The Pilgrims of the Crucial Years That Instigated the Departure from Leiden to North America

Abstract

Leiden played a mayor role in the lives and it changed the worldview of the Pilgrims. The English dissenters, in 1609 embarked from a tiny village called Scrooby, Lincolnshire. They did not know it then, but their actions would change the course of history. Applying a retrospective view of the events taken place, we come to see that the Nederlands was merely the first stop on their journey to finding home. In this paper I aimed to shed light open some important features of the Pilgrims’ stay in Leiden from socio-economic factors to legal actions. With the introduction of the different migrations in the paper, I wanted to rule out the ethnic factor from the view, since there has been no mistreatment of the Pilgrims by the Dutch based on their nationality. The Dutch and the English both had numerous men living in each other’s countries for decades.