every man (none staggering at it) tooke the oathe of Supremacy, and then entered the Assembly."

...

When we look at the acts of this body we are struck with their just conception of their rights as an assembly. They asserted the right to judge of the election and return of their members, and, in its exercise, excluded the delegates sent from the plantation of Capt. John Martin, because, by the terms of his patent, he appeared to be exempt from the general form of government which had been given the colony; and, in addition, they petitioned the London Company that they would examine the patent of Capt. Martin, and "in case they shall finde anything in this, or in any other parte of his graunte whereby that clause towardes the conclusion of the great charter (viz., that all grauntes, as well of the one sorte as of the other, respectively, be made with equal favour, and graunts of like liberties and immunities as neer as may be, to the ende that all complainte of partiality and indifferency may be avoided) might in any sorte be contradicted, or the uniformity and equality of lawes and orders extending over the whole Colony might be impeached; that they would be pleased to remove any such hindrance as may diverte out of the true course the free and public current of Justice." Thus early did Virginia insist upon the equality of her citizens before the law, a principle inserted in her declaration of rights in 1776, when she became a State, in the provisions, that no man or set of men are entitled to exclusive or separate emoluments or privileges from the community, but in consideration of public services;" and, "that the people have a right to uniform government, and therefore that no government separate from or independent of the government of Virginia ought to be erected or established within the limits thereof."

66

4 Acknowledgment of the king as head of the English Church. Failure to receive it might have laid a man open to suspicion of Catholicism.

Having thus purged their roll, the assembly proceeded according to their speaker's report, as follows: "The Speaker, who a long time had been extreame sickly, and therefore not able to passe through long harangues, delivered in briefe to the whole assembly the occasions of their meetings. Which done, he read unto them the commission for establishing the counsell of estate, and the general assembly, wherein their duties were described to the life. Having thus prepared them, he read over unto them the greate Charter, or commission of priviledges, orders, and lawes, sent by Sir George Yeardley out of Englande; which, for the more ease of the committees, having divided into fower books, he read the former two the same forenoon, for expeditions sake, a second time over, and so they were referred to the perusall of two committees, which did reciprocally consider of either, and accordingly brought in their opinions. . . in case we should finde ought not perfectly squaring with the state of this Colony, or any lawe which did presse or binde too harde, that we might, by waye of humble petition, seeke to have it redressed, especially because this great Charter is to binde us and our heyers forever."

Nothing can throw a clearer light on the state of the colony than the acts of this assembly; and in them we can discern the germs of the free institutions of the United States of to-day, germs which reappeared in the colonies subsequently planted. . . .

The question of the validity of the acts of the assembly, till they were disallowed by the authorities in England, was one which was unsettled in the year 1758, when the act passed which permitted debts contracted to be paid in tobacco to be solved in currency at a fixed rate, the resistance to which, by the clergy gave rise to the famous "Parson's cause. The power to disallow the orders of the London Company was a great stride in the direction of independent local government, and the promise of it by the London Company shows to what extent the spirit of liberty was

nourished in that celebrated body during the arbitrary reign of James the First, a fact that excited his hatred of the corporation and caused him to take from it its charter.

William Wirt Henry: The First Legislative Assembly in America, in Report of American Historical Association, 1893, pp. 302-304; 309-10; 314.

QUESTIONS

How was the first assembly of Virginia authorized? What powers was it to have? Describe the manner in which the different elements of the assembly were seated. How was its first meeting begun? Where was the assembly held? How did the assembly assert the right to judge of the qualifications of its members? In what sense did the assembly vindicate the equality of all citizens before the law? How far did the assembly claim the right of revising the great charter or body of laws?

V

THE PILGRIM COUNTRY

The sketches of the characters and influence of Brewster and Robinson could not be bettered. The author's conclusion that the Pilgrim Fathers, before falling under the influence of Brewster and Robinson, were but common folk no more intelligent or inspired in their own generation than the Scrooby folk are to-day is assumed rather than proved. There is such a thing as the removal of the best and most intellectual families of a village by successive migrations. At any rate, even in the seventeenth century, uneducated Englishmen showed ability to assimilate new ideas very quickly. Robinson and Brewster perhaps supplied at the first the moral stamina that induced the Pilgrims to cling through thick and thin to their beliefs.

On the southern margin of Yorkshire the traveler alights to-day at the station of Bawtry. It is an uninteresting village, with a rustic inn. More than a mile to the southward, in Nottinghamshire, lies the pleasant but commonplace village of Scrooby. About a mile to the north

of Bawtry is Austerfield, a hamlet of brick villages. crowded together along the road. It has a picturesque little church built in the Middle Ages, the walls of which are three feet thick. This church will seat more than a hundred people nowadays by the aid of a rather modern extension. In the seventeenth century it was smaller and there was no ceiling. Then one could see the rafters of the roof while shuddering with cold in the grotto-like interior. The country around is level and unpicturesque.

But one is here in the cradle of great religious movements. In Scrooby and in Austerfield were born the Pilgrims who made the first successful settlement in New England. A little to the east lies Gainsborough, from which migrated to Holland in 1606 the saintly Separatist, John Smyth, who gave form to a great Baptist movement of modern times. A few miles to the northeast of Bawtry, in Lincolnshire, lies Epworth, the nest from which the Wesleys issued more than a hundred years later to spread Methodism over the world. Religious zeal seems to have characterized this region even before the Reformation, for the country round about Scrooby was occupied at that time by a number of religious houses.

The little Austerfield church and the old church at Scrooby are the only picturesque or romantic elements of the environment, and on these churches the Pilgrims turned their backs as though they had been temples of Baal. In the single street of Austerfield the traveler meets the cottagers to-day and essays to talk with them. They are heavy and somewhat stolid, like most other rustic people in the north country, and an accent to which their ears are not accustomed amuses and puzzles them. No tradition of the Pilgrims lingers among them. They have never heard that anybody ever went out of Austerfield to do anything historical. They listen with a bovine surprise if you speak to them of this exodus, and they refer you to the old clerk of the parish, who will know all about it. The venerable clerk is a striking figure, not unlike that parish

clerk painted by Gainsborough. This oracle of the hamlet knows that Americans come here as on a pilgrimage, and he tells you that one of them, a descendant of Governor Bradford, offered a considerable sum for the disused stone font at which Bradford, the Pilgrim, was baptized. But the traveler turns away at length from the rustic folk of Austerfield and the beer-drinkers over their mugs in the inn at Bawtry, and the villagers at Scrooby, benumbed by that sense of utter commonplaceness which is left on the mind of the stranger by such an agricultural community. The Pilgrims, then, concerning whom poems have been written, and in whose honor orations without number have been made, were just common folk like these, trudging through wheat fields and along the muddy clay highways of the days of Elizabeth and James. They were just such men as these and they were not. They were such as these would be if they were vivified by enthusiasm. We may laugh at superfluous scruples in rustic minds, but none will smile at brave and stubborn loyalty to an idea when it produces such steadfast courage as that of the Pilgrims.

And yet when the traveler has resumed his journey, and recalls Scrooby and Bawtry and Austerfield, the stolid men and gossiping women, the narrow pursuits of the plowman and the reaper, and remembers the flat, naked, and depressing landscape, he is beset by the old skepticism about the coming of anything good out of Nazareth. Nor is he helped by remembering that at the time of Bradford's christening at the old stone font the inhabitants of Austerfield are said to have been " a most ignorant and licentious people," and that earlier in the same century John Leland speaks of "the meane townlet of Scrooby."

But Leland's description of the village suggests the influence that caused Scrooby and the wheat fields thereabout to send forth, in the beginning of the seventeenth century and of a new reign, men capable of courage and fortitude sufficient to make them memorable, and to make these three townlets places of pilgrimage in following centuries.