Boston in Lincolnshire looks, at first, like a typical fenland town. You see the big church, the flat fields, the muddy river, and you expect a modest local story. Then the names start to surface. Pilgrim Fathers. John Cotton. Boston, Massachusetts. Suddenly the quiet town on the Witham has a much longer shadow.
You and I can trace that shadow in two overlapping strands. One is the story of the Separatists we now call the Pilgrim Fathers. The other is the story of the Puritans who stayed inside the Church of England and then led the Great Migration to Massachusetts Bay. Boston, Lincolnshire sits at the crossroads of both.
A Busy Port and a Restless Church
In the early 1600s, Boston was a serious working port. Wool, cloth and other goods went out across the North Sea to the Low Countries. Grain and other cargoes came back in. The River Witham widened into The Haven, and ships used the great tower of St Botolph’s, the Boston Stump, as a landmark from far out in The Wash. Outdoor Planter Boxes for Highlighting The Landscape.
At the same time, the church life of the region was restless. The Elizabethan settlement had left many people dissatisfied.
- Separatists wanted to break from the Church of England entirely.
- Puritans wanted to strip away ceremonies and reshape the church from within.
Both groups were strong in Lincolnshire and the east of England. The flat country carried new ideas very well. So did the shipping routes. Sermons, pamphlets and gossip all moved up and down the coast and into inland parishes like waves.
Boston’s geography and trade made it a natural hub in this network. That is why, when one group of Separatists tried to slip away to the Dutch Republic in 1607, they ended up on its doorstep.
The 1607 Fishtoft Disaster
The first clear link between Boston and the people later called the Pilgrim Fathers comes with a failed escape at Scotia Creek, Fishtoft, just downriver from the town. In 1607, a group of Separatists from the Scrooby and Gainsborough area arranged for a Dutch captain to pick them up there and carry them to Holland.
Things went badly.
The captain betrayed them to the authorities. Armed men surrounded the party on the marsh. Men, women and children were searched, robbed and marched back into Boston. Future Mayflower passengers like William Bradford and William Brewster stood among them.
In the Guildhall on South Street, the group was held in the cells under the council chamber. The court upstairs tried them for attempting an illegal escape. After about a month, most were sent back to their home villages “from whence they came”, while a handful of ringleaders were kept for the higher Assizes in Lincoln.
The episode sits awkwardly in the story. On one level it is a local law-and-order case. On another, it is the moment when a future American founding myth almost ended in a Boston basement.
From Boston’s Cells to the Mayflower
The failed Fishtoft escape did not stop the Separatists for long. Within a year they made another attempt, this time via Immingham on the Humber side, and succeeded in reaching Amsterdam and then Leiden in the Dutch Republic.
For about a decade they lived there as a tight-knit English congregation in a Dutch city. Life was safer, but hard. Wages were low. The group worried that their children were becoming too Dutch. Eventually a plan took shape to move again, this time to the edges of English territory in North America.
In 1620, a portion of the Leiden community sailed on the Mayflower, endured a rough Atlantic crossing, and landed at Cape Cod. They drew up the Mayflower Compact and founded Plymouth Colony. Plymouth lay south of the future Boston, Massachusetts, but in the same New England world.
When we follow that line back, we pass through Boston, Lincolnshire. Lincoln Christmas Market: The City’s Winter Heartbeat. We move from a New England Thanksgiving image to a damp day on the Lincolnshire marsh, and to a town where those same church members once stood in chains.
Boston as Puritan Heartland
While the Separatists moved out through the creeks, another current was building inside Boston itself. In 1612, the town appointed John Cotton as vicar of St Botolph’s. Cotton was a gifted preacher and a convinced Puritan. He wanted to cleanse and simplify worship, yet stay inside the Church of England.
Under Cotton, Boston became a Puritan stronghold.
- Non-conformity had already been practised in the parish for decades. Cotton’s arrival sharpened it.
- His sermons drew such large crowds that extra weekday lectures were added. People travelled in from across Lincolnshire and beyond.
- He held special services within the church where Puritan practice could avoid the ceremonies demanded by the wider church.
Supportive town aldermen protected him from bishops for years. That protection turned Boston into a kind of Puritan training ground. Young men lodged with Cotton, studied at Cambridge, and carried his style and teaching into other parishes.
In other words, while the Pilgrim Separatists had treated Boston as a risky escape point, the Puritans treated it as a safe base. From that base, ideas began to travel west.
Planning a New World: From Sempringham to the Atlantic
By the late 1620s, pressure on Puritan clergy rose sharply. Archbishop Laud and royal officials pushed harder for uniform practice. Suspensions and court cases followed. The air around Boston grew thicker.
In 1629, a key planning meeting took place at Sempringham in Lincolnshire. Cotton was there, along with future New England leaders such as John Winthrop, Thomas Hooker, and others linked to Lincolnshire families. They discussed organised emigration, not as a desperate flight, but as a deliberate project to build a godly community overseas.
Cotton did not sail at once. He stayed in Boston, preached a farewell sermon for Winthrop’s departing fleet at Southampton, then fell ill and lay low for several years. Meanwhile, the Massachusetts Bay Company sent ships and settlers to the New World. This was the start of the Great Migration, the wave of Puritan emigration from the 1630s.
The stream included many from Boston and the wider fenland region. One later account counts 166 emigrants from the Boston area among the roughly 20,000 who left England for New England between 1620 and 1640.
So Boston’s pulpits and parlours fed directly into the passenger lists that built Puritan New England.
Naming Boston, Massachusetts
When Winthrop’s fleet reached Massachusetts Bay in 1630, the settlers first called their chosen site Trimountaine, after its three small hills. A few months later they changed their minds. On 7 September (Old Style), they formally adopted the name Boston.
The choice was not random. Several leading colonists came from Boston or its surroundings. Among them were Isaac Johnson and his wife, whose fortune and status carried weight in the new colony. Naming the town after their Lincolnshire home honoured those ties and gave the settlement a clear identity.
The name also carried a kind of theological freight. For Puritans, Boston, Lincolnshire already meant:
- strong preaching at St Botolph’s,
- a congregation reshaped along stricter lines, and
- a network of like-minded families.
Giving that name to a raw colonial settlement signalled an intent. Making Memories in Sleaford: 5 Family-Friendly Adventures Everyone Will Love. The new Boston would be a continuation and expansion of that Puritan project on another shore.
John Cotton Crosses the Ocean
The final, personal link came in 1633. By then, official pressure on non-conforming clergy had become harsh. Cotton was suspended, went into hiding, and eventually decided that preaching at the far side of the Atlantic was better than facing prison at home.
He resigned his post at St Botolph’s, sailed on the Griffin, and reached Boston, Massachusetts in September 1633. The town welcomed him as teacher of the church, alongside pastor John Wilson. Many settlers there had once sat under his sermons in Lincolnshire. Now they listened again, but in a timber meeting house rather than a vast stone nave.
Cotton’s influence in the colony was enormous. He helped shape Congregational church government, advised civil leaders, and played a central role in theological disputes such as the Antinomian Controversy. His letters travelled back and forth across the Atlantic, keeping old networks alive.
So we end up with a neat, if slightly unlikely, picture. A minister trained in Cambridge, formed in a fenland town, becomes the leading theologian of a city that will grow into one of the key centres of American life.
Two Bostons, One Long Story
Over time, Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay merged into a single New England colony, and the distinct stories of Pilgrims and Puritans blurred. In popular memory they often appear as one group. On the ground in Lincolnshire, the traces remain more precise.
In and around Boston today you can still walk that layered story.
- At Boston Guildhall, you stand in the cells where the Separatists were held after the Fishtoft arrest in 1607.
- At Scotia Creek, you see the quiet marsh where their plan to reach Holland first collapsed.
- In St Botolph’s, you look up at Cotton’s pulpit and the vast tower that once guided ships and still shapes the skyline.
- Through local trails and Boston-400 projects, you follow links from this fenland town to the naming and early life of Boston, Massachusetts.
Meanwhile, in the American Boston, street names, plaques and anniversary events point back across the ocean to this older, smaller place on the Witham. Pachystachys lutea Golden Shrimp Plant connection is not loud, but it is persistent.
Stone Towers, Salt Marsh and Far Reaching Echoes
When we pull the threads together, Boston’s role in the story of the Puritans and the Pilgrim Fathers looks both modest and decisive. The town did not build the Mayflower. It did not plan the entire Great Migration. It did not set out to found a city three thousand miles away.
Instead, it did simpler things. It provided a port where one group tried and failed to flee. It offered a pulpit where another movement gathered strength. It supplied people, money and a name to a fragile settlement on a New England shore. It sent John Cotton and many others on a one-way voyage.
You and I can stand on the riverbank in Boston, Lincolnshire today and see only the slow brown water of the Haven, the cargo sheds, the Stump, the flat fields. It all looks calm and slightly stubborn. In other words, it looks like a place that would never dream of boasting.
The history does the talking instead.