The Pilgrim Read online

  Tom Foot, the hired husbandman, was a robust youth of my own age. I was weak-limbed and quickly wearied from the vigorous labour. My arms and back ached. But by November, when the autumn planting was finished, my hands were callused and my muscles had grown hard. I learned to slaughter swine and bullocks, the latter with a poleaxe that, at first, took me three or four blows between their big eyes. Covered with blood, bits of bone, and brains, I fully apprehended that we live fallen in a fallen world, wherein life and death feed upon each other.

  Thus, I learned much on the farm, but not to ride a horse. I was scared of being bitten by one. My uncle Roger kept two geldings and a mare. They knew that I was frightened of them and tried to bite me. I always walked the three miles into town. I am glad that there are no horses in New England.

  Along with an unmarried shepherd by the name of Peter Patch, my uncle kept two unmarried women servants and two other unmarried male servants in husbandry. They were twins named Jacob and Richard Fletcher. Uncle Roger called them “Jacob” and “Esau” because the latter was much hairier than his brother; the hairs grew thickly upon his broad back, chest, and arms.

  Now this Esau, like the Esau in Scripture, was a knave; he refused to accompany the rest of us to St. James on the Lord’s Day but slept until dinner. He was a diligent labourer and so my uncle was loathe to report him to the constable, as Esau could not have paid the two-shilling fine. My niggardly uncle would not spend the cash himself; Esau would have been put in the stocks, and my uncle would have lost the former’s day’s work, or more.

  Then Providence willed that during the second year I was at the farm, Esau was much bruised by the fall of a dead elm tree in a high wind and forced to spend almost a week abed. At length, my uncle said to him, “Up with you and return to your labours! For those who indulge themselves in idleness, the express command of God unto us is that we should let them starve.”

  My uncle commanded Esau to go to church, saying, “God hath warned you not to slink from Him! The next time, you absent yourself from church upon the Sabbath, you will surely die!” Thereafter, Esau Fletcher kept the Sabbath as well as any Christian soul in St. James parish. At Sunday breakfast, my aunt Eliza gave us servants thinner slices of the white loaf, flavoured with nutmeg, and but one mug each of hot boiled milk. For supper, she oft served herself alone a special diet of cow-calf or wether mutton.

  The following July, she brake a tooth upon a cherry stone, and, God forgive me, I had the satisfaction of reciting to myself from Psalm 3:7, “O Lord, arise; help me, my God: for thou hast smitten all mine enemies upon the cheek bone: thou hast broken the teeth of the wicked.” The broken tooth greatly pained her until she had it extracted.

  • • •

  Also on the twelfth of September in the year of Christ 1611, which fell upon a Thursday—I made a note of it—on that evening, after supper, upon which I began reading from the Bible, my uncle Roger asked me to also read aloud to him. And thus it became our custom, evening after evening, for three years, three months, and four-and-twenty days. Sometimes, it is true, my uncle fell asleep, particularly during the harvest, sheep shearing, or other long days of hard labour. And sometimes, being otherwise occupied, he missed the occasion. But more oft than not, he harkened to the sacred text.

  He confessed that the meaning of the verses oft perplexed him—as they did me—but that—like me—he was bewitched by their melodious sound. He was charmed by similes, metaphors, and imagery, though he was unacquainted with those poetical terms until I taught them to him.

  He committed to memory vivid utterances in common speech that he had heard over the years in the market-place, in the streets, in the taverns, at fairs, &c. I wrote these down: “A press of people standing as close as mutton pies in an oven.” “From the sprig of his cap to his spangled shoe strap.” “Laughing like a ploughman at a Morris dance.” And then there was the verse of a song my uncle had learned at the Woodbury Fair held near Bere Regis about the eighteenth of every September:

  The plough is the Lord’s pen.

  It writes the land to sow our seed

  To feed the poor that stand in need.

  Neither the Prince nor peasants read

  Without this pen, or earn their bread.

  It bringeth increase to the most and least

  Such food as serveth man and beast.

  My uncle Roger said, “I’m a fool for words.” When next I looked upon a plough, I thought, “Thou art God’s pen.”

  Uncle Roger reciprocated for my reading Scripture to him by teaching me to load, prime, aim, discharge, and cleanse his musket. I learned to make char cloth from linen strips that ignited by striking sparks from a flint and steel upon the strip, and from the little fire, lighting the tip of the match cord, blowing on its coal to keep it smouldering, and using that to ignite the fine powder in the musket’s pan. The match cord, I discovered, was soaked in saltpeter, yet difficult to keep glowing in a high wind, rain, or snow. Roger also taught me how to mold bullets and goose-shot, with which we went hunting and fowling upon the Downs. He was a good marksman; I was not. As such, it was only by an intervention of Providence that my shot shattered the left elbow of the savage Massachusetts Indian in Wessagusset during the spring of 1623.

  • • •

  The Devil engendered my encounters with Jane Fuller. The daughter of Matthew Fuller, a miller in Winterbourne, she was a maid at The Sign of the Bull in the High East Street, whence I delivered some of my uncle’s cider in the spring of my sixteenth year. She was a year older than I and jested with me about my being shy.

  I said, “Fetch me a cup of ale.”

  She pulled at my sleeve and said, “You need not fear me.”

  I said, “I fear you not.”

  “Then come,” she said. “Come, drink a pot with me.” But I hastened through the door and onto the High East Street.

  I returned to The Sign of the Bull upon the following market day. Jane reiterated her previous request, and we drank a pot together. She and her father were parishioners of All Saints in the High Street. She fulminated against their rector, Mr. Lane, who had made a goodly profit selling corn to the Mayor for the poor and had become so proud he no longer spake to common folk in his congregation, like Jane and her father.

  I tried to persuade Jane to come to services at St. James, but she said, “I will stay with Mr. Lane. Does not Scripture say that pride goeth before a fall? Is that not Scripture? I want to be there when Mr. Lane stumbles and falls upon his bum. God is just; it will happen one day in church. Perhaps on his way to the pulpit. You wait and see!”

  I went to see Jane Fuller at The Sign of the Bull every market day for a month. We drank country brew. One afternoon, she wound the string of my shirt about her forefinger and entreated me to go a-maying with her. I refused to take part in a pagan ritual. But at dawn on May Day, I succumbed to temptation and walked into town. I saw Jane return with other maidens and lads from Conant’s wood, wherein they had sipped a drop or two of dew from the tips of their fingers.

  I confess that I joined them gathering green branches, Wind Flowers, violets, Early Purples, thyme, and Kingcups. Then we all went singing from door to door. I did not sing those pagan songs. But I listened to the music of the pipes and drums in the streets and watched the heathen Maypole, a goodly pine tree, bare of branches, and some fifty foot in length, covered all over with flowers and herbs, being borne to the market square by two yoke of oxen. Each one had a sweet nosegay of flowers tied on the tip of his horns. On the village green by the Maypole, Jane put off her shoes and bared her breasts to me; I fled back to the farm.

  For weeks to come, I lost myself in my labour. I became a gardener sorting seeds, a thresher in the barn trying the strength of his flail, a mower whetting his scythe, a husbandman scouring his plow. I hedged, fenced, sowed, reaped, and gleaned until, by the grace of God, I was tormented no more by the thought of Jane Fuller
’s naked breasts, with their round, roseate buds.

  But Satan was hard at work upon the farm. I have mentioned the shepherd, Peter Patch, who with his dog, Hal, tended my uncle Roger’s flock of two hundred and thirty-three sheep. Patch drove the sheep twice each day between the hill pastures and the fields. He fed his flock, gathered the lambs, carried them in his bosom, and gently led those that were with young. He smeared Stockholm tar upon the leg wounds of his sheep; it never failed to heal them.

  He knew not his own age. I reckoned that he was about five-and-thirty years old. He suffered from sciatica that made him limp upon his left leg. His father was my grandfather’s shepherd; his mother, who had lived idly and wandered about the country, went into London and disappeared when Peter was a child.

  In the summer, using sprinkled water and smoke, Patch acquired honey for the household from a hive in the hollow oak on the Ridge. It was there at the end of July that I espied him buggering a ewe. His breeches were down about his ankles. He stood half-naked behind the ewe, between her hind legs, which he held by the hooves close to his hips. The ewe, with her rear end in the air, stood upon her front legs. Then Patch saw me and dropped her hind legs. The ewe ran away.

  Patch pulled up his breeches and said, “If you tell what you have seen me do this day, they will surely hang me, master, on Gallows Hill.”

  Tears trickled down his cheeks. He said, “Do not let them hang me, master. Report me not to the constable. But if you must, and they do hang me, I beg a favor of you, master. Soon as I hang there, give my legs a tug and break my neck. Will you do that for me? Do not let me slowly strangle. Hasten my death! Promise me as a godly Christian!”

  Said I, “I cannot promise you.”

  God forgive me, but I could not bring myself to denounce Peter Patch. It pleased the Lord to forgive my transgression, for it was some months thereafter that Christ brought me into His chambers, wherein I rejoiced in His love.

  This happened on my twentieth birthday, at about seven of the clock on Friday evening of the tenth of March in the year of Christ 1615, whilst I read to my uncle Roger from Scripture. I had reached the introduction to chapter V of the Second Book of Esdras from the Apocrypha, viz., “In the latter time, truth shall be hid. Unrighteousness and all wickedness shall reign in the world.”

  My uncle interrupted me, saying, “Read to me instead of the love of Christ for His Elect and ours for Him in the verses of that most excellent Song which was Solomon’s.” He belched.

  I read aloud, “Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth,” and was filled with a sense of Christ’s love and presence. The God of Israel was with me; I was wholly His. He was my soul’s husband, my unspeakable love, my exceeding great reward.

  I saw no shape but heard a voice only, saying, “Thou art cleansed from the blood and filth of thy sins.”

  I laughed and wept. The following day, my uncle set Esau to harrow the New Field and bade me have a rake’s head repaired at a blacksmith in Winterbourne, wherein I also bought a pound of nails. I then returned to the farm and chopped wood until night. I rejoiced in being saved by the grace of my soul’s Beloved.

  By earnest prayer, I sought counsel of God, the giver of all good gifts. My father, whose pious judgment and knowledge I much trusted, said to me, “Your rebirth in Christ hath divinely appointed you to serve Him as His Minister. You must take a Bachelor of Divinity degree at Emmanuel College, Cambridge.”

  I said, “Sir, I must needs confess to you that, even for Christ’s sake, I’m loathe to matriculate as a poor sizar obliged to pay my way by waiting upon my fellow students of good rank and quality. To serve them food and drink like a common servant, to fetch and carry for them. I cannot. Not even for Christ’s sake! Such is my pride. Help me conquer my satanical pride!”

  We bowed our heads, and he bade me pray from Psalm 36:11, “Let not the foot of pride come against me.”

  I could not conquer my pride. But God forgave me. My uncle said to me that he would pay my full cost of living at the University, in the amount of about forty-five pounds per annum, so that I could matriculate as a pensioner and live in a manner befitting the nephew of a prosperous yeoman such as he. His pride—or perhaps his love for me—overcame his habitual parsimony.

  My aunt Eliza protested his decision, but he was resolute. He likewise gave me a goodly pair of red gloves of kid from his shop, and, for travel apparel, his old black stockings, black breeches, jerkin, and his warm blue cloak. Then he hired a tailor to make me a black suit and doublet with silver buttons to wear at Emmanuel, wherein, according to my father, the students wore neither clerical cap nor gown. My uncle said to me, “I want you to do me proud amongst all them high and mighty gentlemen.”

  My uncle Roger wrote a new will, leaving his farm and glover’s shop to Tom Foot. Foot got drunk to celebrate in The Sign of the Bull.

  I was admitted to Cambridge for the following Michaelmas term. My father wrote a letter to his friend and former chamber mate at Christ Church, the Rev. William Barstow, who was the rector of All Angels Church, in Ashford in the Weald of Kent; he was the sole surviving heir of two nearby manors, managed by a steward. The Barstows were one of the most ancient of Kentish families. In the years since college, Barstow and my father had met regularly at the annual Commencement festivities held every July. Barstow’s son, Robin, aged fifteen, was in his second year as a pensioner at Emmanuel. He hoped to take a Bachelor of Arts, become a Fellow, and one day teach Latin there. His father prayed he would be converted by Emmanuel’s godly tutors and abandon his design. He wanted Robin to take a Bachelor of Divinity and become a Minister. Our fathers arranged for Roger and me to live together in a chamber near the library and share the same tutor, whose name was Charles Morton.

  I first saw Robin seated by the window in his study, reading a volume of the Aeneid. He gazed upon me over the pages of his book and asked in Latin, with a Kentish accent, “How well do you know your Virgil?”

  And I rejoined, likewise in Latin, “Passing fair.” (“Satis certe.”) We Cambridge men spake together only in Latin, Hebrew, or Greek.

  Robin said, “Then tell me this: how long did Alcestes live, and how many jars of Sicilian wine did he give to the Trojans?”

  “I cannot say.”

  Said he, “Well, neither can I.”

  We laughed together. With his blue eyes, his ruddy complexion, his fair hairs, Robin Barstow was the comeliest youth I have ever known.

  He joined with me and a company of six or eight others to pray together every evening and discourse about religion, presided over by our tutor in his chamber.

  Robin said, “I have need of continual under-proppings to hold up my soul.”

  When I told him about my conversion, he answered, “Nothing like that hath ever happened to me. I feel that God is at a great remove from my soul. How I envy thee! My father was converted some twenty years ago in Ashford and said that he trembled from the Divine Majesty and holiness which shone within him. The great weight of uncertainty was lifted from his soul. Like you, he knew he was saved! I live in hope of salvation. Be my soul’s companion. Help me reach out to God.”

  At my suggestion, he and I fasted upon every Sabbath. We prayed together every night before we went to sleep. Sometimes during the day I came upon him praying alone. Tears hung upon his long lashes and trickled down his ruddy, beardless cheeks. He confessed to me that he was much tormented by the sin of Onan. Then he cried out, “Save me, O my God. Save my corrupt soul.”

  Our fellow chamber mates, both from Sussex, were likewise studying Divinity; they hoped to get a nobleman’s chaplaincy or a lectureship in London paid for by a rich merchant or Company. There was much talk amongst them of one of the College Fellows receiving a lectureship at St. Sepulchre, in the amount of thirty pounds a year given by a wealthy chandler.

  All of us Cambridge men kept a Commonplace Book. I have mine with me to this day. Towa
rd the end of my first Lenten term, I noted how I spent my days of the week:

  Item. Chapel every morning at five of the clock. Private devotions.

  Item. Breakfasts are breakstudies. I abjure all but a draught of College beer and a morsel of bread.

  Item. The rest of the forenoon, disputations with tutor, lectures by Dons, which I copy out, word for word, in Swiftwriting; divers variants of same used by other students. Monday, Wednesday, Friday, lectures on Dialectics (Aristotle’s On Sophistical Refutations), Rhetoric (Cicero’s Topics), music. Tuesday, Thursday, likewise in the forenoon, lectures on Greek grammar (the Greek Testament), on Hebrew grammar (the Hebrew Scriptures), and on ethics (Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics).

  Item. Recreation every afternoon until dinner at five of the clock.

  Item. I reserve an hour after evening prayers in my study for translating a few lines of Plato’s Phaedrus or Homer’s Odyssey.

  Item. Before bedtime, prayers and discourse about religion, supervised by my tutor.

  Item. Saturday, in the forenoon, lectures on Divinity (Masculus’s Commonplaces of Christian Religion), Philosophy (Verro’s Ten Books of Natural Philosophy), Latin poetry (Virgil’s Aeneid) with emphasis upon grammar.

  Item. The Sabbath. Three divine services, conducted by College Fellows. Emmanuel’s Head Master, Laurence Chaderton, did not conform to Hampton Court Conference with King James upon his accession in 1603. Hence, with impunity because of Chaderton’s friends at Court, we follow a private course of prayer after our own fashion. Communion twice a month. Fellows never wear surplices, nor do we communicants kneel to receive communion, but are seated instead around the communion table, passing bread and cup from hand to hand.

  (If I may be so bold, the latter is a godly example of how communion might be served, when the Plymouth Church acquires a Minister.)