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Monday, July 25, 2016
The End of the World
July 21, 2016
On our third day in England, Jonathan, Marion and I took a
long journey to Alford in Lincolnshire, birthplace of my ancestor Anne
Hutchinson. We took a train from Liverpool Street Station in London, near our
flat, to Cambridge, where we rented a car for the two hour drive to Alford. To
be clear, that’s two hours when you don’t get lost.
Driving in the rain, and on the left side of the road,
making the occasional wrong turn, made for a grueling journey. Alford is a long
way from London in many ways. Whereas London is bustling and filled with
energy, Alford feels like something of a ghost town. It wasn’t easy to find a
place to eat lunch.
St. Wilfred’s, the local parish, memorializes Hutchinson’s
birth and baptism in that community with a framed notice and picture on the
wall of the sanctuary. Anne was 14 when her family moved to London (quite near
to our flat).
While today Alford seems a small town pro Brexit backwater,
in the early 17th century it was a center of Puritan revival in
large part because of its location across the North Sea from Holland. Anne
moved back to Alford as an adult and found herself in the middle of that
energy. John Cotton became the charismatic pastor in Boston (for which the city
in Massachusetts was named), twenty miles away from Alford.
Anne herself was gentry on both sides of her family. Her
maternal grandparents built Canons Ashby, a manor house in Northhamptonshire.
(Princess Diana and her children are included among their descendants). Anne
did not marry well in terms of the standards of English aristocracy, but she
did marry money. William Hutchinson was a merchant of considerable wealth and
able to fund the migration of their large family to Massachusetts, including
fifteen surviving children and all the servants required to live comfortably in
those days.
Traveling through Lincolnshire one gets a sense of the land.
Clearly the sea was the primary means of transportation. Anne and William
regularly traveled the twenty miles to Boston to hear Cotton preach. Like Anne,
William, and their families in 1631, I am traveling across the North Atlantic,
destination Boston. I am going by way of New York, where Anne died.
If you are interested in learning more about Anne’s life,
one of her biographies, American Jezebel, is on the sabbatical shelf in the CMC
library.
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