John Tombes, and the argument that damaged the furniture
John Tombes was curate of St Anne’s, and he made no secret of his objections to infant baptism. In 1646 he founded the Baptist community in Bewdley, which makes it the oldest nonconformist body in the town, and he did it without giving up his position in the established church.
This was never going to sit quietly. Tombes disputed the question publicly at Bewdley with Richard Baxter, the Kidderminster minister who was one of the most formidable religious controversialists in England. Anthony Wood recorded the effect on the town: their followers became “like two armies . . . and the civil magistrate had much ado to quiet them”.
The best evidence of what that actually meant is not in any account of the theology. It is in the bridge wardens’ accounts. Among the entries for 1649 to 1651 there is five shillings paid to John Weaver for mending the seats and other work done in the chapel “at the dispute”. Two men argued about baptism and the borough had to pay a carpenter to put the pews back.
Tombes left for Leominster in 1650.
Henry Oasland, and a chapel that changed hands twice
Within a few months of Tombes going, Henry Oasland, a native of Rock, was appointed to St Anne’s. He held it until the Act of Uniformity was passed in 1662, and then declared himself a Presbyterian. He very probably formed the conventicle that Thomas Wylde meant to surprise in 1663, and in 1672 his own house was licensed for Presbyterian worship. The chapel itself is said to have been built about 1680.
What happened to that building afterwards is a small lesson in how congregations move. It was Presbyterian when it went up. By 1883 the Unitarians were meeting in it. By the 1920s it belonged to the Wesleyan Methodists. One set of walls, three denominations, and a good deal of the town’s religious history contained in a single change of ownership.
It kept its endowments through all of it. James Clarke left money to the meeting house by will in 1765, for the benefit of the minister and of the poor, and John Reynolds added more by a deed of 1836.
Wesley in the open air
John Wesley came to Bewdley several times between 1774 and 1786, and preached outdoors. The detail worth noticing is that he was generally left alone to do it. Open-air preaching drew hostile crowds in plenty of English towns and Wesley’s journals are full of them. In Bewdley he was, on the whole, not troubled.
The Wesleyan chapel that followed stands behind the houses on the west side of High Street, and it was opened for divine service in 1795 by Dr Cook, a clergyman of the Church of England. A century and a half after Tombes’s dispute had split the town, an Anglican priest opened a Methodist chapel.
It is a genuinely interesting little building and worth describing properly. Red brick with a moulded stone cornice, oblong on plan, with an apse at either end, lit by semicircular-headed windows with moulded stucco architraves. The pews were set out on a curve so that everybody could see the pulpit, and were still unaltered when the Victoria County History surveyed them. The pulpit’s sounding board is carried on two fluted Doric pilasters, and the gallery at the far end is reached by a flight of stairs on the outside of the building.
A dissenter’s account of the town
There is a witness to what had changed, and he lived here. Samuel Kenrick was a unitarian dissenter who came to Bewdley in 1765 to go into banking with his brother, and who stayed until he died in 1811. He arrived, as he put it himself, one of a family of “perfect strangers, & sojourners of the earth”. Writing years afterwards to his old friend James Wodrow, a Scottish Presbyterian minister, he described how a visiting clergyman staying with them was taken up by the principal inhabitants of the town, and what came of it: “the narrow distinction of church & dissenters . . . vanished from among us: & now is hardly known”. By then his own family ranked among the town’s oldest inhabitants, and felt themselves “as much respected & beloved as the rest of our fellow citizens”.
That is a private letter from one dissenter to another, with nothing whatever to gain by flattering the place. It says the same thing the opening of the Wesleyan chapel says, and it says it from inside the town.
The Quakers on Severn Side
The Society of Friends were meeting in the Cotterells’ house on Severn Side in 1689, and asked for it to be registered as their meeting place at the next general sessions. Two years later, in 1691, the society bought the site where their meeting house now stands, and the building probably went up shortly afterwards.
That timing is not a coincidence. The Toleration Act had passed in 1689, and the Friends registered their house in the same year. A congregation that had been meeting quietly in somebody’s front room became, almost immediately, a congregation with a legal right to a building of its own.
The Baptists, endowed
The Baptists that Tombes began kept going, and in the nineteenth century they were provided for handsomely. The Reverend George Brookes endowed the Particular Baptist chapels of Bewdley and Kidderminster by a deed of 2 October 1840 and by a will proved in 1844, with twelve houses in Kidderminster producing a gross rental of one hundred and seventeen pounds a year, and with over two thousand pounds in consols. Twenty pounds a year went to the minister at Kidderminster and the rest to Bewdley.
Four congregations, one town
By the middle of the nineteenth century a visitor’s guide could list chapels in Bewdley for Baptists, Methodists, Quakers and Unitarians, in a town of a few thousand people. All four traced back, directly or indirectly, to the years between 1646 and 1691, and to a curate of the parish chapel who could not accept infant baptism and would not resign over it.