the stake within living memory for their Protestant convictions under Catholic Queen Mary. An early 20th-century monument honors their memory in the close of St. Edmundsbury Cathedral.

In the East of England in particular, a desire to distance the local church from Catholic worship and doctrine was strong; it was a hotbed of Puritanism, fueled at Cambridge University. In 1603 the new English king had been presented with the Millenary Petition, signed by 1,000 Puritan clerics and lay leaders, requesting more reforms for the Anglican Church. At the Hampton Court Conference of 1604, James rejected most of their demands. Hundreds refused to comply, and more than 100 clergymen lost their living within the Anglican Church. Dissenting congregations grew—the folks who became Congregationalists and Baptists.

Scottish Presbyterians wanted a Presbyterian form of church government; the Anglican conservatives wanted to impose bishops on the Kirk of Scotland. Catholics and dissenters sought freedom of conscience and of worship. What King James I wanted was control. Under James’ rules, all were coerced into worshiping in the Church of England.

Up in Lincolnshire, local congregations of dissenters in the villages of Scrooby, Babworth and Austerfield determined together to leave their homes and homeland to find freedom to worship as they chose. We know them as the Pilgrims. It is their 400th anniversary too. After elaborate preparations had been made, in the autumn of 1607 they quietly slipped away from their villages and made their way to the coast just above the small port of Boston, where a Dutch ship was waiting. Even fleeing, however, violated James’ law. When their plans were betrayed, the groups’ leaders, William Bradford, John Robinson, William Brewster and others, were imprisoned in the Guildhall in Boston (where the courtroom and their jail cells can still be seen), and the families were forced to return home. The next spring they made their escape successfully and re-formed their community at Leiden in the Netherlands. In 1620, of course, some in the company would sail Mayflower across the Atlantic.

Back on board Godspeed, it was not religious freedom that motivated the sailors and settlers, but commerce. The Virginia Company was a stock company aiming to make money. Theirs was an economic migration, seeking a better life in a New World. They sailed without medicine; there were no antibiotics, no anesthetic and no analgesic stronger than alcohol. It would be nine years before William Harvey announced his discovery of the circulation of the blood, and 200 years before the germ theory of disease was widely accepted. They sailed without communications; there was no telephone, radio, radar or satellite navigation. Captain Gosnold could determine latitude with a sextant, but it would be a century and a half before navigators could measure longitude. There were no manufactured goods aboard; every shoe and shirt, nail, barrel and tool was the product of an artisan.

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