List of Abbreviations
Full publication details of any work not included in the list below are given in the first reference cited within any chapter, with subsequent references appearing in short-form style. All pre-1800 works are published in London, unless otherwise indicated, and details of publishers are not usually included.
BARS
BDBR
Bedfordshire Archives and Record Service
Biographical Dictionary of British Radicals in the Seventeenth Century, ed. Richard L. Greaves and Robert Zaller, 3 vols (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1982–4)
BL British Library
BQ Baptist Quarterly
Brachlow
Stephen Brachlow, The Communion of Saints: Radical Puritan and Separatist Ecclesiology, 1570–1625 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988)
BS Bunyan Studies
CCAL
CCRB
Canterbury Cathedral Archives and Library
N. H. Keeble and Geoffrey F. Nuttall, Calendar of the Correspondence of Richard Baxter, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991): reference is to letters by number
CH Church History
CL
CR
CSPD
Durston & Eales
Durston & Maltby
DWL
Congregational Library, London
A. G. Matthews, Calamy Revised (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1934)
Calendar of State Papers, Domestic series
Christopher Durston and Jacqueline Eales (eds.), The Culture of English Puritanism, 1560–1700 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1996)
Christopher Durston and Judith Maltby (eds.), Religion in Revolutionary England (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006)
Dr Williams’s Library, London
EHR English Historical Review
English Presbyterians
C. G. Bolam, Jeremy Goring, H. L. Short, and Roger Thomas, The English Presbyterians: From Elizabethan Puritanism to Modern Unitarianism (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1968)
Entring Book
Firth & Rait
Goldie, Morrice
Halcomb, ‘Congregational’
List of Abbreviations
Mark Goldie (ed.), The Entring Book of Roger Morrice, 7 vols (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2007–9)
C. H. Firth and S. R. Rait (eds.), Acts and Ordinances of the Interregnum 1642–1660, 3 vols (London: His Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1911)
Mark Goldie, Roger Morrice and the Puritan Whigs: The Entring Book, 1677–1691 (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2016)
Joel Halcomb, ‘A Social History of Congregational Religious Practice during the Puritan Revolution’ (unpublished PhD thesis, Cambridge University, 2009)
HJ Historical Journal
Inventory
JEH
JURCHS
LMA
Minutes
MPWA
NRO
Nuttall & Chadwick
Nuttall, Visible Saints
ODNB
OED
OHA
PBHRS
Mark Burden, Michael Davies, Anne Dunan-Page, and Joel Halcomb, An Inventory of Puritan and Dissenting Records, 1640–1714 (2016), available online at: http://www.qmulreligionandliterature.co.uk/onlinepublications/dissenting-records
Journal of Ecclesiastical History
Journal of the United Reformed Church History Society
London Metropolitan Archives
H. G. Tibbutt (ed.), The Minutes of The First Independent Church (now Bunyan Meeting) at Bedford 1656–1766, PBHRS, 55 (1976)
Chad Van Dixhoorn (ed.), The Minutes and Papers of the Westminster Assembly, 1643–1652, 5 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012)
Norfolk Record Office
Geoffrey F. Nuttall and Owen Chadwick (eds.), From Uniformity to Unity 1662–1962 (London: S.P.C.K., 1962)
Geoffrey F. Nuttall, Visible Saints: The Congregational Way 1640–1660, 2nd edn (Weston Rhyn: Quinta Press, 2001)
Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, ed. H. C. G. Matthew and Brian Harrison, 60 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004); now online at: http:// www.oxforddnb.com/
Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd edn, prepared by J. A. Simpson and E. S. C. Weiner, 20 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989); now online at: http://www.oed.com/
Anthony Milton (ed.), The Oxford History of Anglicanism, Volume I: Reformation and Identity, c.1520–1662 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017)
Publications of the Bedfordshire Historical Record Society
List of Abbreviations
PP Past & Present
Rel. Bax.
RPCO
Shaw
Reliquiae Baxterianae, ed. Matthew Sylvester (1696): reference is to part, page, and, where appropriate, section number plus, in brackets, any point enumerated in a section, e.g., Rel. Bax., i. 20, §30; Rel. Bax., iii. 193, §79 (II: 3)
Angus Library and Archive, Regent’s Park College, Oxford
William A. Shaw, A History of the English Church during the Civil Wars and under the Commonwealth 1640–1660, 2 vols (London: Longmans, Green, & Co., 1900)
SRO Suffolk Record Office
TCHS
Transactions of the Congregational Historical Society
TNA The National Archives, Kew
Tolmie, Triumph
TRHS
Watts
White, Baptists
Murray Tolmie, The Triumph of the Saints: The Separate Churches of London, 1616–1649 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977)
Transactions of the Royal Historical Society
M. R. Watts, The Dissenters: From the Reformation to the French Revolution (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978)
B. R. White, The English Baptists of the Seventeenth Century, 2nd edn (Didcot: The Baptist Historical Society, 1996)
Notes on Contributors
Michael Davies is Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Liverpool, and one of the founding members of the ‘Dissenting Experience’ project. Among his publications is Graceful Reading: Theology and Narrative in the Works of John Bunyan (Oxford University Press, 2002). He is co-editor (with W. R. Owens) of The Oxford Handbook of John Bunyan (Oxford University Press, 2018). For Oxford University Press he is currently preparing a critical edition of The Bunyan Church Book, 1656–1710.
Anne Dunan-Page is Professor of Early Modern British Studies at Aix-Marseille Université, where she directs the Research Centre on the Anglophone World (LERMA, E.A. 853), and one of the founding members of the ‘Dissenting Experience’ project. Her books include Grace Overwhelming: John Bunyan, ‘The Pilgrim’s Progress’ and the Extremes of the Baptist Mind (Peter Lang, 2006), The Cambridge Companion to Bunyan (Cambridge University Press, 2010), Roger L’Estrange and the Making of Restoration Culture (Ashgate, 2008, with Beth Lynch), and L’Expérience puritaine. Vies et récits de dissidents, XVIIe–XVIIIe siècle (Cerf, 2017). She is currently co-editing the correspondence of Sir Thomas Browne for a new edition of his Complete Works (forthcoming, Oxford University Press).
Crawford Gribben is Professor of Early Modern British History at Queen’s University Belfast. He has research interests in the literary cultures of puritanism and evangelicalism. He is the author of a number of books in this area, including God’s Irishmen: Theological Debates in Cromwellian Ireland (Oxford University Press, 2007) and John Owen and English Puritanism: Experiences of Defeat (Oxford University Press, 2016).
Polly Ha is Reader in Early Modern History at the University of East Anglia. She is the author of English Presbyterianism, 1590–1640 (Stanford University Press, 2011), and (with Patrick Collinson) co-editor of The Reception of Continental Reformation in Britain (Oxford University Press, 2010), and chief editor of The Puritans on Independence (Oxford University Press, 2017). She has been a member of research networks on Freedom and the Construction of Europe, Toleration in the Modern World, and Alternative Religious Settlements in Britain and Ireland. She is currently completing another critical edition of late Elizabethan puritan sources for Oxford University Press and working on Independence in the English Revolution, and conspiracy and innovation in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
Notes on Contributors
Joel Halcomb is Lecturer in Early Modern History at the University of East Anglia and one of the founding members of the ‘Dissenting Experience’ project. His research focuses on religious practice and religious politics in Britain and Ireland during the British Civil Wars. He was assistant editor for The Minutes and Papers of the Westminster Assembly, 1643–1652 (Oxford University Press, 2012) and, with Patrick Little and David Smith, is co-editing volume three of The Writing and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell (forthcoming, Oxford University Press). He is also preparing for publication a monograph on the Congregational movement during the British Civil Wars.
Ann Hughes is Professor Emerita at Keele University where she served as Professor of Early Modern History from 1995–2014. She is the author of many articles and books on religion, culture, and politics in the seventeenth century, including Gangraena and the Struggle for the English Revolution (Oxford University Press, 2004) and Gender and the English Revolution (Routledge, 2011). With Thomas Corns and David Loewenstein, she has edited The Complete Works of Gerrard Winstanley (Oxford University Press, 2009). Her current projects focus on Parliamentarian preaching in the 1640s and 1650s, and on the career and religious manuscripts of the London Presbyterian merchant, Walter Boothby.
N. H. Keeble is Professor Emeritus of English Studies at the University of Stirling, Scotland. His academic and research interests lie in English cultural (and especially literary and religious) history of the early modern period, 1500–1725. His publications include studies of Richard Baxter: Puritan Man of Letters (Clarendon Press, 1982), The Literary Culture of Nonconformity in Later Seventeenth-Century England (Leicester University Press, 1987), The Restoration: England in the 1660s (Blackwell, 2002), and, with Geoffrey F. Nuttall, a twovolume Calendar of the Correspondence of Richard Baxter (Clarendon Press, 1991). He has edited four collections of original essays, texts by John Bunyan, Daniel Defoe, Lucy Hutchinson, Andrew Marvell, and John Milton, and, with John Coffey, Tim Cooper, and Thomas Charlton, Richard Baxter’s Reliquiae Baxterianae (forthcoming, Oxford University Press).
Kathleen Lynch is Executive Director of the Folger Institute at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, DC. Her research has focused on seventeenth-century devotional texts as they were shaped by the twinned regulations of religion and the book trade. She is currently examining the idea of ‘visible saints’ as a contested keyword, taking the term as an opening to performative, or embodied, aspects of godliness within Nonconformist worship in London after the Restoration. Her book, Protestant Autobiography in the Seventeenth-Century Anglophone World (Oxford University Press, 2012), was awarded the Richard L. Greaves Prize by the International John Bunyan Society in 2013.
Notes on Contributors
Chad Van Dixhoorn is Professor of Church History at Westminster Theological Seminary in Philadelphia. His research interests centre on post-Reformation theology and the Westminster Assembly. He is author of God’s Ambassadors: The Westminster Assembly and the Reformation of Preaching in England, 1643–1653 (Reformation Heritage Books, 2017) and Confessing the Faith: A Reader’s Guide to the Westminster Confession of Faith (Banner of Truth, 2014), and editor of The Minutes and Papers of the Westminster Assembly, 1643–1652 (Oxford University Press, 2012). He is currently preparing for publication with Oxford University Press a major monograph on the Westminster Assembly.
Elliot Vernon is a barrister of Lincoln’s Inn and the author of a number of articles on the topics of London, the Levellers, and English Presbyterianism during the English Revolution. Currently completing a monograph on the London Presbyterian movement during the 1640s and 1650s, he is editor (with Philip Baker) of The Agreements of the People, the Levellers and the Constitutional Crisis of the English Revolution (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013) and (with Hunter Powell) Church Polity in the British Atlantic World, c.1636–89 (forthcoming, Manchester University Press).
Introduction
Gathered Church Life and the Experience of Dissent
Michael Davies, Anne Dunan-Page, and Joel Halcomb
At a full assembly of the Church at Bedford the 21th of the 10th moneth
After much seeking God by prayer, and sober conference formerly had, the congregation did at this meeting with joynt consent (signifyed by solemne lifting up of their hands) call forth and appoint our brother John Bunyan to the pastorall office or eldership. And he accepting therof gave up himself to serve Christ and his church in that charge, and received of the elders the right hand of fellowship.
The same time also, the congregation having had long experience of the faithfulnes of brother John Fenne in his care for the poor, did after the same manner solemnly choose him to the honourable office of a deacon, and committed their poor and purse to him, and he accepted thereof and gave up himself to the Lord and them in that service.
The same time and after the same manner, the Church did solemnely approove of the gifts of, (and called to the worke of the ministery) these brethren:—John Fenne, Oliver Scott, Luke Astwood, Thomas Cooper, Edward Dent, Edward Isaac, Nehemiah Coxe, for the furtherance of the worke of God, and carrying on thereof, in the meetings usually maintained by this congregation as occasion and opportunity shall by providence be ministred to them. [. .]
The congregation did also determine to keep the 26th of this instant as a day of fasting and prayer, both here, and at Hanes, and at Gamlinghay, solemnely to recommend to the grace of God, brother Bunyan, brother Fenne and the rest of the brethren, and to intreat his gracious assistance and presence with them in their respective worke whereunto he hath called them.1
1 Minutes, 71–2.
Michael Davies, Anne Dunan-Page and Joel Halcomb, Introduction:GatheredChurchLifeandthe ExperienceofDissent. In: ChurchLife:Pastors,Congregations,andtheExperienceofDissentin Seventeenth-CenturyEngland. Edited by Michael Davies, Anne Dunan-Page and Joel Halcomb, Oxford University Press (2019). © Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198753193.003.0001
Michael Davies, Anne Dunan-Page, and Joel Halcomb
The significance of this brief record of a meeting held somewhere in Bedford on 21 December 1671 has not been lost on historians of seventeenth-century Dissent. For it was here that the great Nonconformist preacher and writer John Bunyan was elected to the ‘eldership’ of the Congregational church at Bedford. A member since the early 1650s, Bunyan would now serve his congregation as minister until his death in 1688, some seventeen years later. In terms of Bunyan’s life and career, then, this was a momentous occasion. Yet, as the other decisions agreed at this meeting indicate—the confirmation of the Bedford hatter John Fenne as deacon, responsible for the church’s ‘purse’ and oversight of its ‘poor’, alongside several others ‘called to the worke of the ministery’ whose daily professions ranged from shoemaker to brick-kiln worker—it also marked a crucial turning point in the administration of the church and the organization of its leadership. What we are witnessing here, in fact, is the structural regrouping of a Dissenting congregation. After eleven years of loss, harassment, and persecution following the return of Charles II in 1660, the Bedford church was now being ‘rebooted’. The point of doing so, moreover, was strategic: to ensure its future survival through what Richard Greaves has described as the coordinated reorganization of Nonconformity across Bedfordshire and its adjacent counties at the beginning of the 1670s. This was Restoration Dissent being rebooted too, on a regional level.2
What, though, of ‘church life’? And what of an ‘experience of Dissent’ that might be defined and understood in terms other than those of either religious persecution or the individual careers of well-known Nonconformist leaders? How, for example, should we understand the importance of this moment not just for John Bunyan but for his congregation? What motivated those unnamed brothers and sisters who met in Bedford on 21 December 1671 to raise their hands in acts of unified assent? And what can this tell us about the experience of ‘gathered’ church life in seventeenth-century England more generally? To answer these questions we are obliged, if only briefly here, to look again at the details supplied in the account of the meeting cited above. For what we notice about church life as it is being conducted here is that it is, above all else, collective and collectively empowering. At Bedford, as in similar churches established in the 1640s and 1650s, the pastor and other officers were appointed through the ‘joynt consent’ of the membership in a ‘solemne lifting up of [. . .] hands’: not by any bishop, patron, or other intermediary, but (as the repetition of these words makes clear) by ‘the congregation’. Far from signalling any dangerous drift towards direct democracy, however, in electing its own elders, deacons, and preaching ministry the church was following not only examples
2 See Richard Greaves, ‘The Organizational Response of Nonconformity to Repression and Indulgence: The Case of Bedfordshire’, in John Bunyan and English Nonconformity (London: Hambledon Press, 1992), 71–87; Glimpses of Glory: John Bunyan and English Dissent (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002), 286–9.
set by mid-century proponents of ‘the Congregational way’ and, of course, by earlier English Separatists, but also, and primarily, Acts 14:23 (the ordination ‘by election’ of Paul and Barnabas as elders), with the Geneva text’s gloss on this process evidently in mind: ‘the consent of the people’ being required ‘by putting vp ye ha[n]ds’.3
This was church life situated within a distinct Dissenting tradition, then, but it was determined first and foremost by the gospel as the sole rule and guide in all matters of worship and ecclesial government: sola scriptura in action.4 As such, the decisions reached by ‘the congregation’ at Bedford indicate how power—the wielding of ‘the keys of the kingdom of heaven’ (Matthew 16:19; 18:18)—could, in effect, be shared across the church, ‘by joynt consent’. They signal too an important instance of communal piety. In setting apart its pastor and other officers, the Bedford church was submitting ‘solemnly’ to the will of God who ‘hath called them’: hence the importance of ‘seeking God by prayer’ first.5 It was only then that Bunyan would be entrusted to serve in the ‘pastorall office’, empowered to administer the ordinances of baptism and the Lord’s Supper, having had confirmed within him the qualities and attributes expected of a minister chosen by Christ to lead a true church.6 In these terms, Bunyan’s pastoral election was not so much an administrative decision as a congregational
3 See The Geneva Bible: A Facsimile of the 1560 Edition (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1969), Acts 14:23, marginal note i. For further accounts of election ‘by lifting up of the hand’, see B. R. White (ed.), Association Records of the Particular Baptists of England, Wales and Ireland to 1660, 3 parts (London: Baptist Historical Society, 1971–4), III, 171; Roger Hayden (ed.), The Records of a Church of Christ in Bristol, 1640–1687, Bristol Record Society’s Publications, 27 (1974), 132, 210. See also B. R. White, The English Separatist Tradition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971), 63–4; Brachlow, 160–8, 196–7; Nuttall, Visible Saints, 81–7; Watts, 315–19; Halcomb, ‘Congregational’, 63–9, 76.
4 See further Horton Davies, The Worship of the English Puritans (London: Dacre Press, 1948), 3–5, 8, 49–51; White, English Separatist Tradition, 1–2; White, Baptists, 12–13; James F. Cooper, Tenacious of Their Liberties: The Congregationalists in Colonial Massachusetts (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 14–15; Halcomb, ‘Congregational’, 56–7, 117–18.
5 See further John Owen, The True Nature of a Gospel Church (1689), in William H. Goold (ed.), The Works of John Owen, 24 vols (London and Edinburgh: Johnstone and Hunter, 1850–5; repr. Edinburgh: Banner of Truth, 1965–8), XVI, 67–8; Stephen Ford, A Gospel-Church (1675), 128.
6 See further John Bunyan, The Miscellaneous Works of John Bunyan, gen. ed. Roger Sharrock, 13 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976–94), VI, 285–89; Owen, True Nature, 47–96; T. G. Crippen (ed.), ‘Dr Watts’s Church-Book’, TCHS, 1 (1901–4), 26–38 (esp. 34–8). Richard Baxter’s treatise on the ‘Reformed Pastor’, Gildas Salvianus (1656), is given extensive contextual treatment in J. William Black, Reformation Pastors: Richard Baxter and the Ideal of the Reformed Pastor (Milton Keynes: Paternoster, 2004). On the pastoral ministry in Protestant thought and practice, see John T. McNeill, ‘The Doctrine of the Ministry in Reformed Theology’, CH, 12 (1943), 77–97; Patrick Collinson, ‘Shepherds, Sheepdogs, and Hirelings: The Pastoral Ministry in PostReformation England’, in W. J. Sheils and Diana Wood (eds.), The Ministry: Clerical and Lay (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989), 185–220; David Cornick, ‘The Reformation Crisis in Pastoral Care’, in G. R. Evans (ed.), A History of Pastoral Care (London and New York: Cassell, 2000), 223–51; R. Emmet McLaughlin, ‘The Making of the Protestant Pastor: The Theological Foundations of a Clerical Estate’, in C. Scott-Dixon and Luise Schorn-Schütte (eds.), The Protestant Clergy of Early Modern Europe (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 60–78; Eamon Duffy, ‘The Reformed Pastor in English Puritanism’, Dutch Review of Church History, 83 (2003), 216–34.
Michael Davies, Anne Dunan-Page, and Joel Halcomb act of faith: one that required a further day of ‘fasting and prayer’ to be kept at three of the church’s separate meetings—at Haynes (Bedfordshire), Gamlingay (Cambridgeshire), and Bedford—five days later (a notably festive date for folk less ‘puritan’ than Bunyan’s people).
Yet, for as rooted in devotion and the gospel as this process would be, its revolutionary dimensions remain hard to overlook. After all, the pastor being appointed here was no university educated clergyman, as Church of England and indeed many other Dissenting ministers were, but, like his predecessors at Bedford (including Samuel Fenne, his then co-pastor), a man without any formal training in divinity. With a rudimentary education, having by his own confession been ‘put [. . .] to School, to learn both to Read and Write’, but not much more, Bunyan was qualified to officiate through his gifts in the Spirit: something that, among other features, placed the Bedford church firmly on the ‘left wing’ of seventeenth-century Congregationalism, as Geoffrey Nuttall has described it.7 The decision to ordain Bunyan was, moreover, for the church to make autonomously: a principle of ecclesial independence given particular emphasis on this occasion by the notable, perhaps even unusual, absence of any other ministers in attendance. The Bedford church alone would determine who held the pastoral (and any other) office: it alone was empowered to ordain.8
One notable result of such an ordering of church life would be a blurring of the traditional distinction between ‘clergy’ and ‘laity’. For, with ministers, deacons, and preachers who were by profession not clergymen but braziers, blacksmiths, and hatters, who could say now who is ‘lay’?9 A hierarchy would certainly exist in the ‘mixed’ polity of such churches, but it would be ministerial rather than sacerdotal. Officers would be ‘set apart’ to perform their distinct duties, including preaching the Word and administering the ordinances: ‘shepherds’ were necessarily distinct from their flocks in this respect.10 But, as the account from Bedford cited above indicates, the ‘eldership’ would serve ‘Christ and the church’,
7 John Bunyan, Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners, ed. Roger Sharrock (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962), 5; Geoffrey F. Nuttall, ‘Relations Between Presbyterians and Congregationalists in England’, in Studies in the Puritan Tradition (Chelmsford: The Tindal Press, 1964), 1–7.
8 See further Davies, Worship of the English Puritans, 243; Nuttall, Visible Saints; White, English Separatist Tradition, 82–3; Brachlow, 203–29; Halcomb, ‘Congregational’, 55, 76–7. It was not unusual for other pastors to attend an ordination, though Dissenting practice varied. See Nuttall, Visible Saints, 87–96, and ‘The Early Congregational Concept of the Church’, TCHS, 14 (1949), 197–205 (200); Watts, 315–19; Davies, Worship of the English Puritans, 222–31; Chad Van Dixhoorn, God’s Ambassadors: The Westminster Assembly and the Reformation of the English Pulpit (Grand Rapids, MI: Reformation Heritage Books, 2017), 44–50, 73–87.
9 According to English Separatist Henry Barrow, members of a true church were ‘ecclesiastical and spiritual’, not ‘lay’: ‘We know not what you mean by your old popish term of laymen’, cited in Nuttall, ‘Early Congregational Concept’, 201. The Scottish Presbyterian minister George Gillespie likewise rejected ‘as “popish” the distinction of clergy and laity suggested by the expression “lay elder”’: see McNeill, ‘Doctrine of the Ministry’, 94–5. See also Francis J. Bremer, Lay Empowerment and the Development of Puritanism (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 4.
10 See further G. R. Evans, ‘Introduction’, in Evans (ed.), History of Pastoral Care, 1–11 (6); Halcomb, ‘Congregational’, 78–80.
ruling with, rather than over, the fellowship. Indeed, ‘the vital tasks’ of a reformed minister ‘could only be realized by living as one of the ruled’, and the range of metaphors and analogies used to describe the Dissenting pastor communicates this concept quite clearly: as servant-shepherd, steward and porter, physician and nurse, watchman and cook; pilot of the ship, not the tyrannical captain.11
There are in the passage cited above deeper marks to be discerned yet of the nature of this kind of church life. To whom, for instance, did the hands held aloft at this meeting belong? Female members must surely have joined their brethren on this occasion. As Joel Halcomb’s chapter in this volume illustrates, women had always been particularly active participants in Dissenting church life, and especially so at Bedford.12 It would be impossible to imagine them not casting their votes at this key meeting. Yet this was a congregation mixed in other ways. Members of the ‘lower sort’ (from labourers to the indigent) would have raised their hands alongside those of the ‘middling sort’ (artisan tradesmen and retailers as well as substantial businessmen, such as the cooper Anthony Harrington) and of the ‘better sort’ (such as William Whitbread, a member of Bedfordshire’s landed gentry).13 As ‘visible saints’ pursuing ‘the Congregational way’, moreover, they may well have held (and were, of course, required to tolerate) differing opinions on the ‘external’ or ‘circumstantial’ matters of worship and practice, including the administration of baptism. Some members, then, would have undergone believer’s baptism at Bedford, but not necessarily all.14 Because ‘the Gospellary way’ also demanded that ‘a Union of hearts rather then a vicinity of Houses, is to make up a Congregation according to the New Testament’, these saints were as disparate geographically as they may have been theologically, having been ‘gathered’ from numerous parishes not just in and about Bedford but also county wide.15 As a result, many of those attending the meeting at which Bunyan was ordained pastor could only have done so by traversing considerable distances, either on foot or by horse. For members at Gamlingay, Cambridgeshire, this would have involved a return journey of well over twenty miles: a considerable commitment on a cold winter’s day.
Although the rubbing of so many different kinds of shoulders could produce friction within Dissenting congregations, nevertheless in their dealings with
11 C. Scott-Dixon and Luise Schorn-Schütte, ‘Introduction’, in Dixon and Schorn-Schütte (eds.), Protestant Clergy, 1–38 (37). See further Nuttall, Visible Saints, 85–7, and ‘Early Congregational Concept’, 198–200; White, English Separatist Tradition, 76–8, 82–3, 142; Brachlow, 3, 157–202 (and esp. 160–8, 175–80, 201); Halcomb, ‘Congregational’, 78–9.
12 See further Chapter 1 in this volume.
13 On Whitbread and Harrington, one of the original members to ‘embody’ the Bedford church, as well as its earliest leaders, see further Michael Davies, ‘The Silencing of God’s Dear Ministers: John Bunyan and His Church in 1662’, in N. H. Keeble (ed.), ‘Settling the Peace of the Church’: 1662 Revisited (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 85–113.
14 See Nuttall, Visible Saints, 118–22; White, Baptists, 10–11; Halcomb, ‘Congregational’, 161–3, and also 47, 72–3, 95, 144–67. See also Chapter 9 in this volume.
15 John Cook, What the Independents Would Have (1647), 5, 7; and see further Nuttall, Visible Saints, 52–5, 71–3, 104–9.
Michael Davies, Anne Dunan-Page, and Joel Halcomb
one another, members would strive for spiritual egalitarianism, addressing one another, as in the extract above, not by title or profession but simply by their sanctified familial identity in Christ: as ‘Brother’ or ‘Sister’.16 The kinds of distinction in social status preserved in parish life, through special seating arrangements, for example, would be abolished at Bedford. Members of Bunyan’s church were under strict instruction from its first pastor, John Gifford, not ‘to be offering places or seates, when those who are rich come in’, for there should be ‘no respect of persons’ ‘in your comings together [. . .] as a Church’.17 This was also a people, it should be noted, who were expected to mark their time together as a congregation of Christ according to a reformed calendar: one that avoided not only festive holidays but also pagan names for months and weekdays, replacing them with their Bible-based numerical equivalents. When Bunyan was elected pastor, then, it was at a meeting held not on 21 December 1671 but notably on ‘the 21th of 10th moneth’ (a Thursday, in fact, or, as the Bedford church book would describe it, the ‘fifth day’, the ‘first day’ of the week being the Lord’s day).18
Such were the terms of gathered church life as experienced at Bedford, and elsewhere: a life to which the visible saints joined themselves voluntarily, as a matter of individual choice, but which required (often through subscription to a formal covenant) a commitment to upholding the collective well-being and unity as well as the reputation, discipline, and orderly walking of the fellowship as a whole.19 The experience of living a Dissenting life in this uniquely corporate way could, no doubt, be liberating. As members of Dissenting congregations, ordinary men and women would attend not just sermons and services but participate fully in the making of church decisions. But it could also prove demanding. How, for example, were members who, in their worship and communion, separated themselves from the world—being ‘gathered’ out from it—supposed to maintain their Dissenting identities as ‘visible saints’ while still functioning in the world, whether as servants, artisans, and shopkeepers, or as wives, husbands, and parents, or even (in some cases) as holders of civic office? How
16 See further White, Association Records, I, 25–6; Daniel C. Beaver, Parish Communities and Religious Conflict in the Vale of Gloucester, 1590–1690 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 239–40.
17 Minutes, 20. On how seating arrangements in parish churches reflected status within the local hierarchy see: Patrick Collinson, The Religion of Protestants: The Church in English Society, 1559–1625 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982), 141; Susan Dwyer Amussen, An Ordered Society: Gender and Class in Early Modern England (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), 137–44; and Christopher Marsh’s ‘The View from the Pew’ essays: ‘“Common Prayer” in England 1560–1640’, PP, 171 (2001), 66–94; ‘Sacred Space in England, 1560–1640’, JEH, 53 (2002), 286–311; and ‘Order and Place in England, 1580–1640’, Journal of British Studies, 44 (2005), 3–26.
18 See further Michael Davies, ‘When Was Bunyan Elected Pastor? Fixing a Date in the Bedford Church Book’, BS, 18 (2014), 7–41.
19 See further Nuttall, Visible Saints, 70–130; Halcomb, ‘Congregational’, 116–42; Anne DunanPage, ‘Bunyan and the Bedford Congregation’, in Michael Davies and W. R. Owens (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of John Bunyan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 53–68.
might the requirements of godliness be balanced with those of good fellowship, as conducted socially and commercially (and often festively) in taverns and alehouses, shops, marketplaces, and fairs? Given that Dissenters would always play integral roles in their local societies, as workers and employers, neighbours and customers—as producers and consumers of daily life, that is—all with demanding lives to lead both within and without their congregations, how did they manage to strike a workable ‘church/life’ balance?20 And how would striving to maintain such a balance inform a very different sense for us of what constitutes the ‘experience of Dissent’ in this period, for pastors and congregations alike?
It is the purpose of this volume to address such questions through a series of chapters which, perhaps uniquely in the study of seventeenth-century Dissent so far, focuses exclusively on the issues and dilemmas that inform the Dissenting experience of ‘church life’ within what would eventually become known as the ‘Three Denominations’: Congregationalist, Baptist, and Presbyterian. As such, these studies target a number of subjects: from the ministerial deliberations of the Westminster Assembly and the pastoral careers of some notable Dissenting ministers, including John Owen and Richard Baxter, to the volatile histories of specific meetings and the disputes, conflicts, and developments that moulded them. To do so, these essays draw upon a diverse array of sources: from the voluminous minutes and documents produced by the Westminster Assembly to the printed works of leading Presbyterian and Congregational pastors; from ministerial diaries to the notebooks of devoted sermon-goers; and from the manuscript church books kept by Baptist and Congregational meetings to a little-known treatise by an anonymous Presbyterian elder defending a decision made in the mid-to-late 1640s to rent a room within the grounds of St. Paul’s Cathedral to a group of Baptists led by William Kiffin (and arguing for religious toleration in the process).
Though covering a wide range of ecclesiological positions and principles, these essays nevertheless find a shared point of origin in the kinds of enquiry that Dissenting pastors and their congregations faced, posed, debated, and pursued when shaping, negotiating, and delivering a church life defined by the Scriptures, on the one hand, and against their ecclesial rivals on the other: from
20 See further Chapter 10 in this volume. On the social integration of Dissenters see: William Stevenson, ‘Sectarian Integration and Social Cohesion, 1640–1725’, in E. S. Leedham-Green (ed.), Religious Dissent in East Anglia (Cambridge: Cambridge Antiquarian Society, 1991), 69–86, and ‘The Social Integration of Post-Restoration Dissenters, 1660–1725’, in Margaret Spufford (ed.), The World of Rural Dissenters, 1520–1725 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 360–87; Beaver, Parish Communities, 267–81; Halcomb, ‘Congregational’, 88–115; Michael Davies, ‘Bunyan’s Brothers: John and Samuel Fenne of the Bedford Congregation, 1656–1705’, BS, 20 (2016), 76–110.
Michael Davies, Anne Dunan-Page, and Joel Halcomb the episcopal Church of England to the Quakers. As Polly Ha’s essay explores, one such issue concerns how a Dissenting commitment to voluntary association was tested by church members who came to dissent from their congregations’ convictions and beliefs. How free were covenanted saints to establish their own meetings, or to join other fellowships and societies? How were the limits of ‘liberty’ to be negotiated and defined in Dissenting church life? The chapters by Anne Dunan-Page, Joel Halcomb, and Michael Davies similarly reflect on problems for gathered churches arising from non-attendance and the need to uphold ecclesial respectability to the fraught business of pastoral succession, and the friction and unease that such matters could easily generate. It is with questions of reformed ecclesial government in mind that Elliot Vernon traces key developments within London’s Presbyterian parishes during the English Revolution, highlighting the complex processes of decision-making negotiated by the pastors, elders, and vestries at their centre. Kathleen Lynch stays in Revolutionary London in order to highlight very different anxieties about the spaces in which Dissenting church life could operate. What would it mean, following the disestablishment of the episcopal church, she asks, for radical Separatists to rent a room for meetings and worship in what had been, until quite recently, the bishop of London’s palace?
At stake in such questions lie matters not only of ecclesiological order and cohesion but also of the formation and transformation of Dissenting identities, as churches sought to define themselves and then to uphold (as well as to test) that sense of definition in the face of dissent, disruption, and disorder. Other chapters approach these subjects by focusing on the ministerial side of the pastor–congregation divide. Chad Van Dixhoorn examines the place afforded to pastors within the Westminster Assembly’s deliberations in the 1640s over how best to reform the Church of England. What would the duties of ministers be within the life of the reformed parish, as envisioned by the Assembly’s members (almost all of whom were themselves active and experienced pastors), when it came to visiting the sick? To what would the nation’s reformed ministry be expected to apply its expertise: the care of the body, or cure of the soul? Others address the experiences of individual ministers, both Congregational and Presbyterian. Where John Owen’s life as a leading Congregationalist is reviewed by Crawford Gribben within the contexts of Owen’s ministerial activities during the English Revolution and the Restoration, Neil Keeble and Ann Hughes address problems facing Presbyterian pastors across this same period. For Richard Baxter, and many others like him, the key predicament of the Restoration would remain, in the face of the 1662 Act of Uniformity, whether to stay with one’s congregation and continue ministering to it by conforming, or to embrace the ‘civil death’ of ejection and abandon it?21 If the latter,
21 See further David J. Appleby, Black Bartholomew’s Day: Preaching, Polemic and Restoration Nonconformity (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007), 11–12, 100, and Chapter 8 in this volume.
how might a nonconforming Presbyterian pastor maintain his ministry, and all that that would entail, without a congregation to lead? What would ‘church life’ now mean to such ministers who would have preferred not to be experiencing Dissent at all, if only their comprehension within the restored Church of England were possible?
These essays reflect something of the range of debates, tensions, and conflicts that informed Dissenting church life in seventeenth-century England. Still, they can hardly claim to be exhaustive. For this reason, one aim of this volume is to invite further exploration of the kinds of issues and experiences addressed in these chapters, particularly through the more concerted examination of the manuscript sources that reveal them, yet which often remain overlooked and underused: Dissenting church books, records, and registers.22 Doing so, moreover, is vital. For what can hardly have escaped notice is that these studies all concentrate on matters of Dissenting church life and pastor–congregation relations at crucial moments in seventeenth-century history and at key turning points in the religious life of the nation: the disestablishment and the reestablishment of the episcopal Church of England; the creation and demise of the Westminster Assembly; the rise and collapse of Cromwell’s Protectorate; the passing of the 1662 Act of Uniformity and the great ejectment that would follow; the arrival of Toleration in 1689, and the subsequent inclusion of Presbyterians as a permanent fixture within English Nonconformity.
The study of church life naturally requires an interior focus: an inward-facing examination of how Dissenters organized themselves in worship, order, and discipline at the local level of the individual congregation. Yet, for both Dissenters and their conforming neighbours alike, in this period church life was also lived within the compass of momentous changes and upheavals, from well before the English Revolution to long after the Glorious Revolution. It is precisely because Dissenting congregations were far from isolated and introspective bodies that church life can be witnessed as something experienced by their members as dynamic and dynamically engaged, not just theologically and ecclesiologically but socially and politically.23 There is, in other words, much more to be said yet about the history of seventeenth-century Dissent through forms of ‘church life’ that deserve to command our attention. The essays in this volume mark, we hope, a further step towards a more detailed historical understanding of what it meant to be a Dissenter, and what that experience could be like not just for those ministers and leaders whose names we easily recognize, but also for the
22 See further Anne Dunan-Page, ‘Writing “things ecclesiastical”: The Literary Acts of the Gathered Churches’, Études Épistémè, 21 (2012), http://journals.openedition.org/episteme/417 (last accessed 22 August 2018); Mark Burden and Anne Dunan-Page, ‘Puritans, Dissenters, and their Church Books: Recording and Representing Experience’, BS, 20 (2016), 14–32; and Michael Davies, Anne Dunan-Page, and Joel Halcomb, ‘Being a Dissenter: Lay Experience in the Gathered Churches’, in John Coffey (ed.), The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions, Volume I: The Post-Reformation Era, c.1559–1689 (forthcoming, Oxford University Press).
23 See, for example, Chapters 1, 2, and 5 in this volume.
Michael Davies, Anne Dunan-Page, and Joel Halcomb
more anonymous women and men—the unknown Dissenters—who comprised their congregations.
*
Such are the aims of this volume, and indeed of the wider ‘Dissenting Experience’ project from which it has emerged.24 It remains for this ‘Introduction’ to say something about the key terms of this book’s title. For if we are to examine the tenets of Dissenting church life in seventeenth-century England, then the concept of ‘church’ itself needs to be unpacked a little, especially when its varied connotations would shape ‘church life’ in markedly different ways for those both within and beyond the Dissenting groups addressed here. A focus on pastors and congregations, ‘the bond’ between which has been described as ‘the firmest of all ecclesiastical ties’ (but also, one might add, the most fraught and troublesome in some instances) perhaps requires little further clarification at this point.25 By contrast, what we describe as the ‘experience of Dissent’ does need some explanation, not only as something distinct from other (usually individual) kinds of religious experience examined in this period but also because anything that involves that notoriously difficult concept, ‘experience’, demands some careful hedging—as does, to a degree, that historically complex term ‘Dissent’.26 It is, then, to ‘church’, ‘life’, and ‘experience’ that our attention must now turn.
It goes without saying that different concepts of ‘church’ produced distinct experiences of ‘church life’ in seventeenth-century England, whether in the parishes of the Established Church or the meetings of radical groups (including Quakers, who, as members of a ‘society’, rejected entirely the traditional concept of ‘church’).27 But how was ‘church’ conceived and understood, in theory and in practice, within the Dissenting tradition represented by the Baptists, Congregationalists, and Presbyterians? At the heart of any answer to this question
24 See further http://dissent.hypotheses.org.
25 Patrick Collinson, ‘Towards a Broader Understanding of the Dissenting Tradition’, in C. Robert Cole and Michael E. Moody (eds.), The Dissenting Tradition: Essays for Leland H. Carlson (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 1975), 3–38 (16–17).
26 ‘Dissent’ here signals the larger tradition, within which the groups considered in this volume (Baptists, Congregationalists, and Presbyterians) stood, of ‘those Protestants who worshipped outside of the established church’ and, more specifically, who either sought to reform or rejected outright the polity and liturgy of an episcopal Church of England: Watts, 1–5 (1–2). On the porous relationship between Dissent and the Established Church, and on how Dissent ‘became the establishment’ between 1640 and 1660, see John Coffey, ‘Church and State, 1550–1750: The Emergence of Dissent’, in Robert Pope (ed.), T&T Clark Companion to Nonconformity (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), 47–74 (56).
27 See further T. L. Underwood, Primitivism, Radicalism, and the Lamb’s War: The BaptistQuaker Conflict in Seventeenth-Century England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 5, 82–100; Andrew Davies, The Quakers in English Society 1655–1725 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000), 11–34, 75–81, 101–7, 119–21. On the terms ‘church’ and ‘society’ see Nuttall, Visible Saints, 71–4; John Bossy, ‘Elementary Forms of Durkheim’, PP, 95 (1982), 3–18.
