Where the story begins.

The name

A town called after a saint.

Boston takes its name from St Botolph, a seventh-century Anglo-Saxon saint. The name is generally understood to have evolved from 'Botolph's Town', eventually becoming Boston.

Tradition associates St Botolph with a monastery at Icanhoe around AD 654. Its precise location remains disputed; this is not an established account of a monastery at modern-day Boston, Lincolnshire.

Wealth

The port that fed England's wool.

Before it was a Puritan stronghold, Boston was a major medieval port. Historic England describes it as England's most important medieval port outside London. The Wool Staple moved from Lincoln to Boston in 1369.

The wool trade connected Boston with merchants across northern Europe and the Hanseatic League. Published accounts differ in their presentation of export percentages and dates, so we do not use a precise share here without a checked historical reference.

That wealth built the church. The prosperity that raised The Stump is the same prosperity that later made Boston's decline feel like a grievance — a thread that runs all the way to the town's present relationship with the wider world.

The Stump

A landmark built to be seen.

Work on St Botolph's began in 1309 and the main body of the church was complete by 1390. The west tower — the Stump proper — was begun around 1425, took real shape from 1450 and was finished by about 1520.

At 272 feet (83 m) it is the highest tower of any parish church in England, exclusive of spires, and St Botolph's is the largest parish church in the country. On a clear day it is visible from East Anglia across The Wash. Its foundations sit below water level, fifteen yards from the river, and have never needed restoration.

Inside are medieval misericords, an octagonal font by E. W. Pugin and a historic parish library. The Parish of Boston describes the collection as over 1,200 books in approximately 1,600 volumes, mainly from the seventeenth century.

• Check the Parish of Boston's current visitor information for church, tower and library access before travelling.
• Address: Bank Street / Church Street, Boston, Lincolnshire PE21 6NW.

1607

The escape that failed, and the town that held them.

In the autumn of 1607 a group of Separatists from Scrooby, sixty miles away, walked to the edge of The Wash at Scotia Creek in Fishtoft. Their plan was to slip across the North Sea to Holland, where they could worship as they chose. The boat's captain had been paid to betray them: local militia came aboard, seized the party and stripped them of their possessions.

They were carried back in open boats through Boston, watched by crowds, and locked in the cells of Boston Guildhall — a merchant guildhall built in 1390 — where they were brought before the magistrates on a charge of leaving the country without the King's licence.

The magistrates discharged them. They lived in Boston for several months before reaching Holland by another route in 1608; a decade later some of them, including William Brewster and William Bradford, sailed on the Mayflower. The Guildhall cells survive and can be visited today.

The thread from here to 1630 is not a straight line. It runs through a Boston cloth dealer called Leonard Beetson, who was arrested alongside the Pilgrims, stayed in Boston, became a councillor, and knew John Cotton.

1630

The day a settlement was given a name.

The peninsula had been called Shawmut by its Massachusett inhabitants and Trimount or Trimontaine by the English, for its three-hooped hill. William Blackstone, a planter of the failed Dorchester colony who had gone to live there alone, invited the newcomers across the river to settle with him for the water.

On 7 September 1630 (Old Style; 17 September New Style) the Massachusetts General Court, meeting in Charlestown, named the new town Boston — after the Lincolnshire town many of them had left, and which many had always intended to honour. Thomas Dudley wrote in 1631 that they had named it 'as we intended to have done the place we first resolved on'.

The naming was not the dramatic moment legend makes it. John Winthrop, keeping a meticulous diary, did not record it at all; his first mention of Boston, a month later, is that a goat there died of eating Indian corn.

1633

The vicar follows his people.

John Cotton had been vicar of St Botolph's since 1612, when the Bishop of Lincoln thought him 'young and unfit to be over such a fractious people imbued with the Puritan spirit'. He held the parish for twenty years through suspension and suspicion, preaching from a pulpit that still stands, until the pressure on non-conforming clergy made England unsafe. He went into hiding in 1632.

On 4 September 1633 the Griffin, eight weeks out of the Downs, arrived in Boston, Massachusetts with Cotton aboard. He had slipped past the officers sent to arrest him. Within a week he and his wife Sarah were admitted to the Boston church, and their son Seaborn was baptised.

Cotton died in Boston, Massachusetts in 1652. He is the grandfather of Cotton Mather. His name survives on both shores: in the Cotton Chapel of St Botolph's, restored to use by citizens of Boston, Massachusetts in 1857, and in the Cotton Memorial of 1907 in the First Church.

What we leave out

A story told in full, or not at all.

A four-hundredth anniversary is a celebration, and celebrations want a tidy story. This initiative does not deal in tidy stories.

The land named Boston in 1630 was Massachusett land, and the settlement that took its name from an English town took its place. The Puritan experiment in New England was also a slave economy, in a city that was also the site of the first printed American anti-slavery tract. Religious persecution drove the founders out of England and then shaped who could stay once they arrived.

We commit to the whole of it: the Massachusett and other Indigenous peoples of the Dawnland, the enslaved and the dispossessed, the communities who have built both Bostons since. If we get a fact wrong, tell us and we will correct it and say that we did.

Boston Together is independent. We are not an official municipal partnership, and we work alongside the organisations who have done this historical work for decades — the Partnership of Historic Bostons, Boston 400, the Lincolnshire Archives and the Parish of Boston.