There is a doorway in a cobbled corridor under the Boston Guildhall, and beyond it a row of low cells with iron-barred openings, and in one of those cells, for thirty days in the autumn of 1607, an eighteen-year-old farm boy from Yorkshire named William Bradford sat and waited to learn what the Privy Council in London would do with him. He had been arrested at Scotia Creek on the edge of the Wash a few miles east, where his Separatist religious community had paid a ship's captain to smuggle them out of England to Holland. It was a crime to leave the country without royal permission. The captain had betrayed them. The Boston magistrates put them on trial in the courtroom upstairs. Many years later, having sailed on the Mayflower and helped found Plymouth Colony in New England, Bradford wrote his history of the Plymouth Plantation and remembered the Boston cells. He wrote that they had been fairly treated. The cells are still there. So is the courtroom. The Guildhall is a museum now, and visitors can walk down the same steps the Pilgrims walked.
Boston in 1390 was one of England's great trading ports - in some years out-shipping London for wool exports to the Continent. The Hanseatic League had a presence here. So did the wine merchants of Bordeaux. So did the Italian banking families. St Mary's Guild, founded in 1260 as a merchant association of pious tradesmen, prospered on the back of all this commerce, and in 1390 - dendrochronology has dated the roof timbers - the guild built itself a hall. The building still stands largely as they left it: brick walls with two faces and a rubble core, irregular hand-shaped bricks laid in a thick lime mortar, with the haphazard bond of headers and stretchers that pre-dates the standardised English and Flemish bonds of later centuries. The guild grew rich. An inventory listed gold and silver vessels, gilt-work, sacred relics. By the 16th century it ran one of the country's most profitable trades in indulgences - the spiritual receipts that, for a price, were supposed to reduce one's time in Purgatory. The Reformation ended the guild. In 1555, after the dissolution of the chantries, the Crown handed the building to the Boston Corporation.
What we now call the Pilgrim Fathers were a small group of Separatist Christians from villages in Nottinghamshire, Lincolnshire, and Yorkshire who believed the Church of England was beyond reform and wanted to worship in their own congregations. This was illegal. The penalties included imprisonment, fines, and the destruction of livelihoods. By 1607 their leaders had decided to emigrate to Holland, where the Dutch Reformed Church tolerated dissenters. They negotiated with a ship's captain to take them out from Scotia Creek on the Wash. They sold their farms. They walked their families to the coast. The captain took their money and turned them over to the authorities. They were marched to Boston. The magistrates put them on trial in the upstairs courtroom of the Guildhall and shut them in the cells below for the thirty days it took for word from the Privy Council to come back. Many of the Boston townspeople were sympathetic to dissent themselves; Bradford recorded that the local jailers treated the prisoners decently, which, he being a habitually understated witness, probably meant kindly. After a month most were ordered home. The leaders, eventually, made it to Leiden.
From Leiden the story most people know unfolds. The Separatists lived in the Netherlands for over a decade, anxious that their children were becoming Dutch and that another war might trap them on the Continent. In 1620 they negotiated passage on a ship called the Mayflower, sailing this time legally with a royal patent for a colony in Virginia. Storms drove them north to Cape Cod. They landed at what they named Plymouth. About half of them died the first winter. William Bradford, who had spent that month in the Boston cells when he was eighteen, served thirty terms as governor of Plymouth Colony and wrote the history of it. The Boston Guildhall is in some real sense the place where the Pilgrim story started - not the romantic American beginning at Plymouth Rock, but the harder, slower English beginning of a group of religious refugees who tried to leave their country, failed, were jailed, and eventually got out. The cells where they waited are still beneath the Guildhall. The courtroom where they were tried is still upstairs.
The Guildhall went on doing what guildhalls do. Justices of the peace held court here until the new Sessions House in Church Close opened in 1842. Borough councils met here until the new Municipal Buildings on West Street were completed in 1904. A restaurant on the premises served as a National Soup Kitchen during the First World War, when hunger was a real problem even in fenland Lincolnshire, and as a British Restaurant during the Second World War - the wartime canteens set up by the government to provide cheap nutritious meals off-ration. The restaurant closed after an outbreak of food poisoning in 1949. The building was restored in the early 21st century and is now a museum. The collection includes a Thomas Phillips portrait of Sir Joseph Banks, the botanist who sailed with Captain Cook on the Endeavour and was later Recorder of Boston in 1813. A copy of Foxe's Book of Martyrs sits in a case - a reminder that this part of Lincolnshire took its Protestantism seriously enough to send sons to die for it, and to send other sons to America to practise it freely.
Boston Guildhall sits at 52.98N, 0.02W in central Boston, Lincolnshire, just inland from the Wash. Boston is famous for the Boston Stump - the lantern tower of St Botolph's Church, one of the tallest medieval church towers in England, visible from the air for thirty miles across the flat fens. Nearest airports: Conington (EGSF) about 25 miles south-west, RAF Coningsby (EGXC) similar distance to the north-west, Fenland (EGCL) to the south. Active military airspace north and west of Boston - check NOTAMs. Best viewed at 2,500-3,500 feet using the Stump as the dominant orientation landmark; the Guildhall sits just south of the church near the river.