In the Footpaths of the Pilgrim Fathers

The Pilgrim Fathers museum
in the oldest house in Leiden
(built in 1372)

Ask most people round here to name three Dutch cities, and you'll usually get some combination of Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Delft and Den Haag (aka the Hague in its anglicised form). This means when I tell people that my parents live in Leiden, the next question is always "where's that?" (It's about 20 minutes south of Amsterdam and east of Den Haag).

To be fair, I didn't know where Leiden was either, until my parents moved there 5 years ago, so I thought it was time to share a little of Leiden's rich history. Leiden is an ancient city at the place where a river splits into three branches. To the extent that any river in this flat land can be said to flow (rather than simply resembling a wide, deep canal), the city is encircled by two branches of the river and the third runs through the middle, facilitating trade. Of course, this means a lot of bridges (engineer's paradise!), some of which can open to allow tall boats through to the markets.

It turns out that one thing Leiden is famous for is the Pilgrim Fathers, who settled in the city between 1609 and 1620 as refugees from England in search of religious freedom for their Puritan faith. Last week we visited a tiny museum behind one of the main shopping streets, housed in the oldest house in Leiden (dated via tree rings in the oak beams to 1372). 

Processional banner from 1500s

There were a few displays, and lots of ancient objects but most of the attraction was the curator, who told us stories and answered our questions as we sat on an old wooden bench (or in Dad's case, on a surprisingly sturdy wooden chair that we were told dated back to 1200!) He also collects old books, and it was fascinating to see how fragments of even older manuscripts were used to bind the books. There were beautiful letters and tiny annotations all tucked into the spine of books made a hundred years later. Recycling, medieval style - and preserves some intriguing fragments for us to gaze at later!

The house itself was built to house Catholic priests working at the nearby Pieterskirk, so interspersed with the story of the (very) Protestant pilgrims were artefacts from the city's Catholic history. One great example was the processional banner pictured here, which was originally assumed to be from the late 19th century, because processions went out of fashion after the Reformation. However, the banner has a seam partway across it, demonstrating that the banner is actually pre-Reformation when the width of a piece of cloth was limited by the length of a person's arms on a hand loom.     

One of the obvious questions for us was to understand who they were, why they came to Leiden and why they later left on the Mayflower and formed a colony in America which became part of the founding story of a new country. Indeed, it seems that the mythological status of the Pilgrim Fathers far exceeds their actual importance (given that the first colony in America was actually on the border with Mexico 800 years ago, and there were plenty of other people who founded colonies since).  

Medieval wooden cabinet,
complete with knucklebones
used as children's toys

Around 100 pilgrims came first to Amsterdam, but left in a hurry the following year because another Puritan church was immersed in scandal and they didn't want to be tarred with the same brush just because their approach to faith was similar. Leiden was the obvious choice for their next move, because it was a city in need of people (in 1574, the city was besieged and eventually liberated on 3rd October, but lost thousands of people in the process). To get the city and its many cloth making businesses back on its feet, migrants and refugees were encouraged because labour laws were more open than elsewhere. Perhaps we should think more about the contribution of migrants and refugees in our cities today... 

Over the 11 years that they were in Leiden, a number of others joined them from elsewhere in England. However, in 1620 the security of the refugees was threatened as the country went to war again. They realised that if they stayed, they would be called up to fight for the Dutch and the ability to worship freely would be tightly regulated to prevent dissent. So 102 people headed off on the Mayflower for a new start in a new country, and the rest is history... The American tradition of Thanksgiving originated in the pilgrims' celebration when they safely arrived in their new home, a tradition thought to have been strongly influenced by their time in Leiden where a major Thanksgiving celebration was called each year remembering the day the siege was broken. 

See also

• A windy wildlife walk in Leiden
• How the Dutch made Fairtrade history
• Pilgrim Fathers Museum official website
• More about the Pilgrim Fathers in Leiden