‘By temperament, they hated ritual and loved simplicity.’

2020 is the 400th anniversary of the sailing of the Mayflower. Steve Tomkins says those on board had much in common with Friends

Mayflower Leaving Southampton | Photo: by Arthur Wellington Fowles, 1881.

There is not an obvious kinship between Quakers and the puritan Separatists who sailed on the Mayflower in 1620. As you’ll know, the Quaker movement emerged around thirty years later, and little more than ten years after that Quakers were being executed by puritans.

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