The Way-Back Machine, Stage 2
This essay is about Stage 2 of our trip to England (I wrote about Stage 1 last week, on June 9). The image above is a snip from my detailed planning spreadsheet, showing where we’ll be from September 6 through September 11.
First, here’s the Airbnb where we’ll be staying.
This apartment is a large open space, with a bedroom separate from the large open-plan living room and kitchen space. The interior is well decorated and the kitchen and bathroom fixtures look clean and modern. We’ll also have access to a patio area with a table and chairs. One of the comments on the listing makes me eager to visit this location: “If peacocks jump on to your car please be patient and gently shoo shoo them off quietly and slowly.” Will do.
Derby and Chaddesden, Derbyshire
We’re visiting two locations during this leg of our trip – the city of Derby and the nearby village of Chaddesden. This is 54 miles (90 minutes) southeast of Darlton.
I don’t have a specific building to visit for Derby, but I do have a couple of locations I want to visit. They’re connected to my 12th great-grandfather, Rowland Cotton, and his family.
Rowland Cotton
Rowland Cotton (1557-1604) is my paternal 12th great-grandfather through my Ellefritz family line. Rowland was born in London and raised there by other family members after his father died in 1559. Rowland attended St. Paul’s School in London and entered the Inner Temple to study law when he was 14 years old. After years of study and unable to become a barrister (those positions were often distributed through favoritism and patronage, and Rowland had neither) he moved 130 miles north to Derby, where he married and had four children.
I have found information that the Cotton family lived on Full Street in the heart of Derby, a 10-minute walk from St. Alkmund’s Church. I know that Rowland was married in this church and I have found other records connecting this family to the church. I’m a little confused about this church, however. The building I have pictures of was built in the 19th century, and it was demolished in 1968. There appear to have been previous St. Alkmund’s churches on this site, but I can’t find anything about them.
I have a photo of what purports to be Rowland Cotton’s gravestone in the nearby Nottingham Road Cemetery in Chaddesden. I can’t read this and I hope that I’ll be able to find this stone and get a better picture of it. This is puzzling to me – this looks like a fairly new cemetery and I can’t figure out why the old graves are there unless they moved the graves when the old church was torn down. I hope to find out more about this before we make this trip. I have posted some questions on the Derbyshire Family History Society Facebook page and have started chatting with a few of these folks who are interested in helping me out.
Scrooby, Nottinghamshire
The next village we’ll be visiting is Scrooby in Nottinghamshire. This is about 23 miles (30 minutes) northeast of Darlton
This is the church we’ll be visiting in Scrooby:
William Brewster
William Brewster (1566-1644) is my paternal 12th great-grandfather through my Arnold family line. He is the best-known of my ancestors I’ll be connecting with on this trip, as he was the spiritual leader of the group of Pilgrims who came to Plymouth, Massachusetts, on the Mayflower in 1620. His life is very well-documented, but I’m going to focus on his activities in Scrooby for this essay. Educated at Cambridge (a hotbed of nonconformist thought in the late 16th century), he served in diplomatic posts in the Netherlands prior to returning to Scrooby in 1590 to administer his father’s estate. He succeeded to his father’s position as Archbishop Sandy’s bailiff-receiver (minor court official), and was soon appointed postmaster there.
William was one of the original members of a separatist congregation at Scrooby that met in the manor house where William and his family lived. When this group fell afoul of the established church, they first went to Amsterdam and then to Leiden. In 1609, William was made the church’s elder in Leiden. When the Leiden congregation decided to leave Europe and establish a colony overseas, William was asked to lead the first group of settlers. The Speedwell and the Mayflower soon departed for the colonies; William and his family (his wife Mary and two of their five children) had originally been aboard the Speedwell, but transferred to the Mayflower when the Speedwell sprung a leak and had to return to England.
I descend from William and Mary through their daughter Patience (1600-1634).
Kirk Ella, Yorkshire
The next village we’ll visit, Kirk Ella, is about 55 miles (90 minutes) northeast of Darlton. While we’re in Kirk Ella, we’ll also visit Hull (to the east) and the city of York (anoth 32 miles or 55 minutes). To get from York back to Darlton will take about 90 minutes, so we’ll be driving a lot on this day. This is the church we’ll be visiting in Kirk Ella.
William Acye
William Acye (or Acey, or Acy) (1596-1690) is my paternal 11th great-grandfather through my Arnold family line. I have information that several generations of this family were baptized, married, or buried at this church. William served as a churchwarden in 1620. In his 1625 will, his father (also named William) requested to be buried “within my Parrish church of Kirkelley near the stall where I usually sit.”
William 1596 migrated with his family (his wife and four children) to Massachusetts on the ship John of London with the party of Ezekiel Rogers in 1638. After wintering in Salem they moved and founded Rowley, Essex County, Massachusetts.
Boston, Lincolnshire
Our last excursion takes us to the town of Boston in Lincolnshire, about 50 miles (1 hour) southeast of Darlton. The name “Boston” is said to be a contraction of “St. Botolph’s town,” and a church by that name is the reason for our visit to this town.
John Cotton
John Cotton (1585-1652) is my paternal 11th great-grandfather through my Ellefritz family line. I wrote about John’s father, Roland, earlier in this essay. John continues his family story in the town of Boston. After attending the Derby School, John went to Trinity College, Cambridge, where he served as a sizar (kind of an early work-study student). After receiving his BA from Trinity, he earned an MA at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, called “the most Puritan college in the kingdom.” He then accepted a fellowship at Emmanuel College that allowed him to continue his studies for another five years. During this time he began his work as a preacher.
In 1610, at the age of 27, he was appointed vicar of St. Botolph’s Church in Boston, described as “the most magnificent parochial edifice in the kingdom,” although he was not awarded his Bachelor of Divinity degree until 1613.
His theology developed over the years, and he became strongly anti-Catholic but also opposed to the established Church of England, which had in his view separated form the Catholic Church in name only. Cotton became an important member of the non-separatist Puritans. At St. Botolph’s, Cotton became renowned for his preaching and his lectures. He began to hold “alternative” services where Puritanism could be more fully embraced; he was suspended for this at one point, but was soon reinstated and was able to operate comfortably under tolerant bishops until Charles I, who became king in 1625, began to crack down on Puritans.
In 1630, Cotton traveled to Southampton to preach a farewell sermon to the members of the Winthrop Fleet that was embarking to settle a colony at Massachusetts Bay. Cotton had been part of a planning conference for this trip, but he did not emigrate with them. After seeing these colonists on their way, Cotton and his wife became seriously ill with malaria; Cotton recovered, although his wife died. He began to think about joining the emigrants in Massachusetts.
In 1632, he remarried (to a widow, Sarah Hankred Story, who had a daughter), and received word almost immediately after that that he was to be summoned to the High Court for his non-conforming practices. The threat to his safety was so great that he disappeared into the “Puritan underground” in England, staying for a time in Northamptonshire, Surrey, and other places around London. Members of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, hearing of his plight, wrote to him urging him to come to New England. He reunited with his wife and step-daughter and they made their way to Kent, where they boarded the Griffin – which was also carrying fellow ministers Thomas Hooker and Samuel Stone, along with Edward Hutchinson, the oldest son of Puritan leader Anne Hutchinson. Sarah had a child while they were on board the Griffin; they names him “Seaborne.” Yes, yes, he was.
Cotton settled in the Massachusetts town of Boston, which had been named after its English counterpart in 1630. He is recognized today as the preeminent minister and theologian of the Massachusetts Bay Colony.
There are more twists to this story. The sixth child born to John Cotton and Sarah, Mary, married Increase Mather, another prominent Puritan minister in Massachusetts, who was president of Harvard College for 20 years and was also connected to the Salem Witch Trials. Increases’s father was Richard Mather, another prominent Puritan minister in England and in Boston. Mary and Increase had several children, including Puritan Minister Cotton Mather, who became prominent in his persecution of witches in Salem.
Just to make things a little more confusing: after the death of John Cotton 1585 in 1652, his wife Sarah married Richard Mather. Richard thus became Mary’s stepfather as well as her father-in-law. I think.