From hence the bleak hamlets of Torworth and Ranskill lead to Scrooby, set amidst the heathy vale of the winding Idle, which sends its silver threads in aimless fashion amidst the meadows. Here the road leaves Nottinghamshire and enters Yorkshire. Beside the road at the little rise called Scrooby Top, stands a farmhouse, once the old Scrooby Inn, kept by Thomas Fisher as a kind of half-way house between Bawtry and Barnby Moor, and calculated to intercept the posting business of the “Bell” and of the Bawtry inns. Competition was keen-edged on the roads in those times.
There seems to have once been a turnpike gate at Scrooby, for a murder was committed there in 1779, when John Spencer, a shepherd, calling up William Geadon, the turnpike man, one July night under the pretence of having some cattle to go through, knocked him down and killed him with a hedge-stake and then went upstairs and murdered the turnpike man’s mother. Spencer was hanged at Nottingham, and gibbeted on the scene of his crime. The stump of the gibbet was still visible in 1833.
This is the place whence came the chief among the “Pilgrim Fathers” who at last, in 1620, succeeded in leaving England in the Mayflower, for America. Scrooby is the place of origin of that Separatist Church which refused allegiance to the Church of England. Here lived William Brewster, son of the bailiff of Scrooby Manor, once a Palace of the Archbishops of York. In those times the Great North Road wandered, as a lane, down through Scrooby village, and all traffic went this way. William Brewster the elder, bailiff and postmaster, was a government servant who kept relays of horses primarily for the use of State messengers. His salary was “twenty pence a day”; the equivalent of about £300 per annum of our money. Although very definite regulations were laid down by the Board of Posts for the conduct of this service, they were not strictly observed, and a postmaster often traded for himself as well, keeping horses for hire and being an innkeeper as well.
At any rate, the Brewsters were considerable people; and William the elder could afford to send his son to Peterhouse, Cambridge, and later had sufficient influence to secure him service with one of Queen Elizabeth’s Secretaries of State in Holland. But the Secretary fell into disgrace, and young William’s diplomatic career ended at an early age.
He returned home to Scrooby, where he found employment with his father, and eventually succeeded him, in 1594, holding the position of postmaster for seventeen years.
Let us see, from one surviving record, what kind of business was his, and how prosperous he must have been apart from his official emoluments. One of his guests, as virtually an innkeeper, was Sir Timothy Hutton, in 1605. Sir Timothy paid him, for guide and conveyance to Tuxford, 10s., and for candle, supper and breakfast 7s. 6d. On his return journey he paid 8s. for horses to Doncaster, and a threepenny tip to the ostler.
Meanwhile, Brewster, nourished in that old nest of Archbishops, had imbibed distinctly anti-episcopal ideas, probably in Holland. His activities in founding the Separatist Church led to his resignation of the postmaster’s office in 1607. In that old Manor House where he lived assembled others of his ways of thought: the Revd. Mr. Clifton, rector of Babworth, near Retford, William Bradford of Austerfield, John Smyth, and other shining lights and painful and austere persons. William Bradford records how the congregation “met ordinarily at William Brewster’s house on the Lord’s Day; and with great love he entertained them when they came, making provision for them, to his great charge.”
They would not attend services at the parish church; an offence then punishable by fine and imprisonment, and thus, persecuted, there was no ultimate course but to leave the country: itself not for some time permitted. “They were,” wrote William Bradford, “hunted and persecuted on every side. Some were taken and clapt up in prison, others had their houses beset and watched, night and day, and hardly escaped their hands; and the most were fain to fly and leave their houses and habitations and the means of their livelihood.”