Read it through once

The one hundred and one emigrants who crowded aboard the =Mayflower= in the fall of 1620 were a mixed lot. Thirty-five of them were religious dissenters who had known years of persecution, flight, and exile. Another sixty-six were added to the group by its financial backers to bring their total number to a level deemed sufficient to establish a colony in the New World. Whether a non-dissenting cooper like John Alden or a religious leader like William Brewster, each member of the tiny band carried the mark of English culture as it was on the eve of the Renaissance. Save for the higher social classes, which were not represented in the group, the English people of the time were products of a medieval world whose legacy was still felt in the first years of the seventeenth century. It is easy to forget that 1620 is further removed in time from the American Revolution than it is from Columbus’ discovery of the New World in 1492. So it was that the church members—“saints,” as they styled themselves—carried the strong tradition of East Anglican yeoman culture to the New World, its peasant customs deeply rooted in the soil and its bounty. The others in the group—called “strangers” by William Bradford—were a more heterogeneous lot, many coming from the urban world of London, others from the countryside. As a group they were to create a culture in New England that bore unmistakable traces of the Middle Ages, whether it be in dress style, the arrangement of their community, their theology, or their social institutions.