Qualla: Boston Guildhall

Boston Guildhall: Introduction

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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.

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Boston Guildhall: A Merchant Guild's House

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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...

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Boston Guildhall: The Pilgrims

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 in...

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Boston Guildhall: Thirteen Years to the Mayflower

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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, saili...

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Boston Guildhall: After the Pilgrims

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 serve...

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