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The first Boston, and Lincoln

The first Boston, and Lincoln

Last updated on: May 9, 2026 at 5:16 pm by Dan Peterson

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The first Boston, and Lincoln 2026-05-09T17:16:41-06:00 Dan Peterson

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The tower of St. Botolph’s Church, Boston, Lincolnshire, England (Wikimedia Commons public domain photograph)

We began the morning by driving to Boston, a market town and inland port in the English county of Lincolnshire. The name Boston is said to be a contraction of “Saint Botolph’s town” — named after a seventh-century Saxon abbot — with tun being an Old English, Old Norse, and modern Norwegian term for a “hamlet” or a “farm.” In Latin, Boston was known as villa Sancti Botulfi “St. Botulf’s village,” and the name Botulfeston appears in 1460.

By the beginning of the thirteenth century, Boston had become a significant place for trade with the European Continent, a port of the Hanseatic League. In fact, before the rise of Liverpool, it was probably the second port in the entire country, after only London. It became wealthy from trade in wool, grain, and lead, and for the importation of salt from the coast of Holland. Unfortunately, in the latter part of the fifteenth century an international trade dispute and the silting up of its harbor led to a massive and fairly sudden decline in the town’s economic prospects.

However, its prior trade connections with the Continent of Europe had made Boston a conduit for intellectual influences, as well — eventually including the teachings of the Protestant Reformer John Calvin. In 1607, a group of pilgrims from the area, led by William Brewster and William Bradford, attempted to escape religious persecution by emigrating via Boston to the more tolerant Netherlands. However, unauthorized emigration was illegal at the time, and they were arrested, brought to trial in Boston’s Guildhall., and, for a time, imprisoned there. We visited the Guildhall, and some of us even climbed into their prison cells. The following year, in 1608, the pilgrims set sail for the Netherlands, settling in Leiden. Thereafter, in 1620, several of them sailed to New England aboard the Mayflower.

In 1612, John Cotton — a graduate, by the way, of Trinity College, Cambridge, and of Emmanuel College, Cambridge — was appointed Vicar of St Botolph’s Church, which remains Boston’s most prominent landmark still today. Popularly (but, I think, oddly) known as “The Stump,” it’s the largest parish church in England. It’s also the burial place of the composer John Taverner (d. 1545).

At St. Botolph’s, John Cotton’s nonconformist preaching became very popular. He encouraged those who felt religiously oppressed in England to join the Massachusetts Bay Company and, in 1633, he himself left for the New World. There, his grandson Cotton Mather (1663-1728), a graduate of Harvard College (in Cambridge, Massachusetts) became not only a Puritan clergyman but a major intellectual figure in Colonial America. According to a plaque on an interior wall of the church, no fewer than five colonial governors of Massachusetts came from St. Botolph’s Church in Boston, England.

“Boston,” by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

St. Botolph’s Town! Hither across the plains
And fens of Lincolnshire, in garb austere,
There came a Saxon monk, and founded here
A Priory, pillaged by marauding Danes,
So that thereof no vestige now remains;
Only a name, that, spoken loud and clear,
And echoed in another hemisphere,
Survives the sculptured walls and painted panes.
St. Botolph’s Town! Far over leagues of land
And leagues of sea looks forth its noble tower,
And far around the chiming bells are heard;
So may that sacred name forever stand
A landmark, and a symbol of the power,
That lies concentred in a single word.

A 2013 view of Lincoln Cathedral from Lincoln Castle (Wikimedia Commons public domain photograph)

We then drove to Lincoln, where we found ourselves in the midst of some sort of celebration of the local football team. We walked by and in front of the massive and magnificent Lincoln Cathedral, proceeding over to Lincoln Castle, where one of the four surviving originals of the Magna Carta has been kept since its signing by King John and the barons at Runnymede, near Windsor, on 15 June 1215. A justly famous document at the very foundation of, among others, the English and American legal systems, Magna Carta established the principle that even sovereign monarchs should be subject to the rule of law.

“Now is the winter of our discontent Made glorious summer by this sun of York.” A late-sixteenth-century image of King Richard III of England, the last monarch from the House of York and the last of the Plantagenet dynasty, from the National Portrait Gallery (Wikimedia Commons public domain image). Although his famous portrayal by William Shakespeare lacks my mean-spirited and gratuitous cruelty, I see in him an obvious kindred spirit. It’s nice to remember him here in his hometown, where, before his assumption of the kingship, he was the Duke of York.

A week or two ago, I posted here some extracts from a book by Reggie Anderson, written with the assistance of Jennifer Schuchmann. The book is entitled Appointments with Heaven: The True Story of a Country Doctor’s Healing Encounters With the Hereafter (Carol Stream, IL: Tyndale Momentum, 2013). I want to mention here another passage that caught my attention, partially at least because I’ve had a couple of roughly similar experiences myself.

The book tells a story about a boy who was brought in by his mother one night while Dr. Anderson was working the overnight shift in the emergency room. The boy had bumped his head. It didn’t seem very serious at first, but then the boy began vomiting and the mother grew worried. Dr. Anderson examined him and concluded that there was nothing to be concerned about. He was intending to give her a sheet of information on head injuries and then send the two of them home.

“”Well, his scan looks good,” he heard himself say, “but I think we should send him to Vanderbilt Children’s Hospital to get a CT scan of his head.”

“I had no idea why I said that. I wasn’t intending to say it, but the words slipped out of my mouth. I looked at the nurse. She stared back at me like I was a lunatic. Even the mother looked a bit confused.”

Out of the room, the nurse questioned him. The boy seemed healthy, after all. Now, they would need to find a neurosurgeon in the middle of the night, make arrangements at the Vanderbilt University hospital, order an ambulance to transport the boy and his mother to Nashville, and so forth. They would need to do lots of paperwork.

All Dr. Anderson could respond was “God just told me to send him.” To this day, he writes, he doesn’t know what prompted him to do what he did. He expected the neurosurgeon to call and say that the boy was fine.

When the neurosurgeon did call, though, four hours later, he asked why Dr. Anderson had sent the boy. Anderson responded that he didn’t know.

“Well, I’m glad you did,” the neurosurgeon said. “I just got out of surgery. We evacuated a hematoma from his brain. If you hadn’t gotten him here in time, he would have died.”

The story struck me because, on at least two occasions, one of them a particularly clear case, I’ve heard words come out of my mouth during priesthood healing blessings that I had not intended to say and that seemed decidedly imprudent and unrealistic given the realities involved . . . and that were fulfilled. I know what it’s like.

Posted from York, England

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