Time warp in Leiden

We went to Leiden, 30 minutes train ride from Amsterdam, to see the Mayflower Pilgrim Museum. I had no particular expectations but GPZ is a descendent of the first English settlers in America, who enjoyed a decade of religious tolerance in this town before they finally set sail from Plymouth.
 Leiden immediately impressed us with its wide waterways, street market and windmill, not to mention the finest pancake restaurant in the country. After we had stuffed our faces we found  an ancient brick house fronting the street below the castle and, peering through its diamond panes, we gathered that it was the museum. We attracted the attention of the sole attendant who unlocked the door and let us step into a capsule of antiquity the like of which I have never experienced - and I've been to a lot of museums. 

"There are no display cases, no guidebooks, no labels explaining the artifacts. Instead, there’s a small square room in a 14th-century building, dimly lit by candles and casually inhabited by furniture and paintings and other appurtenances hundreds of years old: goblets, candlesticks, leather-bound books. A brass bed warmer hangs on the wall beside a medieval built-in bed; a baby’s crib sits on rockers beside the painted-tile fireplace. Everything is nonchalantly, unceremoniously just … there."

The magician responsible for this extraordinary assemblage is the collector and curator, Dr Jeremy Dupertuis Bangs, seen in the image above. Superficially mild and unassuming, but with the driest wit imaginable, he proffers almost nothing in the way of explanation but waits for you to inquire or admire or to pick something up as I did, in all innocence, a dried fish of the kind I might have found at the back of a Pembrokeshire beach – that’s 14th century he said. Likewise a wooden mug that looked solid but weighed…. nothing, so desiccated with antiquity it was. We were touching, holding, sitting on even, historical items that in any other setting would be in temperature-controlled glass cases. Knuckle bones weighted with lead. A baby's cap. A Breeches Bible. A smoothing iron barely liftable with one hand. Clay pipes. Spoons, Brushes.  

The reason for the precision dating was the fact that part of the house, including a fireplace, had been walled up in 1365 and everything behind it remained suspended in time until rediscovered – even to the peat briquettes that would have been used to fuel the fire, the smell of which would have gone some way to mask the stink of the privy in the corner of the room. Ranged around the fireplace were domestic utensils, a dish with holes that acted as a strainer, a baby’s walker in wood, fire dogs, pots and pans.
 
Dr Bangs, American by origin but a longtime resident of Leiden, is the foremost scholar  of the Mayflower pilgrimage and of much else to do with the period: the art, music, culture, the domestic, political and religious life of the 17th century;  a collector on the streets who recognises and scoops up the antiquities chucked out in the name of  modernization, and an archivist whose delving into aged records has  dredged up the intricate details of contemporary lives.. He knows everything about the items in the museum, each one being the key to deeper and more detailed unravelling of a past that comes alive through his descriptions and explanations. It was an enormous privilege to receive the undivided attention of someone of such high intellectual calibre, immense knowledge and wry humour:  “Some of the oldest things in here are my jokes”.

See this link for further background (I borrowed some words from it.)
 

I’ve put an album of images from the museum on Flickr. It shows just a fraction of the wonders to be found in this unique collection. I am profoundly grateful to Dr Bangs for his patience and generosity with time during our visit. It made a rare experience unforgettable.