Wikipedia
Scrooby is a small village on the River Ryton and near Bawtry in the northern part of the English county of Nottinghamshire. At the time of the 2001 census, it had a population of 329, falling to 315 at the 2011 census. Until 1766, it was on the Great North Road and so became a stopping-off point for numerous important figures, including Queen Elizabeth I and Cardinal Wolsey on their journeys. The latter stayed at the Manor House briefly after his fall from favour.
The Manor House belonged to the Archbishops of York and, at the end of the sixteenth century, was occupied by William Brewster, the Archbishop's bailiff, who was also postmaster. His son, also named William, took that post in the 1590s after a job as an assistant to the Secretary of State under Queen Elizabeth I. The junior William became dissatisfied with the Anglican Church as it was developing at the time, acquired Brownist ( Congregationalist) beliefs, and attempted to leave for the Netherlands in 1607.
After an unsuccessful first attempt, Brewster succeeded in 1608. He eventually went to New England in 1620 on the Mayflower as one of the people later called the Pilgrim Fathers. The Manor House was demolished early in the 19th century. All that remain are a cottage (perhaps intended for a resident official and not open to the public), a substantial brick dovecote, and the fishponds.
The parish church of St Wilfrid has an octagonal spire. Other buildings of interest are the remaining buildings on the site of the former manor house, the mill, the old vicarage, the village's historic farmhouses, and the pinfold. The village stocks were sold to America more than a hundred years ago.
Just north of Scrooby, the road that links the A638 and the A614 is called Gibbet Hill Lane. This lane is so named after a brutal crime that took place early in the morning of 3 July 1779. John Spencer had been playing cards with Scrooby's toll-bar keeper William Yeadon and his mother (then on a visit). Spencer returned to the toll house and killed both of them. The crime was enacted for the purposes of robbery, and Spencer gained re-admittance under a pretence that a drove of cattle wished to pass that way. Spencer was interrupted by travellers in the act of dragging one body across the road towards the River Ryton, and arrested shortly thereafter by a search party. He was executed following a trial at Nottingham Assizes, and his body afterwards hung in a gibbet cage on a slope south of the Ryton now denominated Gibbet Hill. The reputed upright of the gibbet is preserved in Doncaster Museum
Usage examples of "scrooby".
About 1602 his neighbours began to assemble for worship at his home, the Scrooby manor house, and in 1606 he joined them in organizing the Separatist church of Scrooby.
Others of the corporation were William Brewster, of Scrooby, and his son Edward.
Earl flicked a shilling to Master Scrooby, and set his horse in motion down the ride.
That he had no hand whatever in fitting out the MAYFLOWER is certain, and the Scrooby statement equally lacks foundation.
From the point of view of the English establishment, the events in the small agricultural communities around Scrooby and Gainsborough, on the borders of Lincohishire and Nottinghamshire, were no more than minor irritations at the outer edge of their concerns.
The accompanying note in the Geneva Bible, which the Scrooby Separatists would have read, makes it quite clear.
This is not what the congregations at Scrooby or Amsterdam would have admired.
The ferocious intolerances of the pre-liberal world have been left behind - it is inconceivable now that a Henry Barrow would be executed, or a Henry Garnet, or that the Scrooby Separatists would have been forced to leave home and country - and perhaps as a result of that change, perhaps as a symptom, religion, or at least the conventional religion of ordinary people, has been drained of its passion.