##Rest Day in Leiden
We walked in two staged groups to the American Pilgrim Museum where Jeremy Banks talked about the Pilgrims. After initially being an underground church group in England, they went to settle in Amsterdam to escape persecution by the church of England. However, a similar group of English “church break-away” emigrants who had moved to Amsterdam a few years earlier was facing a scandal there – brochures were being circulated about a priest molesting a child. Because the Pilgrims were so similar to the other group, most of them moved to Leiden to avoid being associated with the scandal and took jobs in the booming textile industry.
The group lived in Leiden for several years. But things were changing in England, and for financial and legal reasons it became better to be a subject of England (if not a loyal one) in England’s New World Colony. So an initial group of Pilgrims moved to Plymouth, and many of the rest followed over the next several years.
Jeremy Banks was really interesting, with a very dry sense of humor.
The American Pilgrim Museum is located in a typical fourteenth century home, which is now one of the oldest houses in Leiden. It has furnishings contemporary to the Pilgrims’ stay, so you can get some idea of life in the late 1400’s.
This is a bedroom, not a storage cabinet. Apparently people slept sitting up or curled in a ball.
Adjustable-height cooking pot hanger.
Peat bricks.
After the museum visit we had the rest of the day to ourselves. It was market day, so we walked up the market street with lots of vendor stalls and tents. The market mostly featured food, ingredients or prepared, but also had various stalls offering almost anything you would find in a grocery. We bought several small rounds of cheese from a friendly and humorous guy who let us taste a bunch of different varieties. He even had a vacuum packer to seal them up for safer traveling and longer non-refrigerated shelf life. There was a little wagon with freshly-made stroopwaffles for sale, but that guy was not friendly.
After lunch, we went to the Boerhaven Museum of science and anatomy, where we saw one of Antonie van Leeuwenhoek’s first microscopes. Then we toured the De Valk windmill.