May 15, 2026
A Church for the Strangers: The Chapel at Sandtoft
A Congregation of Refugees The settlers who gathered at Sandtoft were not a single homogeneous group. The first wave, arriving around 1628, comprised some eighty families from Walloon Flanders — Dutch and French-speaking Protestants who had fled the religious persecution of the Spanish Netherlands. They were followed in 1635 by a further substantial influx, mostly artisans and tenant farmers from...