If you're an American, you probably grew up hearing the story of Thanksgiving, how the pilgrims came to America to escape religious persecution to establish a new life.

But who actually were these pilgrims? Were they really persecuted? Why did they decide to cross an ocean? And how did they end up where they did?

Learn more about the pilgrims and everything that happened before the First Thanksgiving on this episode of

Everything Everywhere Daily. To understand the events leading up to the pilgrims crossing the Atlantic on the Mayflower,

we have to back up to understand the religious situation in England

in the early 17th century.

As I've touched on in previous episodes, Henry VIII wants a divorce, the Pope doesn't

agree to an annulment, so he outlaws the Catholic Church and establishes the Catholic Church of England with himself at the head.

Over time the Church of England sort of adopted many of the forms and traditions of the Catholic

Church and participation in the Church of England became mandatory.

In my episode on the gunpowder plot I talked about the Catholic response to this and how they weren't

too thrilled.

However, they weren't the only ones who were unhappy with this arrangement. There were Protestant groups as well

who didn't like the mandatory participation in the Church of England. There were many of

these groups and they were generally called separatists or dissenters. There was also religious groups known as Puritans who

wish to purify the Church of England of its Catholic elements. Not all Puritans

were necessarily separatists. Some remained in the church trying to enact change and others left.

There was one such group known as Brownists who were both Puritans and Separatus.

The rest of this story is all about the Brownists. The Brownists got their name from Robert Brown, with an E who was leading to

center to the Anglican Church. The Brownis were Calvinists and Congregationalists.

As for the Calvinist part I'll leave that to a future

episode about the Protestant Reformation. The Congregationalist part simply

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