pilgrim [OE] This is one of the earliest words that came into English from French, just after the Norman Conquest in 1066. It goes back to Latin peregrinus, ‘foreign, alien’, the source of peregrinate [L16th] ‘to wander from place to place’, and of peregrine. The peregrine falcon [L16th] was called the ‘pilgrim falcon’ because falconers caught individuals fully grown on migration rather than taking them from the nest. The Pilgrim Fathers were the English Puritans who sailed across the Atlantic in the Mayflower and founded the colony of Plymouth, Massachusetts, in 1620.