d only about a score of years before Bradford's birth. The
people were comparatively rude and uneducated, with few schools; and
papal influence yielded more slowly away from the governmental
headquarters. If Mary Queen of Scots had not been executed shortly
before the Puritan churches arose, it is difficult to see how or when
they could have lived so near her seat of power. But Elizabeth, in her
laudable aim to uplift the nation by improving the people and repressing
the nobles, encouraged the incoming of tens of thousands of Dutch, of
whom many flocked to the fair lowlands east and north, imparting their
tolerant ideas, bestowing names upon numerous localities, and producing
a marked effect in the speech and blood of the inhabitants. The Queen
required every family of Hollanders to take an English apprentice in
their imported arts and crafts. Thus England changed rapidly from a
country merely agricultural to one also manufacturing, where industry
was pursued in weaving cloth and in glass, pottery, iron and various
metals, wrought not in factories at first but in private houses as once
was commonly done in New England.

The religious effect of this immigration was not in the royal reckoning;
for much as Elizabeth hated the papacy, she despised its counterpart, as
quite too good for her liking, namely, the body of her subjects which
represented an intelligent faith, and holy practice according to the
accepted dictates of a revered, studied and intensely cherished Sacred
Scripture. Though she could do no more than patronize, from political
motives, any order of spiritual devotion as long as she herself would
not learn to love devoutly, she failed to realize that the infusion of
the virile Puritan element, regardless of racial strain, in the field of
religion saved her authorized church from relapsing into Romanism. Her
successor, James, was a fit son of Mary of Scotland, in his intolerance
towards Puritans, Protestants though they were.

Austerfield itself, though having less than three hundred residents, was
the scene of a great session in 702, when the Archbishop of Canterbury
and the bishops of almost all England met with King Aldfrid to hear the
complaint of Wilfred the Bishop of York, who was so ardent a Romanist
that the former king had deposed him. The English under Aldfrid won
against the papal party, but before the venerable Wilfred died he was
restored to office and canonized, and the first Puritan assembly afte